UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be
published as HC 333-v
House of COMMONS
MINUTES OF EVIDENCE
TAKEN BEFORE
EDUCATION AND SKILLS COMMITTEE
POST-16 SKILLS TRAINING
Monday 14 May 2007
MS DINAH CAINE, MS LINDA FLORANCE and MR BRIAN WISDOM
Evidence heard in Public Questions 448 -
556
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Oral Evidence
Taken before the Education and Skills Committee
on Monday 14 May 2007
Members present
Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair
Mr Douglas Carswell
Mr David Chaytor
Paul Holmes
Mr Gordon Marsden
Fiona Mactaggart
Mr Andrew Pelling
Mr Rob Wilson
________________
Memorandum submitted by Skillfast-UK
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Ms Dinah Caine,
Chief Executive, Skillset, Ms Linda
Florance, Chief Executive, Skillfast-UK, and Mr Brian Wisdom, Chief Executive, People 1st, gave
evidence.
Q448 Chairman:
I welcome Brian Wisdom, Dinah Caine and Linda Florance to this very
important inquiry into skills. In this
session we want to learn more about the role of the sector skills councils. We
thought that it would be very interesting to bring together here the rather
diverse sectors represented by the witnesses. We usually give witnesses the
opportunity to say a few words, not lasting more than a couple of minutes,
about themselves and their organisations. If that is acceptable, we will begin
with Mr Wisdom.
Mr Wisdom: I am Brian Wisdom,
chief executive of People 1st. People 1st is the sector
skills council for the hospitality, leisure, travel and tourism industry which
comprises approximately 180,000 employers and about 1.8 million employees. In
the past 18 months we have conducted research with over 5,000 of our employers.
My board consists of the two largest employers in the sector, the second
largest visitor attraction business in the world and three small to medium
enterprise chief executives.
Ms Caine: I am Dinah Caine,
chief executive of Skillset which is the sector skills councils for the
audio-visual industries. Effectively, our board comprises large companies like
ITV, BBC Channel 4 and a large number of small to medium size enterprises - we
have a number of levies running in our industry - but also 60 % are
micro-enterprise or freelance, which is a significant issue. Further, over 60 %
of our industry are graduates. That is our skills profile. We were a
trail-blazer sector skills council; we were one of the first four pathfinders
to develop sector skills agreements. Like all other sector skills councils, we
are led by our industries. We are not non-departmental public bodies but
limited companies led by our industries who work in social partnership
with the trade unions where they are
recognised within the industries.
Ms Florance: I am Linda
Florance, chief executive of Skillfast-UK which is the sector skills council
for apparel, footwear, textiles and related businesses. It sounds like a very
long title, but that is everything from the production of fibres through to
high-level couture fashion, and certainly new and innovative industries have
been born out of that sector. For example, at this moment our weavers are
weaving the wings for the new Airbus and knitters are knitting products that
will end up in heart valves and ligaments for surgery. Our industry is
dominated by small to medium size enterprises and micro-businesses, many in
niche product areas who trade internationally with some global brands that are
well known around this table, for example, Mulberry, Jasper Conran and so on.
In the past two years we have been linked in to about 2,500 employers directly
to look at their needs across the sector and each sub-sector, which differ quite
significantly. It is worth mentioning that we three represent the 25 sector
skills councils which themselves have representation across the FTSE 350
companies but, importantly, build on those links with small businesses and the
trade union movement.
Q449 Chairman:
We may well have other sector skill councils before us later in our inquiry. We
want to hear what you think and you can generalise if you like, but do not feel
it is too onerous. I open the questioning by asking all of you what sort of
budgets we are talking about to do your jobs and who provides the money.
Mr Wisdom: The core funding that
comes via the Sector Skills Development Agency to People 1st
has been an average of ₤1.3 million for the past three years. The
rest of the income for the sector skills council comes from industry or our own
commercial enterprises.
Q450 Chairman:
You get ₤4 million from the Sector Skills Development Agency. How
much do you get from other sources?
Mr Wisdom: In terms of total
revenues for the past three years it is ₤21 million.
Q451 Chairman:
Therefore, the ₤4 million is quite a small part of that?
Mr Wisdom: The
₤4 million is a relatively small part.
Ms Caine: We manage levies on
behalf of our industry. We manage funding of about ₤81/2 million which
is a mixture of levies and money from the UK Film Council which supports the
training of people within our industry. Much like Mr Wisdom, we then have about
₤1.3 million a year from the SSDA and about ₤1 million
from our industry. Therefore, our core resource is relatively small in relation
to the growing list of things that we are expected to deliver as part of our
licences with government. Obviously, we have to deliver those roles right across
the UK. Am I right in understanding that all the Members here represent English
seats?
Q452 Chairman:
Yes; they must be to be on the Committee.
Ms Caine: Obviously, training
and education is a devolved power, and our role is to represent our employers
and interface with those many different agencies and governments right across
the UK, which is a significant additional pull on our resources. It is welcome
but nevertheless significant.
Ms Caine: To repeat what has
been said to some extent, our sector skills council has also had core funding
of ₤1.3 million a year for the past three years. In addition, we
have sourced another ₤3 million worth of funding approximately to
deliver on specific pieces of work, many from regional development agencies; some
on the qualifications development front and others through the LSC to pilots
and strategies for them.
Q453 Chairman:
How much are we talking about?
Ms Florance: It is
₤3 million per year in addition to the ₤1.3 million that we
receive in core funding.
Q454 Chairman:
Where does the second ₤3 million come from?
Ms Florance: The second ₤3
million per year has come from a range of bodies, in some cases regional
development agencies.
Q455 Chairman:
What comes from the industry itself?
Ms Florance: In terms of the
industry we have had very low investment into the sector skills council for the
industry. I believe that is a key point on which to build. Our objective is to
get our industries to invest in skills within the industries themselves rather
than in the sector skills council. In an industry driven by small to medium
size enterprises the actual onus to get them to invest significant amounts that
would be easy to manage by the sector skills council has been quite difficult.
Q456 Chairman:
The original intention was for all of them to be self-sufficient, was it not?
Ms Caine: You are quite right
that that was the stated aim and intention of DfES. I have to say that that aim
was decided upon without consulting the sector skills councils and
Ms Florance's point is very well made. Currently, the network of 25 enjoys
something like ₤36 million worth of core investment. Perhaps we can
go on to discuss later that the percentage of satisfaction and recognition by
employers is increasing. When looking forward to the Leitch expectation, one
perhaps has to begin questioning the proportionality around which agencies have
been tasked to do what and where that resource is being applied. The original
proposition that we should be self-financing in three years was extraordinary
and misguided. Our practice shows what we can deliver in terms of the benefits
to which Ms Florance has referred but we believe that for that we require
authority and further resource. I just draw to the attention of the Committee
that currently the Learning and Skills Council has a budget of
₤10.4 billion for England alone and a significant part of that is
applied to staff and overheads.
Q457 Chairman:
My question is not a criticism; it is just to get the balance right and compare
it with the original intention. What are the great challenges facing the sector
skills councils? It has been going for some time. How successful do you rate
yourselves?
Mr Wisdom: It depends on how one
measures it. I believe that the sector skills movement has achieved a lot in a
very short space of time. I think the first sector skills council was established
in April 2003 and the last one in January 2006. This is a relatively young
network. I cannot talk about every sector skills councils. If I take my own
first, on 7 March the Minister for Tourism and Creative Industries
launched the first ever national skills strategy for hospitality leisure,
travel and tourism based on a massive breadth of research, including four
skills summits that had involved in the region of 200 employers, to develop
solutions for the industry, and all of that was from a standing start with
fairly minimal investment.
Ms Caine: It is interesting to
note that at lunchtime today CIPD launched its research which looked at its
employers' views on skills and agencies. Given that we are, as Mr Wisdom said,
a young network, it is very pleasing to see that 87 % of those employers rated
our performance either as good or average. That is better than the RDAs and is
pretty level pegging with the Learning and Skills Council.
Q458 Chairman:
You are being a bit selective. I chaired that launch of CIPD at lunchtime and
KPMG said some quite hard and rather nasty things about the performance of
other parts of the sector skills councils.
Ms Caine: I am sure they said
that we probably needed to improve.
Q459 Chairman:
No; they said they rated you below FE colleges and private trainers. You were
in the third tier. It is true that you were not as bad as the LSC but by some
criteria you did not achieve quite that result.
Ms Caine: I think that is right.
What I am saying is that given that the network has only just been finalised we
were pleased to see the result. One must not forget that we are also strategic
bodies and do not deliver training. If you ask employers about the benefits
from training FE and HE are institutions that deliver, but it is also worth
pointing out that when asked about factors that would increase employers'
contact with training bodies one in three said that more sector involvement
would deliver it. If one looks at other statistics, in the summer of 2005 after
only two years of the establishment of the network 35 % of employers were aware
of their own SSC and of those 62 % felt
that they had had a positive impact as a result of that interface. We know what
Leitch said; we are aware of the points that have been made about the
patchiness of the network. We recognise that we need to improve and deliver to
a standard across the piece, but inevitably all nine RDAs do not deliver to the
same standard, nor do the 47 local learning and skills councils. We believe
that we have made a good start and have some good stories to tell in terms of
success with employer involvement and the picture is positive.
Q460 Chairman:
I just point out that I shared that experience. Ms Florance, what are the
barriers to being more effective?
Ms Florance: Perhaps I may kick off with what we have
done as a sector skills council and then talk a little about barriers. As a
sector skills council we were one of the trail-blazers, pulling together
industries that had never worked together before. Many in the public sector
view clothing and textiles as being one; they are not. They were not happy
bedfellows in the same meeting room when we set up a sector skills council, but
now they are gaining the trust of each other in terms of business and realising
that on skills their competition is not in the UK or Bradford; it is in
Beijing. There has been a big recognition within my sector that collaborative
action on skills which perhaps in the past they would not have endorsed is the
real solution for the future. Much of that is coming together in the formation
of our sector skills agreement which has nine strands backed by various
sub-sectors of the industry. Moving that onto what are the biggest challenges
is to get that sector skills agreement to stick with others in the training
infrastructure. I mean that this series of measures is aimed at ensuring that
our sector is sustainable and increasingly productive for the future. It is not
a menu from which to select; it is a range of interventions which will support
the industry in future. I find success in some regions of England, but I also
find it a very hard job to change the gearing of the training system to be able
to deliver against my sector's agreement.
Q461 Chairman:
One matter that emerges from all the evidence we have had so far about the sector
skills councils is that you are national bodies and a lot of the business,
resourcing and provision is at regional level. People have told the Committee
that one of the deficiencies is that you are not down at the regional level
because you do not have the funding to be in every region with the kind of
clout you should have. Does that strike a chord, or is it poor information?
Ms Florance: In part it does
strike a chord; some of it does not. For every sector skills agreement that we
have, each strand has been both researched at regional level and in some cases
at local level where there is a local hot spot. They have also been developed
into regional plans for pick up by partners. If what we say is that partners
are perhaps not happy to implement those particular plans without further
intervention from us on a wide scale, dealing with a myriad of partners at
local level, currently we are not resourced to do that.
Ms Caine: I give you one example
of where we are working at regional level because that gives people a focus. There
are other examples across the country, but for us the BBC move to Salford and
the development of Salford as a media city will have an impact right across the
North. We are working with all the employers, trade associations, unions, the
three RDAs and the three learning and skills councils, also building
partnerships with relevant schools which will be offering the 14 to 19 courses
and the FE and HE institutions with which as an industry we are building links.
We are very much taking a strategic lead in pulling all of that together. That
is a concrete example. You are right that resource is an issue and that, if we
turn to Leitch, the calibration between, as it were, ourselves as sector bodies
with a regional, national and UK-wide and global role and the plans around the
setting up of the local skills and employment boards and how they integrate
will be key. I happen to chair the network of sector skills councils in London
and have just become an adviser to the newly-formed London Skills and
Employment Board. That brings benefits in terms of bringing the network and
region together and ensuring that we
mesh effectively. But you are right that the sector skills councils which have
people on the ground in London and the resource to do that have much greater
traction in and for London than ones which do not.
Mr Wisdom: It is also important
that that sectoral perspective is strongly held. For example, for the tourist
industry the Cotswolds are important. There are three regional development
agencies that intersect three learning and skills councils. What employers
could not understand was why there would be three different approaches to
skills and training in such a confined areas as the Cotswolds which clearly is
a destination in its own right and has its own particular skills. To make sure
that balance is right is very important.
Chairman: Let us move on to how
you as sector skills councils represent employers.
Q462 Fiona Mactaggart:
I was wondering how you know that you are the voice of the people particularly
within very diverse sectors, for example big hotel chains versus local leisure
clubs and so on. It must be quite complex. How do you know? What is your test?
Mr Wisdom: The fundamental
litmus test is the level of satisfaction with the product that we are able to
produce, but to get to that point you need the ability to influence the product
in question, which is skills training for the sector. The governance of People
1st is carefully structured to make sure it is representative of all
the industries within the sector. I have talked briefly about our board. The
board is elected by a members council which has 20 chief executives and HR
directors from both small and large organisations that represent our 14
industries. We have subsets of meeting structures that also pull together employers
from both regions and our sub-sectors. We work as broadly as we can. But the
next important point is the research that we conduct, that is, the labour market
intelligence which covers 5,000 employers in our sector. That is the largest
piece of labour market intelligence conducted in hospitality, leisure, travel
and tourism in three decades. That in its own right demands that there is
clearly a representative voice being heard there. I am sure that my colleagues
have other examples.
Ms Caine: Research is the
cornerstone of everything we do. We have a regular programme with employers and
the workforce and within that we ask them about their knowledge of and
satisfaction with us. The critical point for them is how we then work with them
to develop strategies and action plans that build on that. To my mind,
ultimately it is whether or not they change action. For example, we know from
two of our sub-sectors that they are satisfied because film has moved to
agreeing a statutory levy, which is the first time in 30 years any sector has
done that. In TV and radio the companies have voluntarily agreed to a co‑regulatory
situation with Ofcom, Skillset and the industry which is about focusing what
they do and how they do it. To my mind, that action and delivery results can be
brought about only if we have been involving them and they feel that they own
who we are, what we do and the actions we are taking.
Q463 Fiona Mactaggart:
That is quite different from Ms Florance's pattern where if the businesses are
paying themselves for the service they get from the sector skills council that
is a reasonable measure; it has agreed to a levy and is paying it and that
means it is getting a service which it believes represents its needs. That is
not what is happening in Ms Florance's sector, is it?
Ms Florance: But that does not
change the fact that the information is based on robust labour market
intelligence which is divided up to be representative of each of the
sub-sectors and types of employers. It is really important not only to listen
to what the employers are saying but to turn that round and get them to
future-proof it. In the skills world it is not just about the employer who
shouts loudest about a skills shortage or gap today; it is about us trying to
inform the suppliers of education and training to change things for the future.
Therefore, we have to look at future skills, not just the skills today. That is
a really important role for the sector skills council and one that we have taken
very seriously with focus groups of employers throughout the UK.
Q464 Fiona Mactaggart:
I think that is a very reasonable point. All of you have talked about your
sector skills agreements which clearly have a role in that process, but are you
sure that employers have bought into those agreements and they feel that they
meet their needs?
Ms Florance: In my case the
employers are ready to get behind some of those agreements with their personal
investments. We have managed to implement some pilots for that. To give an
example, there is an early pilot that tests a brokerage model. Where there are
small businesses that do not have sophisticated systems for HR and training
advice a broker that can help them determine their future business and skill
needs can be exceptionally helpful. In piloting that the learning and skills
council in England put in ₤1/2 million that would back employer-driven
skills required. In return for that my sector put ₤800,000 into that
skills package. I believe that for small to medium size businesses to more than
match public service investment is a demonstration that the industry is
supportive of an employer-led agenda and one of the strands in our sector
skills agreement.
Ms Caine: I think that the two
examples I gave were products of our sector skills agreements and our
industries' commitment to action. As one of the pathfinders one of the matters
we found slightly disappointing in the process was the promise made of a
something-for-something deal of rights and responsibilities which our sector
took very seriously and addressed. We did not consider that it was quite so
fulsome in terms of a joined-up
response from the public agencies involved. Therefore, we welcome the Leitch
review's recommendation that sector skills agreements should become firmer, if
you like harder-edged, both in terms of the commitments that the sectors make
but also the way in which authority and investment flows in relation to that
demand-led analysis and agreement to act. Unless we get both those together and
calibrated we will not see the step change that we need.
Q465 Fiona Mactaggart:
What were you expecting from the public bodies that you did not get?
Ms Caine: We were expecting more
joined-up commitment and support in terms of recognising us as an authoritative
lead, which we believe we had earned and demonstrated. We believed that
institutional politics were at play to a significant degree.
Q466 Fiona Mactaggart:
Can you give an example? You may anonymise it if you wish. To say that
institutional politics were at play can mean almost anything so I would like a
story, if you have one.
Ms Caine: There are nine English
regions and in some there is a genuine openness and willingness to work in
partnership with us; in others we were regarded as national interlopers on the
regional patch and to be ducked around rather than worked with. As it goes, I
think we were a pathfinder. Matters have improved and developed, but I
certainly believe that the harder-edged holding all partners to account around
a demand-led agenda has to be firmed up if we are to get the kind of buy-in
from employers that everybody wants to see. We cannot step up to the mark and
then have promises made which are not followed through in a systematic way.
Mr Wisdom: I believe that is the
biggest worry. I sit here looking up to my two colleagues because I have the
freshest yet sector skills agreement which is not yet being put to the acid
test of whether all parties will play their part. But I look at some fairly
simple issues such as the training of chefs for which my sector skills council
takes some responsibility and accountability. Over the past five years we have
seen a six per cent rise in demand but colleges of further education have produced
10 % fewer trained chefs during that period. We have 50,000 practising chefs
and cooks out there with at best the equivalent of a basic food hygiene certificate
which does not really equip them to cook from scratch, whereas we have an
industry that is crying out for an industry standard qualification that it can
recognise. Fifteen per cent of my employers still advertise for a qualification
that has not existed for 15 years. The challenge of all those things happening
within the context of our sector skills agreements fills my employers with some
dread that it just will not happen. In terms of the qualification for chefs,
for example, it has taken us two and a half years to get 14 colleges piloting
the new qualification with no firm agreement to full funding from the Learning
and Skills Council for the future. Going at that pace we fear for the 2010 date
that Leitch talked about.
Q467 Fiona Mactaggart:
I am very interested in the conflict between sectoral and local or regional. I
represent Slough. There is a huge demand for skills in the town I represent.
There are very low levels of skills, but in a way the issue is not particularly
sectoral; there is a very big common agenda of skill shortages and skill needs
which exists within the place rather than necessarily the sectors. I am wondering
how you deal with the tension between the skills needs and demands and
shortages in a place where your employers are based and the skills, needs,
demands and shortages in the sector. I believe that these things pull in
different directions. I should like to know how you as sector skills councils
would deal with that.
Mr Wisdom: Living in Datchet
which is very close to Slough, I am fully aware of the difficulties that the
shortage of chefs causes in Slough. The sectoral need is also present in the
local area and raises the interesting question that if you take my own sector -
every sector is different - 45 % of the workforce work for UK-wide
organisations. Forty-five per cent of the workforce work for micro-businesses
in local locations. Therefore, the regional agenda in the middle is quite a
difficult one for our employers to understand because they care either about
the economy in Slough, Blackpool or Weston-super-Mare or about having a skills
provision that crosses the UK for them.
Ms Caine: As far as our industry
is concerned, our employers have global, national and probably regional interests.
First, there are stunning examples of where the two agendas do mesh extremely
effectively. I just give the Skillset BBC move north as an example. That
reaches and ticks all of those boxes from local through to global. It is very
important one recognises it is possible and there is a lot of good practice,
but it seems to me that something systemic needs to be addressed to ensure that
that is the case. I come back to the local skills and employment board. It is
our view that they too need to be licensed by the new commission. In our view,
the network, which is the important part, needs to be represented or meshed in
some way. You are quite right that in terms of issues like employability, basic
skills, management and leadership there are cross-cutting themes which will
impact and be important at a local employment level. Between us we can and do
support those agendas and we network across them. The issue is the one the
Chairman discussed earlier: the resource and detail and the level to which we
can work in order to play our part to that picture.
Ms Florance: And it is the
delivery of sector-specific skills. The bottom line is that in an industry
which is scattered right across the UK we need to help provision
cross-boundaries. We see waste in the system where two neighbouring colleges in
different regions offer the same programme and both fail because they cannot
attract enough delegates. We transcend that barrier. We could advise them and
give them the right data on which to base their future provision to make sure
it is secure, because our industry loses if it loses two programmes that one
could win. I believe that is the additional benefit that we can bring to the
regions, but for generic employability skills I agree with everything that Ms
Caine has said. We need to interact effectively in the regions and at local
level.
Q468 Mr Chaytor:
I want to return to the question of budgets. I should like to clarify what each
of the witnesses said earlier about the budgets of the respective
organisations. Ms Florance, you said that the budget of Skillfast was
₤3 million of which ₤1.3 million came from the SSDA.
Ms Florance: I said that
₤1.3 million came from the SSDA and a further ₤3 million came from
elsewhere.
Q469 Mr Chaytor: Ms Caine, yours is ₤81/2 million, of which
₤1.3 million comes from the SSDA.
Ms Caine: No. The ₤81/2
million is a mixture of UK Film Council and levy funding which we use to invest
in training. We then have ₤1.3 million from the SSDA, ₤1 million
from our industry and, like Ms Florance, we probably bring in through a range of
project activity another ₤2 million, so our core budget is about ₤4
to ₤5 million.
Q470 Mr Chaytor: Mr Wisdom, you referred to a figure of
₤21 million.
Mr Wisdom: It is ₤21
million over three years. That comprises the income from an awarding body
business which we owned and subsequently sold and income from projects and
employers in the industry.
Q471 Mr Chaytor: Ms Florance and Mr Wisdom, you agree with
Ms Caine's comment that the original objective of trying to make the
councils self-financing at the end of the three-year period is a non-starter,
or is there a possibility of that happening?
Ms Florance: I agree with that. One
must contrast the development of any commercial lines of income with the core
role of an SSC which is strategic. My sector skills council piloted a number of
ways of developing an income but at the crux of it was a conflict of interest
between some of our strategic activities and the development of an income.
Mr Wisdom: I endorse that. The
reason we sold the awarding body was that we believed there was a conflict of
interest with our role in terms of simplifying and rationalising
qualifications. It was distracting us from the core work that our employer
expected us to do, that is, to reduce the 500 qualifications operating within
the sector that they do not understand.
Ms Caine: That was one of the
matters in respect of which Leitch felt SSCs should move on.
Q472 Mr Chaytor: The prime object of the SSCs is the building of the
network and the strategic oversight. What are the legitimate revenue-earning
activities that would not involve a conflict of interest? You do not want to be
involved in providing qualifications or directly delivering training, so what
else is left?
Mr Wisdom: It is very difficult.
The question is how one earns an income from those core activities if they are
not in delivery or the world of qualifications. That is why proper funding for
sector skills councils that enables them to continue to maintain their presence
effectively as honest brokers within their sectors, signposting without any fear
of bias or conflict of interest to the very best provision and ensuring that
qualifications are fit for purpose, is absolutely key.
Q473 Mr Chaytor: When you refer to proper funding you mean more
funding from the public purse. Your view of the future is that the SSC should
be very largely funded by the Treasury?
Mr Wisdom: Sector skills
councils must have enough resource to provide world-class labour market
intelligence to be able to conduct a proper reform of the qualification system
with colleges. That takes more resource than is now available to the network.
Ms Caine: At the end of the day,
we have a key role to play in terms of raising investment for training in our
sectors and focusing employers' contributions and demands. That is absolutely
key if we are to meet the challenge in terms of skills and UK Plc going forward
within the global economy. We are happy to be held accountable for that; we are
happy to be held accountable through our sector skills agreements in a more
tighter way, but we go back to Leitch and the fact that he was saying one
should clarify the roles of the agencies. We believe that resources should
follow that clarification. He called for a streamlining of the learning and
skills council organisation. To us, that seems to make sense because if we in
Leitch world are to be given the role to interface with employers and
workforces, identify needs and demand-led agendas and economically valuable
skills and the Learning and Skills Council becomes a commissioning body, or
buyer of training against those plans, then to us there seems to be sense in
terms of apportioning the available resources that now exist in line with the clarification
of the new roles.
Q474 Mr Chaytor: Ms Florance, what is your view of the future funding
of your sector skills council?
Ms Florance: I concur with what
Ms Caine has put forward. A lot of savings can be made in the system as long as
there are clear roles. The clear roles will help employers gain access to the
advice that they need to train their workforces and, importantly, individuals
to back the right horse in terms of their own learning to ensure that they
undertake training that is fit for purpose for their future career prospects.
Q475 Mr Chaytor: Another view is that the sector skills councils have
been around three years and have received a considerable amount of public
funding and, frankly, within that period nothing has changed. There has been a
lot of networking but what has changed? Presumably, as we speak the LSC is
preparing its brief as we move towards the next comprehensive spending review
and demanding that your wings be
clipped a little bit. Is not the real problem that your role is uncertain and
therefore the whole issue of how it should be funded is also uncertain?
Mr Wisdom: The issue is how
important is our employers' future skills need in this economy. Who will voice
it if it is not the sector skills councils?
Q476 Mr Chaytor: But to provide a voice for the employer is not a big
job, is it?
Mr Wisdom: I hear trade
organisations or other membership organisations quoted. One of the issues about
employer membership organisations - I give you a little example from Northern Ireland
- is that they must represent all of their members. In Northern Ireland there
is a big issue about where hospitality education is located. It is currently on
the North Antrim coast. The trade association is unable to argue that it should
not be there because it has members on the North Antrim coast, so who will
articulate that the best place for it to be on behalf of the majority of employers
is in Belfast if it is not the sector skills council? I think that is just one
example of where you get an independent view of skills provision that you
cannot get through some of the other bodies, so it is a question of balance.
Ms Caine: I hear that analysis
but I make two points. First, we have to face the fact at the moment the
players who have played thus far have not succeeded in achieving the level of
employer engagement and investment that I believe we would all want to see and
need to see if we are to move the economy forward. If we take that as a given
then the question is: how best do we proceed? You could say that sector skills
councils have been around for three years. Ms Florance has just described the
collecting together of different size companies and sub-sectors. TV and radio
are broadcasters but, my goodness, there are fundamental differences between
them and how they see themselves. The whole thrust of being a voice for
employers requires the building of confidence, the analysis of information and
working with them to get them to see that skills is a key issue and lever and
is something on which they need to work together.
Q477 Mr Chaytor:
Is there not a big difference between your sector skills council where 60 %
of people working there are graduates and there is a fairly high level of
technical skills in the area of radio, television and film, and the hospitality
and clothing and textiles sectors? This is reflected by the fact you have a
levy which a large number of your employers are prepared to pay. In terms of
the other two is there any scope for getting that kind of employer buy-in
through a levy, or has that been discounted completely?
Ms Florance: You are absolutely
right that there are differences between sectors and that is why there are 25
sector skills councils. There will be many approaches to levering investment
into the development of the workforce. Clearly, in some sectors to have larger
businesses that are able to support a workforce that ultimately is freelance
and whose services they wish to buy into is critical. In most areas in my
sector we looked at creating incentives in terms of training. There are not any
drivers in terms of health and safety; there are no drivers to say that there
should be a licence to practise in this sector. Many people enter the industry
without any qualifications whatsoever and succeed supremely because here we are
looking at skills and qualifications. If we can tailor the public effort and
investment in such a way that leads to further private investment that must be
my objective. That is what I should like to be held accountable for in my
sector skills council. I mentioned waste earlier. To give an example, I said
that we spanned the couture industry. There are 3,000 graduates every year in
fashion design for which there are between 500 and 800 jobs a year, including
the people who enter self-employment. On its own that is quite a damning
statistic because when young people enter those courses they do not do so for
general education but on the basis of their belief that those course will equip
them for a role within the sector.
Q478 Chairman:
Are you advocating there should be the right number of jobs for the people?
Ms Florance: I am saying that
the match should be closer. Fifty per cent of those who exit with degrees do
not have the technical skills required to be picked up by the industry. We
would like to increase the number of graduates that the industry employs in
future, but because there is a shortfall in some of the skills when they exit
we have a difficult mismatch. I believe that in pulling those things closer
together we will have a better investment for employers; indeed, many of them
are now prepared to offer master classes into universities to ensure that
undergraduates understand what will be required of them in future.
Q479 Mr Chaytor:
Ms Florance, you said that public investment was important to lever in private
investment. What do you think the broad ratio should be in terms of the typical
sector skills council in future?
Ms Florance: I find that
question extremely difficult to answer. To go back to an earlier point, for an
investment of ₤500,000 my sector put in ₤800,000. That kind of
balance in many sectors and sub-sectors would work.
Mr Wisdom: It is very difficult
to say what the balance is. Research has shown that within our sector there is
about ₤600 million of public sector investment in skills that
supposedly helps the hospitality, leisure, travel and tourism industry every
year. We also know that 981/2 % of our small and medium size enterprises
have never accessed to or had support from any of that funding. Therefore, we
have to find a balance which says that we make that investment work harder and
more effectively for our businesses. When we do that we encourage our
businesses to invest more. Today, our businesses probably invest more than the
public sector does alongside it. Next, there is also the issue of the learners
who will invest only if they believe there is some value to them out of the
skills they are learning.
Q480 Mr Carswell:
Why do we need sector skills councils? Surely, this is just a vast and
sprawling corporist network that uses tax pounds to do something that is best
left to people and companies pursuing their own interests? Why do you exist?
Ms Caine: I would say that we
exist in terms of adding economies of scale and added value to the existing
huge corporist tax-ridden system that pumps a lot of public funding into
various schemes to support employers and individuals which is not focused
effectively and does not meet industry's particular needs. My view is that the
bit we get makes the rest of it work more effectively but, importantly, brings
together industries to look at the future.
Q481 Mr Carswell:
Do you say that that could not happen without you?
Ms Caine: I genuinely do not
think it could. If I take my sector, radio, film, TV, BAFTA - you name it - are
siloed. When one looks at the way industry is going it is about digital
platforms and content creation. We are at the point where all those employers
meet; we sit them down and ask them to look at what they believe they will need
in future and start planning for it now. I believe that is so valuable to the
economy and critical in terms of this nation moving forward.
Q482 Mr Carswell:
Is it not basically a form of planning? I think it was you who talked about the
need to look to the future rather than the present skills. You are trying to
second guess and so it is a form of planning. Would it not be better to leave
it to the invisible hand?
Ms Florance: For my sector there
would be no invisible hand. Small to medium size enterprises just do not take
out the time in their own businesses to do this; they need a catalyst. We are
that catalyst to help them come together and look at what the future may offer.
I do not believe it is second-guessing; it is based on international and
national statistics; it takes a view of what is happening in technologies and
seeing where this sector may play a part if it has the right skills.
Q483 Mr Pelling:
My questions are to some extent both prejudiced and informed by having sat on
an RDA and LSC. Do you think that the balance should be changed despite the
inability of the private sector to be able to make good judgments about
investment in training away from RDA and LSCs to employers so skills training
is much more demand-led than supply-led?
Mr Wisdom: Absolutely. The
example from my own industry is chefs. Fewer and fewer are being trained every
year where the supply side is dictating the capacity that is delivered to the
industry and yet demand is rising every year. Last year we recruited more chefs
from Jobcentre Plus than from colleges of further education which cannot be
good for a business sector that is truly competing on a global level.
Sixty-three per cent of our employers now say that they do not have sufficient
customer service skills from their employees. In terms of welcome of
international visitors we rank 17th out of the 35 leading nations, which
is not a great place to be as we move towards 2012.
Q484 Mr Pelling:
Perhaps more discretion should be given to the SSEs rather than the RDAs and
LSCs in deciding where spending on training should take place.
Mr Wisdom: Spending needs to be
more demand-led from two aspects. Clearly, there is the individual. None of us
would deny the need for the individual to have some choice in where he goes, and
to some extent that will be driven by the opportunities available from the
training undertaken. The second aspect is giving our businesses the best skills
available to enable them to compete in a global market.
Q485 Mr Pelling:
How do RDAs and LSCs compare with SSCs in their ability to reach out to
business?
Ms Florance: I believe that the
situation here is very different. There is no doubt that regional development agencies have strong employers on their
boards, but I come back to the point that it is not the employer who shouts the
loudest but the considered opinion from a representative group of employers
that will determine what is picked up in that marketplace for skills. In terms
of the Learning and Skills Council very often when one looks at surveys one may
say that a lot of people know about it basically because they are funding
skills, whereas sector skills councils are informing them of what should be
funded in future. Therefore, very often they appear higher up that list of "knowns"
and get more support from them than perhaps sector skills councils do. But we
support the Leitch recommendation that some further streamlining within the LSC
should take place to turn that role into more of a commissioning and
capacity-building role within the provider network as opposed to a central
planning role. Essentially, the central planning role is a duplication of what
we are doing as sector skills councils.
Ms Caine: We need to provide
clarity for employers. At the moment it is such a cluttered marketplace; it is
incredibly confusing. For them to achieve access to what should be a simple
offer is very cluttered as a result of all sorts of organisations that are
being funded through tax to support that role. Therefore, as Leitch said there
should be clarification of role. We have the key role to play in terms of that
articulation of the demand-side agenda. Your question on statistics is a good
one. We know that we are measured to the right, left and upwards and downwards
and have been since we started. We think that our figures show well and are
prepared to send them to you afterwards. It would be interesting to see what
the RDAs and LSC do in relation to that kind of measurement of the level of
satisfaction.
Q486 Mr Pelling:
Are there some specific examples of your having changed the skills offered
within specific regions in terms of the influence you have had on RDAs or LSCs?
Ms Caine: Certainly for us. The
other matter I should like to put on record is that higher education has a key
role to play in terms of delivering the skills agenda. Through a UK-wide
approach in recognising and working with a number of designated skill set
academies we have had an effect and worked successfully with regional HEFCE and
RDAs in terms of supporting that initiative, but that approach is global to
UK-wide to national to local.
Q487 Mr Pelling:
Are there specific examples and evidence of how the change is being made?
Ms Florance: I can give an
example that is to be launched in the North West next month and is being picked
up by two other regions. Our sector has had some difficulties in recruiting to
hard-to-fill vacancies. In the past young people have been looked at purely as
potential recruits. We have been encouraging employers to look beyond that and
at certain groups that currently are not in work but may be in a cohort of
people who receive benefit. By working in partnership with Jobcentre Plus and
the Learning and Skills Council in those regions, and with the support of
regional development agencies, we have managed to launch a programme called
Intro which will offer some joined-up support for individuals to get back into
a working environment. It will not just stop at the offer given by Jobcentre
Plus, which is to get them through a basic skills agenda and into work, but
roll them into the Train to Gain agenda and help them sustain their role in
employment. We now have employers who are ready to take those individuals and,
hopefully, secure long-term employment for them. There are some real changes.
We have joined up those bits of the system in such a way that we couch an offer
that our employers believe is useful for them but also matches part of the
social agenda.
Q488 Mr Pelling:
If the Government were to retain this supply-driven rather than demand-led
process what advice would you give to it in terms of making that process work
better so that resources are better aligned to training needs?
Mr Wisdom: The Leitch review has
spent far more time looking at this than I have the resources to do. Besides,
my background is industry; I am not an education specialist. I believe that the
system needs to change because it has not delivered for UK Plc to date.
Q489 Mr Pelling:
The system is not performing?
Mr Wisdom: Therefore, change is
really no option.
Ms Caine: I would recommend what
Leitch has recommended, which is that there needs to be a much closer
relationship between the supply side and, if you like, the demand side. I
believe that we have a key role to play if we are given the right authority and
resource to help improve focus and be the glue to make those parts of the
system work together more effectively.
Q490 Mr Pelling:
To put a regional question, as a London Member of Parliament it is already a
very complex system. Is it really sensible to continue to have within London
the responsibility shared between the LDA and the London LSE and to have the
skills board as well? Would it not be better to give all of that power to the mayor to be directed in
that way?
Ms Caine: Certainly, that was
what the mayor wanted and would have liked; and it was certainly the case that
he prosecuted. As you are aware, we have ended up in a position where the
London Skills and Employment Board has responsibility for the adult skills
budget. I have to say that I think that is working well in terms of a mechanism
whereby the LDA, LSC and ourselves come together and look at strategy and how
that meshes. It leaves some untidy edges. I believe that it is an interesting
experiment and I hope that if it is successful it may well be one can move
forward to tidy up some of those edges.
Q491 Mr Marsden:
Mr Wisdom, I should like to begin with you and take up the point just made
about a much closer demand/supply relationship. Assuming we all accept that
that is a good thing, is there not a problem about the level at which demand
and supply come together? You said in your comments a few moments ago that many
of your employers were far more concerned about what was happening in places
like Blackpool or Weston-super-Mare. The regional issue is much more vague for
them. How will we get demand and supply more closely related when there are
different emphases between the various SSCs on whether or not they want to
deliver things locally or regionally?
Mr Wisdom: I do not believe that
sector skills councils have the clout to deliver things at a local level.
Ultimately, the strategic issues that I see are built up from a multitude of
local environments. I sit on the skills and training sector for the Royal
Borough of Eton and Windsor which looks at the opportunities of hosting the
Olympic rowing regatta in 2012. What I hear is a microcosm of what our
employers have said at national level. Clearly, there is a feed through and the
issue for sector skills councils is: how are they enabled to have authority to
change things from that strategic level and enable the system to respond to
local needs where they are different in terms of the volumes required?
Q492 Mr Marsden:
Ms Caine, you were asked previously about transforming roles and, quite rightly
in my view - I speak as a North West MP - focused on the immense possibilities
of media city and everything else. That is an example of you as an SSC taking a
big sectoral initiative in one particular region. For the sake of argument, if
there was some other major initiative that came up elsewhere in the country
would you have the capacity to do that?
Ms Caine: I gave that example. I
could also point to working with Aardman and looking at the establishment of an
animation academy in the South West. I could also point to examples where we
are working very closely together in London.
Q493 Mr Marsden:
Therefore, you have the capacity to pursue more than one regional focus at any
particular time?
Ms Caine: We do. In part, that
is because we have investment from our industry. We have always prioritised
working hard within the regions, but it is difficult. Even with the money we
have it pulls us to quite a significant degree. To go back to what you said
about bringing supply and demand together, I believe that we do it through the
sector skills agreements which are based on research. As Ms Florance said
earlier, each SSC has research for each region. Within that we are able to
analyse where the hot spots are and there are particular areas of activity or
initiative, such as animation or the North West and the media city. I believe
that we then have a key role to play in terms of bringing our employers
together with those public agencies to ensure that what we all do makes sense.
Q494 Mr Marsden:
Ms Florance, within this session it has already been said that Leitch was
curiously patchy in his final report about sub-regional strategies. Is it not
also the case that the slimming down of the LSCs has also been curiously
patchy? Do you think we have focused enough in terms of future plans on what we
should be doing on a regional or sub-regional basis as far as delivery is
concerned? How do you see it from the perspective of your sector skills
councils?
Ms Florance: I concur that
Leitch was not terribly clear on this area. It was passed on to Lyons and we
did not really get under the skin of that. This is one of the areas where we
have a big job of work to do. It seems to me that at local and regional level
the complexity of the system insofar as employers are concerned is such that we
must be careful not to add to it. A great opportunity is provided by the
establishment of the Commission for Employment and Skills with a role that
oversees bodies at local level to deliver. In establishing those bodies I would
be less concerned by who they should be and who they should replace than by what
they should deliver and how they should be accountable for that delivery. Prior
to coming here today I looked at a piece of work done for a workshop held
recently that looked at the very issue of the regions. It is true that one has
the learning and skills council, the RDA, the Regional Skills Partner and
Jobcentre Plus, but in addition there is, with lots of different boundaries, a
list of other organisations that take an interest in working with employers on
skills. One has Fair Cities, City Strategy Pathfinders, core city skills and
employment boards, adult learning option pilots and local strategic partners.
Q495 Mr Marsden:
Stop!
Ms Florance: That is exactly the
point. If you are an employer out there the complexity is immense. We must tidy
up the system.
Q496 Chairman:
Perhaps you would give us that list in case there are few on it we have not
heard about.
Ms Florance: I am sure I can let
you have the list later.
Q497 Chairman:
Mr Wisdom is worried that he does not have enough chefs. When we had all the
vet programmes that were so popular there were so many kids who wanted to do
that.
There was enormous pressure to become a vet. If we had a similar programme
perhaps we would have an excess of people wanting to become chefs. It amazes
me.
Mr Wisdom: That is probably one
of the reasons why demand is rising.
Mr Marsden: Clearly, we are all
eating out too much.
Q498 Chairman:
Ms Florance, I gained the impression that we were training so many people in a
field that you wanted manpower planning, which I thought we had left a long
time ago, to provide enough jobs.
Ms Florance: There is a big
issue here about information advice and guidance to young people. One of the
things we like in the Leitch report is the idea of a universal service for that
across England.
Q499 Chairman:
If there are not enough jobs for doctors there is an Opposition Day debate on
it, but when it comes to musicians, actors or any of the creative professions
we turn out 100s at every opportunity. We do not start to ask about planning
for those, do we? You would like the
right number of jobs for actors as the actors who emerge from acting school?
Ms Caine: What we would like to
see and are working on is identifying where best practice is in terms of
delivery within higher education. Once we have identified it we then partnership
it and focus the industry's interests and resource on providing equipment and
work placements.
Q500 Chairman:
You know that in some areas there will be 100 people wanting to get into a
profession and no planning will change that?
Ms Caine: That is true, but
there are also definite ways in which one can help to focus and nurture the
best talent by bringing together the best partnerships between industry and
those institutions.
Q501 Mr Carswell:
I am sure that many of the justifications for state planning were used in East
Germany before the wall came down. What do you think about the targets set by
Leitch bearing in mind the comments made about central planning? How do you
think some of your member firms will react to the challenge they set?
Mr Wisdom: I think they are incredibly
demanding in an industry like hospitality and tourism. I think that the
challenge to uprate those skills levels is one that employers will look at from
two perspectives. The first is that today we probably have the most highly
skilled workforce at the front end of hospitality and tourism that we have ever
enjoyed as a result of the accession of states. The second is that this is
probably not a sustainable position unless we do something about the skills of
our indigenous workforce. The challenge for us is that we know what the cost is
in addressing the Leitch targets in our industry; it is ₤700 million.
We know that ₤600 million is being expended every year to help those
skills.
Q502 Mr Carswell:
Are you saying that in your sector it is working and you have the skills you
need but without the intervention of your organisation it may not work much
longer in future?
Mr Wisdom: I think our industry
will say that in the long term it is not sustainable as it is now.
Q503 Mr Carswell:
Without your intervention?
Mr Wisdom: Without some
intervention.
Q504 Mr Carswell: Ms Caine, what
do you think of the targets set by Leitch and how do you think your member
firms will react to the challenge that they set?
Ms Caine: In relation to the
Leitch targets I was very pleased to see that they were across the piece. Quite
often in terms of skills debate one tends to focus on the lower level skills
area. Therefore, one welcomes the fact that there was an agenda round
high-level skills, which is very important. Our industry is composed largely of
graduates and therefore that is the area in which we are most interested. I
believe that we have a role to play with the other sector skills councils in
terms of helping to advance those targets, but inevitably there are things that
industries do which make sense in terms of their businesses which will probably
not be linked to measurement via full-fat qualifications and therefore will not
apparently and necessarily appear to deliver immediately to those numeric
targets. We can demonstrate where we are helping. I think that they are useful
in terms of focusing an ambition, but I believe it is very important that they
are not the be all and end all in identifying (a) what needs to be done and (b)
what is being delivered.
Ms Florance: My sector shares
some initial concern about the targets which have been set. Their principal
concern is that it is based very much on outputs of numbers of qualifications,
throughputs of numbers of learners and no real aim at ensuring that what we
deliver are skills that are economically valuable. Therefore, in hitting some
of the targets we may just miss the point. Their point is that we should be
looking at some of the measures; in other words, the outcomes that those
targets achieve. Are we improving productivity across all industries through
the achievement of these targets? Are we improving the face of the market in
terms of job shortages and skill gaps? Are we increasing the number of learning
opportunities for individuals? It is about overlaying that onto a system. At
the same time, my employers endorse the fact that in particular we need to
address the issue of basic skills, but they see that very often as being driven
by more emphasis placed on intermediate and higher skills and pulling the rest
through on that basis. My industry is changing every day to a higher value
skill equilibrium. In setting a target that may be interpreted into a universal
pledge that every sector signs up to the same thing flies in the face of the
fact that sectors are different and will respond in different ways to that
gauntlet being thrown down.
Q505 Mr Carswell:
Do employers in your sector value qualifications? To what extent does the tying
of public funding to qualification-bearing courses limit uptake of training
opportunities?
Mr Wisdom: Employers do value
some qualifications when they understand what they mean. What they value more
than anything is skills. The closer you can link those skills to the
qualifications the better. In the example of the chefs to which I referred by
re‑establishing an industry standard employers will gratefully receive
that and give it the kudos it deserves. Similarly, with basic food hygiene
standards although it is a skill that people have to learn there are 19 basic
food hygiene qualifications at work. Employers are confused and someone must
take the responsibility for rationalising those qualifications to a level that
employers naturally understand. I now know what skill level this provides and
what occupation it supports. I believe this is a vital role for sector skills
councils because I do not see another body with that ability to look at it in
that incisive way.
Q506 Mr Carswell:
I was going to ask how you persuade employers that training pays, but I
disagree with the whole premise of the question and will leave it there.
Mr Wisdom: Thirty per cent of
small to medium size enterprises in our sector that did not train over a
six-year period ceased to exist in that period, as opposed to three per cent of
small to medium size enterprises that did train which went out of business in
the same period.
Q507 Mr Carswell:
The presumption is that it is for a planning organisation that exists through
taxpayer funding to tell businesses how to run them and you can do it more
effectively than they can.
Mr Wisdom: Not to tell them how
to run their business but to advise them of the importance to their own
business survival of participating in training. They are likely to listen only
to another employer organisation.
Ms Caine: You are positing
central planning with state bodies. We are not state bodies; we are
employer-led bodies. Our boards are made up of the employers from our industry.
Q508 Mr Carswell:
You are state funded?
Ms Caine: We are partly state
funded, but there is a difference between regarding those employers who make up
our boards as organisations who are planning, and therefore applying that
planning to businesses that are, as it were, in no way related to them. They
are of those business. Therefore, I believe you can be confident that as a
result that which they address and recommend are borne out of a fundamental
understanding of their own businesses which are businesses operating within
those sectors. Therefore, they would not be giving their time, energy, effort
or resource to an organisation that they regarded as interfering or being,
frankly, a waste of time. We know that businesses hate bureaucracy, waste and inefficiency.
The fact that they are engaged with us and are working through us is I believe
a sign of ultimate confidence that we are the right bodies to help them with
that planning, not the wrong ones.
Mr Wisdom: You could leave all
of it to the supply side, which is probably where it has been in the past, and
look at the performance of the UK in terms of skills during that period. I
believe that in its own right that suggests more balance is needed.
Q509 Chairman:
The thrust of Leitch is that all this should be employer-led, but employers in
this country have a dreadful record on training. Surely, it is an enormous leap
of faith suddenly to say, as does Leitch, that it should all be demand-led and
that it should be for the employers. I was shadow minister for training years
ago and it was the same problem. Employers were short-sighted, did not see the
value of training and did not train or invest in it. What has happened now so
that with Leitch there is faith that employers will not only train but think of
anything other than today or the day after tomorrow?
Mr Wisdom: That is quite a
generalisation, with due respect. The reality is that there are employers who
do not train and many go out of business, as I have just suggested, which is
the ultimate sanction. There are also some who do not train and survive. In my
own sector we know that 30 % of them do not train and of that 25 % say that
nothing would ever induce them to train, but they are a tiny minority of
employers. The responsible ones want to do something about that. Within our
national strategy responsible employers are now beginning to talk about whether
they should be putting in codes of practice which ensure, certainly where there
is a public health interest in commercial kitchens, that minimum standards of
training should be carried out within the industry. I believe that is an
example of how responsible employers can be brought together around sector
skills agreements to look at how they can raise standards of training across
the whole industry.
Q510 Chairman:
To take Mr Carswell's point, can you give an international comparison where there
are no state bureaucracies involved and they do far better, or, to take my
point, is there an international comparator where employers who care about
training lead from the front and show the way we should do it in Britain? Can
you give either of those international comparisons?
Mr Wisdom: If I take the example
of Canada as a leading example of the perception of international welcome, in
that country there is a very strong sectoral model of employers. They have a
reputation of having the best customer service.
Mr Carswell: The Internet would
not have started without the sector skills training required. I just do not buy
it.
Q511 Mr Pelling:
We have the ability to show that there are different strands in Conservative
thinking.
Ms Caine: Let us hope it all
comes together in one.
Q512 Mr Pelling:
Do you think there are differences in terms of the performance of different
sectors which would justify different degrees of intervention? To put it
another way without irritating people, in the past sometimes the experience of
the hospitality industry has been mixed and has been of poor calibre because of
lack of training. Do you think it would be better for government to concentrate
on the provision of funding for particular sectors over others, bearing in mind
the degree of interest in training? It strikes me that there has been a
tremendous market failure when it comes to the hospitality business, in that
there has been a tremendous lack of investment in training such that we have to
import a huge number of staff from overseas?
Mr Wisdom: I believe there are
other factors which have caused the import of staff from overseas, although
they have always had an important role in hospitality. But the real issue that
now drives the numbers of people who join the hospitality industry is that the
young population is in decline. The hospitality and tourism industry has always
relied on the under-25 population as key. That population is in decline, and
the industry has a very high turnover of staff. The gap is being filled by
accession state workers where there is a ready supply, Therefore a slightly
different issue drives that. As to your question about whether you should treat
sectors differently, one of the great facts about sectors is that they are all
different and there are different drivers. Clearly, there will be sectors in
decline. That is not necessarily to do with skills; it may be more to do with
global economic factors or whatever. There will be sectors in growth. Clearly,
within the economy you would want to support those sectors that are growing and
help them maximise the opportunities to improve their productivity and to
compete globally. One would want to minimise the issues that are being caused
by sectors in decline. I strongly believe that one of the values of sector
skills councils is that there is such flexibility and difference of view and
application to those industries.
Ms Caine: I believe that the
notion of blanket solutions is problematic, as I think is the notion of talking
about all employers doing this or doing that is problematic. To analyse by
sector makes every sense in terms of the actions that need to be taken within
the economic context with regional variation. As you rightly say, there is then
absolute difference in terms of the urgent priorities and whether or not people
have been investing, but critically through the sector skills agreements I
think that it will give you and all of us a tool by which we can see whether or
not sectors have moved in terms of those agendas for action. In my view, if
they have not that becomes a fair, sensible and analysed way to look at the
future and what may need to happen potentially in terms of those sectors.
Q513 Mr Chaytor:
I should like to ask Ms Florance about qualifications reform. Is it realistic
to assume that all vocational qualifications should be determined by the sector
skills councils and only those that are employer approved should be eligible
for state funding?
Ms Florance: Looking solely at
my sector, there are about 600 vocational qualifications. That is a huge number
for the size of the sector. Leitch mentions that there are over 22,000 across
the nation and all the sectors. Some work is to be done on treading a path with
qualifications reform which determines the kinds of skills that employers want
to achieve by accrediting someone with that particular qualification. My
employers are keen to see a system that is driven much more by a credits
framework, that is, to put it colloquially, in bite size chunks of learning.
Former qualifications - full-fat qualifications as people describe them - do
not always meet the needs of today and tomorrow. First, the learner needs to
track a path that may be different for the occupational area that he or she
wishes to enter; second, new technologies come along so quickly that one needs
to be able to bolt on additional pieces of learning that can quickly meet a
need for competitiveness. As to whether it is realistic, I think that a huge
job is to be done here in terms of qualification reform.
Q514 Mr Chaytor:
What is the timescale?
Ms Florance: We are now engaging
in this sector. As the only one based in Yorkshire, I am also part of the pilot
for the UK reform on qualifications. We are quite well advanced in terms of
determining what needs to be done and having some initial work done on some of
the qualifications framework. We need to develop further our infrastructure as
a sector skills council to ensure that we employer-proof any accreditation
system, because it must be absolutely transparent in terms of a formal system.
We are trying to do that within a framework of reform which was established
pre-Leitch, and we would look to your support in considering the way in which
that process is managed in future by the Department for Education and Skills
and perhaps do some reforms in terms of the governance for that. I think we can
work rapidly not only in terms of rationalising qualifications but in generating
new ones in some sectors that are fit for purpose.
Q515 Mr Chaytor:
Would that increase the total number?
Ms Florance: I do not think it
would increase the number, but through a mix and match system one would have
core adoptions on qualifications. It would not increase the number, because
some of them are qualifications that people think are out there but do not
exist any more. Some of them need tweaking and others need an absolute
revolution to make them fit for purpose.
Q516 Mr Chaytor:
Do you believe that the employees in your respective sectors are fully
convinced of the value of qualifications in terms of increasing wage rates, or
is there more work to be done there and are you doing anything to raise the
link between qualifications and earnings?
Mr Wisdom: While employers do
not have confidence in the qualifications it is very unlikely that employees
will have confidence in them either. In my sector one certainly must start from
a perspective which says that employers must be given real confidence. I am not
sure that I share Ms Caine's confidence in the speed at which we can make those
qualification changes happen. My experience of the one qualification on which
we have worked, albeit a very important one to do with chefs, has taken us two
and a half years and we are not there yet. That is simply far too long to correct
the endemic faults that are there in the number of qualifications and to start
to build that confidence that both employees and employers need to have around
that qualification system and framework. There will always be new ones. We have
just completed writing the national occupation standards for the gambling
industry where there were none before. Clearly, that is an industry where
employers treat those standards with great respect because they help them in
terms of self-regulation and social responsibility issues right now. We would
seek to develop qualifications in that arena to make sure that as that industry
grows people are properly qualified to provide the service that they require.
On the one hand, there is the issue of reducing the number; on the other, it is
a matter of making sure that we are reacting to changes in society and the
economy and delivering new qualifications where appropriate.
Ms Florance: The point you raise
is a very important one for my sector, particularly an area which overall has a
workforce where most are not qualified up to level 3 and yet at the same time
graduates are being recruited. I have an ageing workforce which prides itself
on its skills and does not necessarily see the advantage in having those skills
qualified and accredited. Even where employers have wanted to do that and have
the skills accredited there has been some reluctance among employees. For that
reason we have been working quite actively with Unionlearn to try to encourage
that kind of driver from the workforce. I have to say that we have had some
limited success to that end, but there is a big issue with the existing
workforce, particularly those over 50, in terms of looking forward to
accreditation when they do not see the correlation between that and the
improvement in wage rates.
Mr Wisdom: Someone has to give
the employees the advice and guidance around which qualifications are
meaningful. Today, sector skills councils are best placed to do that. We are
about to launch our information and guidance system before the end of May and
that will provide employees with the information that says which skills are
relevant to which jobs and which ones are industry admired qualifications. We
are able to do that from a level and uninfluenced point of view. I cannot see
where else that will come from if it does not come from sector skills councils.
Q517 Mr Chaytor:
Leitch argued for a substantial increase in the number of apprenticeships to
500,000. Ms Caine, is that relevant to your sector skills council, or do you
think that is a realistic total across the board?
Ms Caine: To go back to what I
said earlier, the good thing about targets is that they encapsulate an
ambition. I said earlier that in our industry 65 % across the piece were
graduate entrants. That is partly because we suffer from an oversupply of
people who want to enter the industry, which brings us problems. One of them is
that sometimes we do not necessarily think very carefully about the way in
which we recruit; in other words, to deal also with issues of diversity, there
are definitely craft roles - camera and sound - which are apprenticeship roles.
To go back to points raised earlier, it is not that we do not do on-the-job
training; it is that we do not necessarily package that in a way that links to
full-fat qualifications that would be recognised in terms of apprenticeship
targets. Our industry sees that there is a gap and is eager to address it.
Certainly, in terms of looking at the Leitch recommendations and our work as a
sector skills councils that would be the area where we feel we need to do most
to become Leitch-ready and support the delivery of those targets.
Q518 Mr Chaytor:
Your message is that your employers are positive about the potential
flexibility?
Ms Caine: They recognise that it
is a challenge and want to play their part in terms of helping to deliver that
target, albeit the numbers will not be huge in the industry. That is the power
of the network, because in terms of that overall target there will be other
sectors that train much more through apprenticeships. I think that between us
we are committed to seeing what the aggregate looks like and how we can help
drive towards that number and figure.
Q519 Mr Chaytor:
Does the figure of 500,000 seem realistic to you? Is your sector up for a big
increase in apprenticeships?
Mr Wisdom: The real issue is to
increase the completion rates significantly among the apprentices we have. In
our sector there are some 20,000 apprenticeships in the framework at any time.
Only 40 % of those apprentices complete it. As an example of how the skills
system is not really linked up, we have no knowledge of who is starting their
apprenticeships. We see the numbers only when we certificate them and they leave.
There is no system by which one can see what is going on with those apprentices
and measuring the wastage that goes on today and why it is happening as people
leave the system before they complete their training. I believe that is a real
worry. We would like to see a doubling of the number of apprentices who
complete within the sector rather than have the current wasteful system.
Ms Florance: My sector will not
create vast numbers of apprentices but it is very focused on craft and
intermediate areas. It is particularly interested in seeing the expansion of
apprenticeships to cover the over-25s, which is quite critical. In addition, it
wants to see many more apprenticeships tailored to meet clusters of employers.
To give an example that has happened quite recently, there was not an
apprenticeship for leather production. You may think that leather production is
quite small. It is quite small and it is a niche and quite high added value
market. In the south west of England centred around Mulberry is a cluster of
manufacturers who in the main produce high added value goods. With greater
flexibility from the learning and skills council and a very flexible approach
from Bridgewater College we have managed to develop a new apprenticeship for
that sector in a technical area in which the college formerly had no expertise.
By using the equipment and expertise in the company, the accreditation
facilities of the college and flexibility of the learning and skills council in
developing it we now have the potential which did not exist before of 50
apprentices a year in that region going through that apprenticeship.
Bridgewater College is doing business with companies that it has never dealt
with before. That is a success story. It is one of the examples of local and
regional resource on the ground to pull it together, but now we have that model
it is something we can share with other companies in other parts of the
country.
Q520 Chairman:
Will you meet the target by watering down the quality of apprenticeships? The
target of 500,000 is an awfully big one, is it not?
Ms Florance: I think that from the
perspective of the Skills for Business network at this stage we have not
disaggregated that target and decided which sectors will meet the target
itself, and perhaps that is a piece of work that we need to take away and
consider and come back to you.
Q521 Chairman:
All of you appeared to nod when Mr Wisdom said that you did not know how many
apprentices there were. Why do you not know?
Mr Wisdom: The recording system
does not give us the information as to who is starting an apprenticeship. As a
sector skills council we have no knowledge of who is starting apprenticeships
in our sector.
Q522 Fiona Mactaggart:
Who does have that knowledge?
Mr Wisdom: The providers and the
learning and skills council has that knowledge but it is not linked through to
us. To answer your point about watering down, if apprenticeships apply to the
70 % of the workforce that have already left full-time education and we look at
an apprenticeship system that helps the older workers that we need in terms of
up-skilling for the future, then there is not necessarily any reason why we
should water it down, but we would have to change the focus from where it sits
today.
Q523 Mr Marsden:
Ms Florance, you said earlier that in your sector what employers wanted were
more bite-size learning and qualifications. Would it be an advantage to apply
that philosophy to apprenticeships for older learners?
Ms Florance: Yes, I believe it
would. We are not talking about time-bound apprenticeships but getting people
back into the lifelong learning regime. By taking that learning over a longer
period of time people can take out pieces of learning, consolidate them at the
workforce and employers and employees get the benefit of that and then move on
to develop their bank of skills in a better way.
Q524 Mr Marsden:
There are individual employers who have done really good things in terms of
apprenticeships for adult learners, but by and large the record so far has been
very patchy. Would it be possible to have the approach of more bite-size
learning over a longer period of time whilst preserving the strength or brand
of the apprenticeship and not watering it down?
Ms Florance: I think it would.
There is something called a blueprint as to what can and cannot be part of an
apprenticeship. That is now quite flexible, although a number of sectors - I
stress not my own at this stage - are questioning parts of it. I think that we
would be watering it down if we did not say that at the end of that particular
apprenticeship someone was equipped to fulfil an occupational role within a sector.
Qualifications have not necessarily been locked into that. This is the role in
the sector as opposed to what the apprenticeship looks like. There has been
some mix between the two.
Q525 Mr Marsden:
Mr Wisdom, in an earlier exchange between you and my colleague Mr Pelling
you spoke about the history of people coming from outside the UK to fill gaps
in the hospitality industry. It is the case, is it not, that if you were to
match the sort of targets that Leitch has set there is no way, given current
demography, you can reach those targets even with the current proportion of UK
young people? You would have to go down quite a lot.
Mr Wisdom: I have not
disaggregated the Leitch targets into this particular sector, but it is true
that today 60 % of hospitality employees in London are international
workers, and that figure is rising on a daily basis.
Q526 Mr Marsden:
Given that it will not be easy to meet anything like the Leitch target in terms
of the younger end of the market and the UK at the moment, why are you as a sector
skills council and the hospitality industry in general not doing far more to
encourage and attract older workers into the industry? Would apprenticeships of
the sort we are talking about be a valid mechanism for that?
Mr Wisdom: I think they would be
a valid mechanism for it. The reality is that industry partly through the
research that we have been doing has only recently woken up to the fact that
the real issue it faces is not recruitment but retention and that as an
industry we are probably the best recruiters in the business. We recruit more
people more often, and more successfully, than anyone else. What we do not do
is retain them and upskill them. In answer to your point, yes, I think that
apprenticeships of the sort you have mentioned would be a real incentive.
Q527 Chairman:
Your industry is not pay them very well.
Mr Wisdom: Having said that,
there are tremendous unidentified career opportunities.
Q528 Chairman:
But earlier you said that you specialised in new flows of the under-25s all the
time. We know why that is; a lot of it is low paid and seasonal work?
Mr Wisdom: Traditionally, that
has been the view of the industry. The reality is that the tourism and
hospitality industry has been growing quite successfully and does not have,
particularly in cities like London, the seasonality aspect that it used to
have. There are many good careers to be had in these industries. The reality is
that people are not aware of that. We come back to the point about
informational guidance. We have a big issue to address in terms of informing
not only young people but also older workers in the workforce about the
opportunities open to them and the skills and qualifications that would enable
them to access those opportunities.
Q529 Mr Marsden:
Earlier you mentioned Canada as number one in the welcome list. One interesting
point about both Canada and the United States is that historically they have
been far more successful than we have at using older people, particularly in
the public sector, in the areas you are talking about. Ms Caine, ageism in your
sector is a problem, is it not? It will also be a problem for you in terms of
reaching these sorts of targets?
Ms Caine: That is right. I view
it as a personal triumph that I sit with you today. I think you are right. To reflect
on what I said earlier, there are issues about oversupply and the fact that there
will always be bright young people who are prepared to come and work in the
industry. Looking at our statistics, it is very interesting that women over 40
almost disappear in terms of the profile of the industry. There are lots of
reasons for that: freelancing, patterns of labour and so on. First, we have
worked with the industry to look at the whole issue of work experience and stop
the practice where people work for free, which is important in terms of
equality and diversity of access to the industry. Second, we are working quite
hard to get the industry to recognise and appreciate - I think it will as
demographics start to shift and a number of other industries become more appealing
- the skills and abilities of people who are already in the workforce which
need to be nurtured and employed, but freelancing is freelancing.
Q530 Chairman:
Do you talk to the BBC at the highest level about ageism?
Ms Caine: We do; we talk to the
whole industry.
Q531 Chairman:
The BBC sets the tone, does it not?
Ms Caine: It sets the tone. We
are just about to sign a memorandum of understanding with the BBC. The BBC
takes issues of diversity very seriously and I think that under Mark Thompson
it seeks to address some of them. Apart from anything else, we are quite
wasteful in terms of not maintaining and using the excellence that we already
have, so there is a business argument for why we should be tackling some of the
ageist parts of our practices.
Q532 Chairman:
I believe that last night in an interview Victoria Wood asked why people should
cease to be funny once they get over the age of 50.
Ms Caine: That is quite right.
Mr Marsden: Why should they
cease to read the news?
Q533 Fiona Mactaggart:
Mr Wisdom, as far as apprentices are concerned I want to ask about knowledge of
who starts and who finishes. It seems quite worrying to me that you do not know
this and that the learning and skills councils are not sharing that information
with you. Have you asked them to do so?
Mr Wisdom: I think we have been
having this conversation certainly since I joined People 1st
two and a half years ago. To date I have not seen any information on it.
Ms Caine: I believe that one of
the benefits of working through the sector skills agreement process has been
that we have been able to start to identify with the Learning and Skills Council
the kind of information that is useful for us to have disaggregated on a
sectoral basis, as opposed necessarily to a local and regional basis. They are
making moves to address some of those issues, but going forward it strikes me
that if the Leitch proposals are being looked at one of the matters that the
commission needs to consider if it is to scrutinise all parts of the system is
the way in which the management of information and the sharing of critical
information is made available and is transparent to all parties to the system.
Q534 Fiona Mactaggart:
Is there a sense that some employers consent to a system where an
apprenticeship is started but not finished? You get some of the stuff that they
want but you do not spend ages away from the workplace getting skills that do
not necessarily make you a more valuable employee?
Mr Wisdom: It is very difficult
to understand what is going wrong when you do not have the information base to
ask the question. What I do know is that in some areas the industry has taken a
strong interest. For example, there is an extremely good apprenticeship
programme supported by the Academy of Culinary Arts at Falmouth and Poole
College. That has completion rates of 93 %. We know that in that case it is
about mentoring and pastoral care given to the students, which is different. We
know that because of our contacts through the industry and our understanding of
what is going on there. Without information as to what is going on elsewhere
what is going wrong is pure speculation.
Q535 Mr Chaytor:
As to the question of the availability of information, why do you not just pick
up the telephone and ask the LSC about the number of apprenticeships that are being
started? Are they refusing to provide that information?
Ms Caine: No. The first part of
the sector skills agreement process is to research information about shortages
and also supply. At the start of that process it was clear that the kinds of
information that we might want on a sectoral basis were not necessarily
available on that basis because the system was focused locally and regionally.
Q536 Mr Chaytor:
Do the regional LSEs have this information?
Ms Caine: Yes, they will.
Q537 Mr Chaytor:
Why not just ask them for it?
Ms Caine: We have been and we
are.
Q538 Mr Chaytor:
What do they say?
Ms Caine: "We will get there."
Q539 Mr Chaytor:
They are thinking about it?
Ms Florance: Last week I
received a piece of correspondence from the LSC on this very subject. Given
that sector skills councils have all been asking the same questions in the
development of their sector skills agreements, they are putting in train a
process to try to disaggregate the information that they have at local level
into sectors. They have informed us that we will get it in 2008.
Q540 Mr Chaytor:
If you had asked a Member of Parliament to table a Parliamentary Question when
this first became a problem you would have got the answer within two weeks. Why
wait until 2008?
Mr Wisdom: When I joined this
two years ago from industry I thought I would ask the question and almost
expected an answer. I have learnt that without the authority in the system to
ask for the answer you do not get one. That is the battle. As employer-led
bodies we have influence but with no authority within the system we struggle
with that.
Fiona Mactaggart: It seems to me
that we have some authority here, and perhaps we can ask this question.
Chairman: Mr Holmes will turn to
the last section of questions which are to do with who pays for training and
Train to Gain.
Q541 Paul Holmes:
Ms Florance, in November your council made a submission to the Committee and in
paragraph 27 it said that "sector employers derive direct benefit from less
than 10 % of the current public expenditure on education and training that
notionally relates to the skills of our sector." Do you say, therefore, that 90
% of the money is totally wasted or that it goes on generic training that
benefits everybody, not specifically your employers?
Ms Florance: The
₤80 million to which I am referring is funding that goes into
courses which are linked to our sector. Our employers say that they value 10 %
of the output of that. A number of programmes which are running, not often
through private provision but mainly through further education, are deemed to
be linked to our sector and to have outputs which would make someone employable
in our sector but are not valued by those employees.
Q542 Paul Holmes:
Therefore, in your case 90 % of ₤80 million is being wasted or misdirected?
Ms Florance: Yes.
Q543 Paul Holmes:
Whose fault is that? Is it the fault of the college, the LSC, the sector skills
council or the DfES? Who is messing this up?
Ms Florance: The answer is that
it has been a supply-led system. Basically, if you are running a programme
which is attractive to individuals and fill it with individuals you get a
payment for doing it. Colleges are businesses like anything else. If that is
the way they are rewarded it will continue that sort of message. I believe that
the answer is to pull the two closer together. There are programmes where we
would very much like to see further education running, one example being Bridgewater
College. That helped to cut through a lot of the bureaucracy that employers see
in running an apprenticeship and support an industry that is very much in a
niche market. The answer is to try to work through the sector skills agreement
to pull those two together and offer a deal for a deal, one for the employers
and one for the colleges. I believe that we have to structure something in that
way and make it much more demand-led. I do not believe that we will ever make
it perfect and get the exact numbers, and we are not looking for that. We are
trying to pull resources that might be in one area into perhaps technical
courses for the sector that are no longer being run.
Q544 Paul Holmes:
College principals to whom I have talked, most recently at Chester College,
have said the same thing. They have said that for them to get funding from
government via the LSC and so on it must be a course with a measurable outcome
and qualification that the LSC will accept, whereas employers often say that
they do not want that but something else and they cannot get it. You have said
that it is the fault of colleges because they have to get the bums on seats to
get the money, but is it the fault of the LSC and government because of what
they say qualifies for the money?
Ms Florance: I believe that in
the short term we need to start thinking about making that provision which is
perhaps endorsed in a different way from the accreditation process that it must
currently go through. Some of that can be achieved through the national skills
academies established by sector skills councils and approval panels by
employers. That links in to why we want to reform qualifications, does it not?
If we ensure that the qualifications deliver what the employers want there will
not be an argument about accreditation itself.
Q545 Paul Holmes:
Earlier Mr Wisdom said that there were far too many different sets of qualifications,
for example nine or 10 in one area alone, but if you let every group of
employers in every part of the country have their own deal with the local
colleges as to what they want, which are the good examples that we are shown
sometimes, does it not mean that we will have even more sets of qualifications
that may be recognised in Chester but not down the road in Liverpool or
Manchester?
Ms Florance: You raise a very
important point about which all of us across the sector skills councils share
some concern, that is, the way in which for the future those qualifications
will be approved. We need to base them on the national occupational standards
that are updated, upgraded and are right for the sector. We need to have some
sort of overview process; otherwise, exactly what you have described will
happen.
Q546 Paul Holmes:
Are you looking for a national accreditation accumulation framework? It can
vary according to what you do in a different away but it will count for the
same credits when you move to Scotland, Northumberland or whatever?
Ms Florance: Indeed. We have
said there are regional differences in our sectors. My sectors do different
things in different regions from that which they do in others, but provided
they are based on national occupational standards and an overview is taken of
that particular accreditation endorsement qualification, which I believe must
be at national level, we will avoid the Tower of Babel which you describe.
Ms Caine: That will also enable
potentially a more direct relationship between the employers and colleges,
particularly with the FE Bill, greater self-regulation and so on. I believe
that that would be welcome, but it is critical to have a common currency of
understanding.
Q547 Paul Holmes:
In the case of the two other sector skills councils have similar estimates been
made and is 90 % of the money is being wasted or misdirected? Do you have any
idea of the percentages in your area?
Mr Wisdom: We can tell you that
employers are not taking up a great deal of the provision. If you look at that
number it is only around 10 % who say they are taking up the provision out
there. That is not necessarily to say that 90 % is misdirected because that may
enable an individual to achieve something else that they want to, but clearly
it is not being applied to best effect. Looking at the principle of skills
brokers reaching out to business with proper advice, provided they have the
right information and guidance developed at a sectoral level and they are not
just chasing targets that is helpful particularly for small businesses.
Chairman: The Chartered
Institute for Professional Development was mentioned earlier. One survey showed
that it did not like the brokers. Brokers were not at the highest point in the
list of dislikes but they were up there; and they were disliked more than they
disliked you.
Q548 Paul Holmes:
We had before us a set of witnesses who said that so far the brokers were
absolutely useless. They had almost no one referred to them by the brokers.
Mr Wisdom: I did refer to the
principle of brokerage that was the right one and said that employers wanted
that principle. As an example, I spoke to a principal of a college in Yorkshire
only this week. I was told that two employers had gone to the college in the
past fortnight asking for help on training provision. In both cases the college
had to send those employers to a broker for that broker to send them back to
the college more confused than when they started. The reason for that is that
the broker is not properly trained in the needs of the employers or the
sectoral model that they should be following. There is a target that someone is
trying to achieve and it is not being delivered in a way that is best for the
employer, or indeed for the provision.
Q549 Chairman:
Who are the brokers in your patches?
Ms Caine: The brokers are
different in each region.
Q550 Chairman:
Who is doing the brokerage? Is it the public or private sector?
Ms Caine: The Learning and Skills
Council contracts with brokers in each region. I believe that in some regions
the business advice service, which was previously run through the RDA and Train
to Gain service and which is good, is linked and that is offered to employers.
We absolutely endorse in principle Train to Gain and the need to have brokers
in place who can give advice and help employers to be routed through, but the
example just given demonstrates the importance of us working effectively, as it
were, with those brokers to ensure that the right kind of advice, guidance and
industry expertise is on hand. That is problematised by it being times nine and
having different brokers in different regions relating to different sectors,
but I am sure we will get there.
Q551 Paul Holmes:
The group of witnesses who appeared here on a previous occasion were college
principals and private training groups. They were fairly unanimous in saying
that brokers were not sending them anybody but they had to send people to the
brokers just so they could get the tick of authenticity and claim the money.
Somebody said that it was early days; they had been up and running for only
nine months, but if they are failing like that is it not a total waste of time?
Mr Wisdom: It sounds like a case
of hitting the targets but missing the point.
Q552 Paul Holmes:
As to Train to Gain, some people have argued that an awful lot of Train to Gain
at level 2 is just dead weight and that employers who were paying for the
training are no longer doing so because it is now all being provided by the
taxpayer. Is there any evidence of that?
Mr Wisdom: There is no evidence
at this stage of which I am aware.
Ms Florance: As for my sector,
there is no evidence of any impact of Train to Gain at this stage, but the
principle of brokerage is welcomed by my employers because they are the ones
who are hard to reach and have no sophisticated systems. They would welcome
that kind of advice and support. I believe that some of the targets are driving
the activity and perhaps that needs to be reviewed. As far as concerns my own
sector, I would want brokers not only to be advising at level 2 but
advising right across the skills of the workforce and putting together a
package built around the sector skills agreement and for employers to be
investing in skills and working with some of the supply side to build the
capacity for them to be able to deliver.
Ms Caine: That is a concern to
me. Certainly, in London we have been working with brokers and have had quite a
good result in terms of an appetite from industry for them to come in and do a
diagnostic on companies. Clearly, if in a target-driven environment there are
more ticks on the boxes if you go to companies that can deliver full-fat MVQs
at level 2 it slightly detracts from the point of what the brokerage
system seems to be about in the first place. I have said publicly before - I
speak here individually as representing a sector skills council - that I
believe there is an issue about large multinational corporations achieving
state subsidy for training people at level 2. Potentially, I would rather
see a state subsidy going to small and medium size companies and, in certain
instances where they are at the forefront of the knowledge economy, the support
of higher level provision through the Train to Gain brokerage system going to
smaller companies rather than it being necessarily level 2 and bigger
companies, but I have to say that that is a personal opinion and not
necessarily a network one.
Q553 Paul Holmes:
In part that answers my next question. Do you think the Government is right to
concentrate Train to Gain on level 2, because different people in the sector
say that they want it for level 3 and level 4?
Ms Caine: At the end of the day,
what government is saying, rightly in my view, is that it has a choice as to
where to invest its money. It must be right that it should invest the bulk of
that money and focus on those in society who need the most support and help.
That is a different question from: where do employers get support? From where
do individuals get state funding? That is a slightly different question from
Train to Gain brokers who should be able to provide advice, guidance, knowledge
and a route through and encourage employers to invest in their own training. It
is important to link that target to where public funding is going but be wary
of that then leading the brokerage system down a path that is not as useful as
it could be across the piece.
Q554 Paul Holmes:
You may say that it is too early to say, but is there any evidence of the
follow-through at which you have just hinted, namely that if you get the
support for Train to Gain at level 2 the employee and employer say that
they will pay for level 3 and level 4 because they can see the benefit at level
2?
Ms Caine: For my part, we do not
have that many level 2 people in our sector, and I would say that it is early
days anyway. But evidence across the piece demonstrates, particularly if you
look at Unionlearn reps and the effect that they have had, that once people
have got the learning bug, be they employers or individuals, and they see the
benefits a positive culture becomes imbedded.
Mr Wisdom: It is just too early
to say whether that will flow through in the way we had hoped. Certainly, all
the evidence we have is that when somebody starts the journey he or she is more
inclined to carry on.
Q555 Chairman:
You have been very opinionated today and that and your knowledge have been of
value. Some of the witnesses who come before us have so much vested interest
standing behind them that they do not express much of an opinion, but you have
done so. You must feel a great deal of frustration when you look at the schools
training system in our country. What are the priorities? If you could really
crack this what would be the two things you would change in the area of skills?
Ms Florance: For me, it would be
about reviewing the PSA targets, putting issues in there about outcome measures
and driving the sector skills agreements through the system. That would include
work through Train to Gain brokers, work that we would have to do on reform of
qualifications and about simplification of the system.
Ms Caine: That is also my top
wish. First, I am quite concerned about the current PSA targets and the way
they are being drawn up and the measures being drafted against them, which at
the moment do not even include employer satisfaction as one of the measures. I
totally agree with that. Second, I wish people would be able to recognise where
change is needed and in this very cluttered marketplace embrace that change in
a way that affects the machinery which at the moment takes so long to move.
Unless the opportunities and recommended changes following Leitch are brought
on board quite quickly I am concerned that, certainly in my sector, the appetite
of employers to become engaged and to see change and progress in the system
will diminish accordingly.
Q556 Chairman:
Was it the Learning and Skills Council that you regarded as the biggest
encumbrance in terms of getting change? You compared your budget with theirs.
Ms Caine: I did and, I think,
quite reasonably in light of the Leitch recommendations. We work across a lot
of government departments and the devolved administrations. One of the
inevitable issues to do with bureaucracy in government is that it is very
difficult to drive through change; it is slow.
Mr Wisdom: First, I should like
to see real world-class research properly resourced to enable us to assess our
needs in a global economy. Second, I should like to see sector skills councils
and employers given the authority to take control of the qualification system
that is purportedly for their benefit.
Chairman: Thank you for your
attendance. We have enjoyed this session very much and have learnt a great
deal.
