UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be
published as HC 333-vi
House of COMMONS
MINUTES OF EVIDENCE
TAKEN BEFORE
EDUCATION AND SKILLS COMMITTEE
POST-16 SKILLS TRAINING
Monday 21 May 2007
MR CHRIS HUMPHRIES
CBE, MS ISABEL SUTCLIFFE, MR GREG WATSON,
MR JOHN McNAMARA and
MR ALAN STEVENSON OBE
Evidence heard in Public Questions 557 -
637
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
|
1.
|
This is an uncorrected transcript of evidence taken in
public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the
internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made
available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others.
|
|
2.
|
Any public use of, or reference to, the contents should
make clear that neither witnesses nor Members have had the opportunity to
correct the record. The transcript is not yet an approved formal record of
these proceedings.
|
|
3.
|
Members who
receive this for the purpose of correcting questions addressed by them to
witnesses are asked to send corrections to the Committee Assistant.
|
|
4.
|
Prospective
witnesses may receive this in preparation for any written or oral
evidence they may in due course give to the Committee.
|
Oral Evidence
Taken before the Education and Skills Committee
on Monday 21 May 2007
Members present
Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair
Mr Douglas Carswell
Jeff Ennis
Paul Holmes
Fiona Mactaggart
Mr Gordon Marsden
Stephen Williams
________________
Memoranda submitted by City and Guilds, Edexcel, Federation of Awarding
Bodies and OCR
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr Chris Humphries CBE, Chief
Executive, City and Guilds, Ms Isabel
Sutcliffe, Director of Qualifications and Accreditation, Edexcel, Mr Greg Watson, Chief Executive, OCR, Mr John McNamara, Chief Executive,
British Institute of Innkeeping and Mr
Alan Stevenson OBE, President, Food and Drink Qualifications, gave
evidence.
Q557 Chairman: Can I welcome Chris Humphries, Greg Watson,
Isabel Sutcliffe, John McNamara and Alan Stevenson. We decided to put you all in together because we were going to
divide you into two but the whole pace of the thing, when you have to get two
sets of witnesses, does rather affect the quality of the way the thing builds
organically over the couple of hours that we have you in front of us. The one thing I am going to ask you to be
careful of, please do not each try and come in on every question. Some of my colleagues will try to make you
but I will try and stop them. Here we
are, we have some of the best known people in the skills world here. You have
all got a tremendous history in the skills world, in other words you know where
an awful lot of bodies are buried, we will probably try and disinter some of
them today. I do want us to get a
little bit of a feel of where we have come from rather than just where we are
at the moment, if that helps us. I want
to run right across from Chris through to Alan and give you each two minutes to
say, "Okay, here we are". The reason
that we are holding a major inquiry into skills, not only because this
Committee is pretty obsessed about skills, and quite rightly so, we always feel
that skills are the neglected part of the Department. Of course, when we do do skills the media are never here. Any media here today? Not one person. Whenever we do skills they are not here and yet everyone tells us
that skills are of paramount importance to our country. Without further ado, what we are trying to
get out of this then is okay, where are we?
Here are two parts of Leitch, here is Foster. There has been a great deal of comment/discussion. The Treasury has been involved, the
Department for Education & Skills of course has been involved, the Prime
Minister is interested in skills, right across the piece skills are in
focus. That is why we are doing it now,
this is why we are doing our inquiry.
Pull all these threads together.
So where are we now, Chris, are we in a good position?
Mr Humphries: I think we are sitting on a potentially good
foundation but there are some major issues still to be resolved around adult
post-16 skills. I think some of the
debates which are going on, both here and elsewhere in the system at the
moment, are ticking along that. Let me
try to address them. Let me pick out a
few. Heterogeneity of employer demand will be my first issue. What we know from years of working for employers
is that the needs of employers, large and small, even within the same sector
are amazingly diverse, depending on the nature of the business, the focus
within the industry, the specialisations that they follow, the niche markets
that they pursue in order to be competitive against their neighbours. All of those create a remarkably
heterogeneous employer base where the need for skills have many common
characteristics but the differences in skills requirements are just as great. I
think if you are asking me what is one of the big issues, it is the extent to
which we are properly responding to that heterogeneity of demand. There is a strong concern in many places
that both the amount of work and the scale of current activity of the Sector
Skills Councils is going to lead to them addressing a homogeneous set of
solutions because the scale of the task otherwise becomes too huge. If that
happens we will end up meeting SSC expectations and requirements not employer
needs. My first one would be how do we
make sure the system really responds with the heterogeneity of
requirements. The second one is
responsiveness. There have been many comments over the years about the extent
to which we are fast enough or not fast enough in keeping pace with change in
industry and the extent to which our system is capable of producing new
qualifications, variations, updating programmes, flexibility in provision and
the concern from employers about how long it often takes to bring things into
the market place. My second concern - there are lots of reasons we can explore
later for why it might happen - is that I think we are in grave danger of
increasing bureaucracy and inflexibility in the system rather than eliminating
it, and I think that is the second issue.
Q558 Chairman: That is not a bad starter.
Mr Humphries: One more if I can mention, to pick up your
too many qualifications questions in this.
I do not know the extent to which the Select Committee is going to be
talking directly to employers, not employer organisations or employer
representatives but employers who train.
My experience of dealing with employers in almost all the sectors that
are going suggests that actually they know what qualifications are in the
market place, they know the ones which are right for them. They typically only deal with half a dozen
different awarding bodies or skills organisations and they know the ones which
are right. Richard Wilson of the
Institute of Directors did a major study of employers to find out whether they
thought there were too many and actually they thought there were not. There are 55,000 different degree programmes
UCAS announced in December of this year but we do not think there are too many
of those. I think there is a
misunderstanding about what is happening in the vocational qualification
sector, the skills sector, about demand and responsiveness. Employers know what is out there and will
choose the things they need.
Q559 Chairman: Right, you reminded me as you spoke, Chris,
that I should have declared an interest. I am a City and Guilds fellow, am I
not?
Mr Humphries: You are indeed.
Q560 Chairman: Greg Watson, what is your take on where we
are now?
Mr Watson: I think it was interesting, your
introduction, you talked about seeing a bit of history in this situation and it
certainly strikes me that we are standing in front of something of a watershed
around skills and particularly around qualifications. If we look from the early
1990s up to today I think we can see a paradox emerging. On the one hand, there
have been growing attempts since the creation of NVQs, right through the 1990s,
through to the creation of the National Qualifications Framework to create a
formal process driven architecture to bring the right skills and the right
qualifications to individuals. With it
we have seen the creation of the bureaucracy that Chris has touched on in the
form of a growing number of public bodies which are involved in the supply
chain. On the other hand, over that
same period, I think we have seen a growing diversity in what employers need by
way of skills, in the kinds of businesses that employers are involved in and,
particularly in the early part of this century, we are beginning to feel the
dramatic impact of things like globalisation, e.commerce, mergers and
acquisitions which are bringing companies together from formerly disparate
sectors to be parts of single enterprises.
It seems to me if you put those two trends together, on the one hand
these growing and regularly failed attempts to try and create a formal
architecture and set that against the greater diversity and the more rapid rate
of economic change that we have a mismatch here. I think Leitch and the work we
are all doing on another form of qualifications framework really begs the
question as to whether we go further in that same direction and attempt once
and for all to capture this formal bureaucratised process for getting it right
or whether actually this is the point that we admit defeat on that as a method
and instead seek to find other ways to stimulate the sort of innovation and
responsiveness that gave us a lot of the vocational qualifications which are
still most of the popular qualifications to date, most of which date back to
the 1970s and 1980s.
Q561 Chairman: Thanks for that. Isabel, do people not feel there is a tremendous vested interest
in your sector because you are a private sector - many of you are private
sector now - you are very profitable organisations and the more qualifications
you keep going the better. Is that an
unfair comment?
Ms Sutcliffe: A touch unfair, Chairman, if I may. As with my colleagues sitting to my right
and left, we need to keep investing into the technology that is required to
enable the users of our qualifications to maximise the opportunities those
qualifications provide in terms of alternative approaches to learning. Edexcel, being part of Pearson, of course we
have got a wonderful opportunity of tapping in to what is happening elsewhere
in the world and actually learning from that and bringing that to the benefit
of our learners. If I may, certainly I
would fully endorse what my colleagues to the right have already said. Could I add two points, which perhaps have
not been covered thus far. First of
all, whilst there is a lot in Leitch to admire and support, not least actually bringing
skills very, very high profile, I think we have got to be mindful of a very
economic way of looking at the issue.
We are talking about individuals at the end of the day, the learners
themselves, be they employees, be they potentially aspiring employees and, as
some of the research carried out by IPPR showed, for example, unless you try
and focus on what is it that is going to motivate the individual to get fully
engaged in learning then it does not matter what we throw through employers it
is still not going to have the desired effect.
NIACE's report just last week suggested 500,000 adult learners who might
have been in the system this year who are no longer there because of the
diversion of funding, and I fully understand the reasons for that. Let us keep in mind the individual and the
needs of that individual in terms of moving forward and it satisfies all of
those issues of social justice and so on and so forth. I think the other point
I just want to make is this thing with the emphasis being put on the
qualifications system. The
qualification framework we have, I put it alongside, if you like, a food chain
and we, as awarding bodies, and our qualifications are at the end of a very,
very long chain, and yet it seems to be the part of the chain that is always
the one that is looked at first. I
think most metaphors would suggest you do not start at the end of a food chain
when you are trying to bring about significant and sustainable change going
forward, it is earlier in the food chain that you start to look and I know that
is obviously part of your inquiry.
Q562 Chairman: John, how do you view it? You have a rather specific view on
this? Where do you think we are in
terms of where you come from?
Mr McNamara: Thank you, Chairman. Obviously I represent a professional body
which is a discrete sector and very focused on the business success of that
sector. We have got about 30,000
members, so mainly small businesses, small and micro businesses, from six to 12
employees, that is the standard remit that we would cover. I think we are at a
very interesting stage in development because we are now starting to see, as
far as our sector is concerned, some of the detailed issues of Leitch and we
would all applaud the need to get employers' views in terms of the skills
debate to the fore, all of us would support that and endorse that. I speak for a sector that, to be honest, at
the moment has no funding for its qualifications. The sorts of qualifications
that we provide are fit for purpose but they are not fundable. Many of our employers will be looking at
this debate and thinking "Well, where is the beef for me? Where will it affect me? Where will it impact for me? Where will these reforms change the way I am
doing things? Where will it improve my
business?" Those are key issues for all
of us to face. As a professional body
we face those and discuss those every single day of the week. I have genuine
concerns that if we are not careful at this crossroads, if we go down the wrong
route on some of these key points, we could end up very seriously behind where
we were ten years ago even. Certainly
as a sector we hope and expect a lot from these reforms for small
businesses. Part of my job is to make
sure we get the benefit from the reforms as well as communicating those
effectively to our members.
Q563 Chairman: Are the people sitting to the right of you
helpful in this process or are they a barrier?
Mr McNamara: They are colleagues of ours in many cases in
producing qualifications into our sector and outside but at times we compete,
at times we do not compete because we are members of trade associations which
come together and represent common views. I suppose all I am saying is from a
particular sectoral point of view the role of SSEs in our sector has been, to a
certain extent, mixed and variable. We
get on and we have dialogue with a number of SSEs and sector skills bodies
which are very, very effective, in other cases not so effective because the
existing structures and networks that we have, we are very, very close to
employers. Those structures and system
have not been used, I do not think, to the full yet to help drive this agenda
forward, and we certainly intend to work on that.
Q564 Chairman: Alan, you are one of the people who John
works closely with, are you not?
Mr Stevenson: Yes.
Our interest is mainly food and specifically meat. The industry is made up of a lot of small
and medium sized enterprises. The bulk
of the training within the industry takes place in the larger
organisations. The availability of
funding and the bureaucracy associated with getting a training system on board
discourages a fair number of employers.
Increasingly the food industry and also the meat industry are relying on
non British workers. There is an
increasing concern and worry that we are unable to find British nationals who
are able to come into an industry where I suppose the conditions of working are
somewhat difficult, whenever they can sit in a much more pleasant environment,
but we are at a watershed and the industry is going to have to tackle
this. Therefore, we are most anxious to
make best use of train to gain and the other opportunities which are available
within an industry which is under considerable competitive pressures, mainly
from the major multiples.
Chairman: Right, I think that has warmed us up and you
up. Let us get started on particular
sectors. Fiona?
Q565 Fiona Mactaggart: I was very interested in something which I
heard I thought from a number of you. I think I was hearing that the Sector
Skills Councils are not really in touch with employers, I might be over-stating
what some of you only hinted at but I would like you to flesh that out. Chris, certainly you were one of those who
said you felt that. I want you to flesh
that out and tell us what the consequences of that are?
Mr Humphries: I did not quite say that but I certainly
implied that there was a big issue about their responsiveness.
Q566 Fiona Mactaggart: Yes.
Mr Humphries: I am not trying to draw a silly line
here. The problem for many of the
Sector Skills Councils is they have a huge footprint, it is called a huge
remit. They cover a large number of
sectors. In hospitality, for instance,
they cover 14 distinct sub-sectors.
They have limited resources, a relatively small staff given the scale of
the job and the likelihood that they would be in a position to completely
understand the full skills requirements of every industry in that sector, every
employer in each of those 14 sub-sectors, and be able to determine in a
timeframe which is responsive to the needs of those employers every single one
of their skills needs is a misunderstanding of what is possible. My concern is not so much that they are not
in touch with employers, it will vary enormously from Sector Skills Council to
Sector Skills Council but whether the job they are being given in relation to
qualifications is do-able. Fourteen
sub-sectors, probably in that sector something like 120 different occupations,
usually at two or three levels of the qualification framework, that is about
250 to 300 separate qualifications they would have to review in three
years. Are they equipped to be able to
do that in terms of occupational standards and at the same time build enough
flexibility and customisation into each and every product in order to produce
those responses in time, it raises for me the question of whether it is
do-able. However much effort they put
into talking to their employers, the idea that they could cope with all half a
million, one million employers in the sector and meet the heterogeneity of
their requirements is my concern. I am not sure it is a do-able job if they are
going to get into the detail of qualification development, no matter how hard
they try.
Q567 Fiona Mactaggart: John, you were another person who I interpreted
as saying the same thing.
Mr McNamara: Yes.
I think I can summarise it by saying it is good in parts. We deal with three sector skills bodies, one
SSB sector skills body and two Sector Skills Councils. In two of those cases we work very closely with
them, we collaborate. We obviously have
a very extensive network of membership and we also provide qualifications into
the sector. We work extremely close to
employers. We do not design
qualifications on the basis that they might work or they might not, we test
drive them, we fly them first and see if they work and then we deliver them if
they do. In two cases we work very closely with those bodies to try and
represent employer needs from our sector, our specific sub-sector to those
bodies; in other cases it is not so effective.
I suppose one of our comments as a professional body is, use the
networks that are available to Sector Skills Councils and similar groups which
already exist. We are already in close
contact with employers at many levels.
We have been in business for over 26 years now. Those structures exist, they are there, let
us use them. I do not think that has
been going on to a large extent.
Q568 Fiona Mactaggart: The reason I was asking about this is because
it seems to me that there is a theme going on about the bureaucracy that I have
heard from a number of people and that bureaucracy was established, it seems to
me, in an attempt to simplify a kind of terrain where it was not necessarily
easy to know who to relate to, so creating Sector Skills Councils was an
attempt to simplify the system. What I
think I am hearing is - it is a bit like what Chris says about let a thousand
qualifications bloom, don't worry about it - I am wondering if what you are
saying is that attempt to rationalise and simplify the communications terrain
has been flawed and is not working and has created an unnecessary bureaucracy
whereas just leaving it to people to do on their own would have worked better?
Mr Watson: It is easy to see in conception how this model
does what you are talking about and somehow shepherds needs into manageable
pieces but it does depend an awful lot then on getting the right model of the
economy at any given moment. It is interesting, I was just looking back at the
list of the current Sector Skills Councils and I cannot currently find one for
business enterprise, customer service, marketing, sales, international trade,
languages, purchasing and supply, recruitment and personnel. Those are very large developments in the
economy, areas which are carrying growing weight but they do not tend to sit
within what we would recognise as established industrial product based sectors.
I think part of the problem is that the very constitution of the Sector Skills
Councils tends to force a lot of analysis on to product based industries and
tends to neglect the over-arching skills trends within the economy. I think
sometimes it seems responsive, I think it is a question of looking at the wrong
question sometimes.
Q569 Fiona Mactaggart: Isabel?
Ms Sutcliffe: I think too if I could just pick up, Chris in
his response queried whether the role given to Sector Skills Councils in terms
of crafting qualification strategies going forward is do-able. I think the bigger question is really is
that an appropriate role to give to Sector Skills Councils. Surely we are in an issue of trying to
encourage demand for training, upscaling and so on and it is recognised, is it
not, that whilst the bigger employers might be doing lots of this we are not
seeing the demand coming from great swathes of employers. It strikes most of us they have an enormous
remit of responsibility and taking on board qualification, reform, design and
so on, we would humbly suggest is probably not the best use of resources
targeted to try and get the demand coming from training. You asked about the
consequences of those SSCs where they do not seem to get that level of
engagement, and I will come back to that in a moment. If I could just say obviously, as awarding bodies, we work across
all 25 of them so the inconsistency is very much something we are having to
work with, work around, do our level best because there is no such thing as a
standard SSC awarding body working relationship, not at all. The consequences of them not managing that
high level of employer engagement is, of course, we all find our way around it
so employers, as has been suggested already, work directly with us. There will be no question of an employer,
for example, seeking permission from its SSC to enter a dialogue directly with
an awarding body who was able to give, at the right price, in the right
timeframe, something which met that employers needs. That has been happening for decades and will continue to work in
the future, I would suggest, because that is the way somebody who is purchasing
the product is going to get what they want, at the price they want it and in
the timescale that is appropriate.
Q570 Fiona Mactaggart: Were not SSCs set up, to some degree, to deal
with the frustration from the employers that you were talking about, that their
needs and concerns were not properly reflected in the design and development of
courses?
Mr Humphries: Yet the consequence is that we are getting
more homogeneity in qualifications as a result of it. OCI gave an example in their submission, there is only one IT
qualification now allowed to be offered in the market place, the only problem
is no-one is taking it. The second
issue is you do get bureaucracy. I
brought along, which I am happy to leave with the Committee, the qualification
endorsement process, just initially issued by Cogent, the Sector Skills
Council. It is more bureaucratic than
anything we have ever had in the past and this is to happen before it goes to
QCA for regulatory approval. We have suddenly seen a system that is more
uniform, more homogenous, gives less choice to employers associated with more
bureaucracy than we have ever seen before.
In my view, it is a consequence of organisations who City and Guilds
supported - I recommended the establishment of Sector Skills Councils in the
Skills Task Report in 2000 - taking on things which I think are simply beyond
their capacity and far from doing that sort of over-arching, long-term view of
the future, they are seeking to get into the detail of day to day organisation and
operation of the sector which actually risks creating a less responsive system
to employers rather than more responsive one.
Q571 Fiona Mactaggart: I want to hear from the employers, Alan?
Mr Stevenson: As far as FDQ are concerned, I think it is
fair to say that the jury is still out.
We believe that a considerable amount of time has been lost. Advice given at the time, whenever it was
formed, was not always taken and, 12 months down the line they have come back
and said "Perhaps you were right" or maybe they have not even said we were
right. The major experience within the
food industry is with the trade associations and that advice initially was not
used. I think the industry, as a
generalisation, at this moment in time, are not quite certain what the Food and
Drink Sector Skills Council is actually doing. I do not think that they are
fully listening - certainly from the meat side of the business. The meat industry had a very
well-established set of qualifications and they are being played around with,
which is confusing, and employers are not quite certain just which way they
should be going, whether they should be trying to do their own training rather
than going for more structured training.
Q572 Fiona Mactaggart: I am thinking about this set of answers
because I think what I am partly hearing is that traditional vocational
qualifications have been messed about with a bit and that the relationships
which buttressed them have been interrupted and that, I think I am hearing, has
not been a good thing. Now, I want to
squeeze two questions into the last question which the Chairman has invited me
to ask. Are there any good things from
this new structure, that is question number one? Question number two, one of the reasons it tried to be created
was to encourage qualifications in those fields where there have not
traditionally been qualifications.
Alan, you have talked about how you are employing people from overseas
and so on. One of the things I am
struck by is that in meat there has been a tradition of qualification but in
various other food areas there has not.
I am just wondering, are there areas where we have not got a
sufficiently robust tradition of qualifications, not just that overseas people
are prepared to work in these sectors but actually they have a tradition of
qualifications in other countries and, therefore, people come with appropriate
qualifications in, for example, hotel and catering and things like that where
we have very little tradition of qualifications. Are there areas where there is a gap and we should be doing it,
retail, I do not know, is one example, aspects of hotel work and so on? Two questions: have there been any benefits
from the new structure and are there areas where we are lacking on
qualifications where we need them?
Mr Humphries: I think there are some good things in the new
structure. I have never been a random SSC basher. As I said, I have supported their establishment from day one and
continue to support the need for effective bodies working in sectors that seek
to understand the larger picture of the long-term needs of industry, help make
those explicit and to do it in such a way that also acts as a spur to SMEs to
participate in training. I think that aspect of the remit of SSCs is one I
strongly support. It is the level of the detail where I start to worry. In
terms of qulaificatons where there are not any, yes there are some good
examples. I pick Skillset, the Film and Television industry Sector Skills
Council is one which is starting to create a demand for and an interest in
transportable mobile qualifications in the sector where most of the training
has been ad hoc and has achieved the success of buying into the sort of levy
that will fund that as well. I would
never say it is all bad, I think it is the point at which they get down into
the detail rather than up at the business strategy and sector strategy level
that simply the capacity gets overwhelmed.
Q573 Chairman: They have got a mission creep have they,
John?
Mr McNamara: I think that is a good way of looking at it,
Chairman, on the basis that we all supported the setting up of SSCs from the
perspective of a strategic look at each sector and there are some shining
examples of sector skills bodies or SSCs which have just done that. They have looked at a sector, Skills for
Security is a good example, an SSB has looked at that sector, traditional low
value in the past, now heavily regulated.
They have stood up for their sector, they have represented it well. They have done enormous amounts of work in
terms of building a picture of that sector in terms of management information
and profiling its worth. They have used
existing networks. They have got to
grips with the real nitty gritty of what is going on, on the ground, close to
employers and to professional associations that work with it, a good example of where it works very, very
well. I have to say across the board of
SSCs I think there has been a mission creep, I think part of that is driven by
lack of funding and it is the strive to survive syndrome. We need funding, we need to be here in three
years' time where is that money going to come from. Some of that is Government sponsored, obviously, but we have got
examples of SSEs that have done bits of research and have got grant funds to
stay in existence and that cannot be good strategically for the long-term role
of those sectors and I think that is a cause for concern.
Q574 Chairman: Good.
Mr Watson: I might draw a distinction in trying to
answer this question between qualifications which are a strict licence to
practice of some sort and other qualifications which are for a much more
general contribution to the economy. At
the licence to practice end we might find some very good examples of success
actually. Look at areas like
construction or hairdressing, for example, the sort of industry where either
you can or cannot do it and there is a fairly hard line between the two. If you
cannot do it people get hurt, people's health is damaged, safety is
jeopardised, those kinds of things. I
pull out a number of good examples where that has worked rather well. Contrast that with an experience OCR had in
2005 where we were looking to develop a new set of qualifications around the
area of enterprise. There is a lot of
discussion about how to stimulate SMEs and being an SME these days is not
simply a case of finding a bank account, filling out a form and getting a loan,
actually there is a certain amount of compliance work to do and some basic
skills that even most lenders will want someone to acquire. The reason that project failed is because we
could not find a sector body to support us, not because it was not economically
needed, not because we had not got a well thought through idea of what we would
like but we knew that unless we could successfully navigate the bureaucracy,
and part of the bureaucracy was to find an SSE to tick a box for us, those
qualifications would never see the light of day. To this day that project sits on a shelf gathering dust in OCR.
Ms Sutcliffe: Could I just again endorse the examples and
statements which have been said thus far.
Going back to the point you said before, their history and fairly recent
history has examples of qualifications that were initially designed very much
with employers needs in mind and continue, despite all the to-ings and fro-ings
of qualification reform, are still there and highly regarded and highly valued.
If I can just use an example from my own organisation, our BTECs in the past,
we always built in flexibility to enable very particular local regional needs
and we have not introduced a geographical dimension as yet into the debate. I
think there is something very important about having a flexible way of ensuring
that a locality's needs from an employer base or wherever are met. Prior to the introduction of the National
Qualification Framework in the 1990s we were able to, if you like, have empty
shells attached to filled shells, if you like, of qualifications enabling that
flavour to be fully represented, respond to a local employer, "That engineering
BTEC national is fine but we have this particular need, can you customise
it?" The NQF another example, again, of
rather a blunt instrument resulting in good practice of that kind being removed
and yet we are now expecting, through the current reform programme of the
Qualification Credit Framework to be able to bring that back again. We have been there before and that might be
one example of good practice that will be back for us to use sooner rather than
later.
Q575 Chairman: To fully answer this, can you take us through
the bureaucratic process that you are describing? Can you give us a little bit more feel for why you, Chris, have
described it as a bureaucratic process.
Mr Humphries: You know the process at the moment is that
Sector Skills Councils are meant to identify the National Occupational
Standard, pass that to the awarding bodies, we develop the qualifications, they
go to the regulator for approval. We
are now seeing a requirement even to continue an existing qualification that
before it can go to the regulator there has to be a 13-stage process. This particular Sector Skills Council they
want a letter of intent and they have to establish a written business case to
continue it and they have to do a qualification review plan. Then there has to be a regulatory
consultation, and then there has to be an application form and qualification
submitted. Then there is a desk review
by the team. Qualification supporting
documentation is then considered by the industry or regional director and that
is then reviewed. Then it goes to the
education and qualifications manager, they will produce a report. That then comes back to the awarding body
and that is before it goes to the regulator who gets a chance to have another
go at the whole qualification and can send it back to start again. In an industry where employers are looking
for a process where we should be going from idea to concept in less than six
months in order to be responsive to employer needs, and we already know the
system is struggling to meet those timeframes - you have had reviews of the
underpinning bureaucracy in the qualification process before - what I fear is
we are in grave danger of creating something which is far more complex than we
have ever seen before.
Q576 Chairman:
You know these people, what do they say when you say, "Look, this is
intolerably bureaucratic. It is not helping.
It is getting in the way of what we do"?
Mr Humphries: Particularly since the Leitch
Report has said SSCs should sign off every qualification, there is a belief
that they have to create something which is in some way robust and related to
assessed market demand. I think they
would argue that this is a consequence of the remit they have been given and a
need to ensure that this is tested thoroughly against good market
principles. The reality is if this is a
market then, to be honest with you, there is a simple solution: since people
have to buy this stuff, they will not if it is no good. There is a much simpler way of testing the
market with this, which is see whether people are willing to put their money
where their mouth is. My organisation
is a charity, and it is certainly not in my interest to pour charitable funds
into something which is going to lose me more charitable funds. There is just no interest in us doing this
role, so we put an awful lot of effort into talking to employers ourselves to
make sure these things are the sorts of things they are willing to offer their
staff or their recruits before we even put them in the marketplace. Now we are going to have two further
sign-off processes, each of which is checking whether employers are going to
use them, and you think, "Something must be wrong here".
Q577 Chairman:
We are trying to discover when this all happened. Were the Sector Skills Councils okay and less bureaucratic until
this Leith recommendation or were they moving in this direction anyway? Where did they get this power? When did they get the power to have to give
this stamp of approval to qualifications before they could be publicly funded?
Mr Watson: My experience is, and this goes back
to the creation of the National Qualifications Framework, as soon as you have a
notion of a framework you have a notion of boxes in a framework and there is
instantly a question about who has guardianship of the rules for entry to the
boxes. I think that was the point at
which there was a decisive shift towards industry representation.
Q578 Chairman:
Give us a timeframe for this?
Mr Watson: 2001.
Q579 Chairman:
Okay, because that was my other question about the NQF. SSCs came in at what date?
Mr Watson: We had NTOs back then, but it was a
similar sort of idea, sector-based bodies who act as a gateway to a box in a
framework.
Q580 Chairman:
They came in when?
Mr McNamara: SSCs were in 2004.
Q581 Fiona
MacTaggart: But there were NTOs before that?
Mr McNamara: Yes.
Q582 Chairman:
When did the National Qualifications Framework come in?
Mr Watson: 2001.
Q583 Chairman: 2001?
Ms Sutcliffe: Yes, the end of the 1990s.
Q584 Chairman:
How do they mesh? What was the NQF
doing before Sector Skills came along?
Mr Humphries: What an awarding body had to do
before then was to be able to prove to the regulator they had adequately
consulted with the workforce and the employers in that sector in developing the
qualification before it went to the marketplace. You have to put a business case up which says, "We have talked to
the sector. Here is what we believe the
demand is. Here is what our research
tells us will be the demand for this qualification. Let's put it in the marketplace". What NTOs were given was an additional sign-off authority which
said, first of all, they could ask for qualifications to be developed and,
secondly, they could then insist on a sign-off. The sign-off in the early stages was light touch.
Mr Watson: It was good enough.
Mr Humphries: It was, "Have you done enough work
to satisfy us that there are employers out there who want this? If you have,
let's go with it". What we have moved
into is a mode where what Leitch has said is, "No qualification can receive
public funding unless it is signed-off by the Sector Skills Council through an
approved process". The Sector Skills
Councils are being challenged to write the Sector Qualifications Strategy which
determines the shape which qualifications must take. We have added a number of additional requirements to this which
will inevitably cause there to be people whose job it is to take those
views. The consequence will be there
will be more and more organisations involved in checking whether employers want
them. The difficulty is at the same
time we are seeing a narrowing of offer to the point where a qualification can
only look like the form which the SSC has decided it should take, so there is
also a squeezing, a narrowing down, of the focus and a reduction in choice for
employers.
Q585 Chairman:
These are very simple questions but we must get them before we can write a
decent report. In this process, the Sector Skills Councils are here, the
National Qualifications Framework is here, how do those two relate to QCA then?
Mr Humphries: The NQF, as was, which is due to be
replaced by the Qualifications and Credit Framework, a new name, will have a
tougher set of requirements about what can get on to it. The QCA will only be able to accredit a qualification
which has been signed off in the way in which that Sector Skills Council wants
it signed off, but they then have to do additional checks to see that it meets
all the requirements which they lay down in terms of qualification shape,
allocation of credit, combining rules for choice of units and options and
electives. We are in the process of
designing a system which is more complex and more constraining than anything we
have had before.
Q586 Chairman:
You guys and those three bodies are the main players?
Mr Humphries: The regulator, the Sector Skills
Council and awarding body, yes.
Q587 Paul
Holmes: Leitch and Foster argue that there should be a very
significant rationalisation of the number of qualifications being offered, but
the Institute of Directors said that in a modern capitalist economy it is good
that there are all these different bodies offering lots and lots of different
qualifications and competing to provide what employers need. I take it from your opening comments, Chris,
you would agree with that?
Mr Humphries: Yes, I would.
Q588 Paul
Holmes: In a capitalist economy, one of the points of competition is
supposed to be to drive prices down to give the consumer a good deal, but the
consumers, such as the colleges, are saying that it seems to be a licence to
print money, that fees have gone up, for example, about 36 per cent in the last
three years.
Mr Humphries: The first
thing is I think you need to look at where they have gone up. By and large, they have not gone up anything
like that level in the vocational sector, and I think I would leave it to
people like Edexcel and OCR to talk about what has happened in general
qualifications because I think they would argue that. I thought you might ask that question, so I did track our price
rises against inflation, and you can see the two lines on the chart are roughly
in line, that is what we have done for the last five years. I think it is perfectly right and
reasonable, all things being equal, for the education system to expect us to
keep prices in line with inflation, or slightly below it, if possible, in order
to gain efficiencies and produce a benefit for the marketplace. The interesting consequence of the changes
we are talking about here is that if a process becomes a lot more complex, a
lot more bureaucratic and a lot more time consuming, then it will put costs up,
and if costs go up, prices will go up. As I said, I will leave it to my
colleagues to talk about whether that is what has happened in the general
qualifications sector, but our fear is that these changes will put up costs.
Q589 Paul
Holmes: City and Guilds have kept it in line with inflation, you
must have put it up a lot more then to make up the 36 per cent increase, Mr
Watson?
Mr Watson: I have read the full report from FE,
from the Association of Colleges, which is doing the rounds at the moment. There are a few obvious causes of rising
costs which the report does not pick up.
One is what Chris has alluded to, which is the growing cost of our
managing the bureaucracy with which we are forced to engage in bringing new
qualifications to market. The second is
because of the more frequent process which we were forced to go through, and
reaccrediting qualifications, the management overhead associated with that is
growing. We might talk in a little
while about the number of qualifications and the fact that is also the result
of too much churn in public policy rather than anything else. The third, and most glaring emission from
that report is nobody has counted the number of qualifications that are being
taken. A big driver of what is driving
the total bill up in terms of total pounds spent is the number of learners
going through which is growing relentlessly over time.
Q590 Paul
Holmes: There are half a million less doing adult educational course
than there were last year.
Mr Watson: Remember, FEs also count in the total
cost of all qualifications, so that will include A levels, for which uptake is
still rising, for example.
Ms Sutcliffe I am sorry, I cannot show you Edexcel
prices over the last few years as City and Guilds has and Chris Humphries on
their behalf. Certainly our starting
point on any review of fees is very much to keep it in line with
inflation. All the points which Greg
has made we would endorse as well, and rather than trying to see a way of
bringing efficiencies, which we, as businesses, are all about, clearly, we are
all business people trying to work more effectively and more efficiently, we
find ourselves increasingly subject to the vagaries of policy diktat which, as
a consequence, introduces more cost.
Mr McNamara: As a professional body, obviously we
reflect the needs of the sector. We
have frozen prices for the last three years and, in fact, this year we have
introduced a new discount scheme to try and encourage more of our employers and
small businesses to take qualifications.
Again, like Chris, we are a charity and we do not intend to make mega
profits, but if we do not make a profit we go bust.
Mr Stevenson: In an effort to get a larger share
of the market, we reduce prices.
Q591 Paul
Holmes: We have held prices at inflation, we have reduced prices but
costs have gone up 36 per cent purely because of Sector Skills and Government
requirements or because of the increasing numbers of people who are sitting
exams. Somewhere like the City of
Bristol College, for example, they spent £1.5 million last year on fees, Truro
£1 million, Chesterfield College in my constituency £860,000, then you could
come back and say, "Bristol College is one of the biggest in the country, of
course it is £1.5 million" but the principal there says, "It has gone up 30 per
cent in four years". So it is not just
that it is a large college and lots of people sit in it, it is a 30 per cent
increase in four years, so there is something going wrong somewhere.
Mr Humphries: The interesting thing about the AOC report, and I have seen the
comments from the individual principals, is that what it does not separate out
is the growth. If you do not count last
year, there has been a dramatic growth in the student numbers over that period. A part of that 30 per cent rise is
undoubtedly the total, because the figure is how much we have spent on award
fees last year. If you look at that
four year period, in fact, participation in FE rose dramatically, it was only
last year particularly that the LSC announced that big £700,000 fall. Until that time - that report was, of
course, a 2006 report, not a 2007 report, so they were not looking at last year
at all - you were measuring that at the point when there was the fastest growth
in further education probably in my time in this sector. The second thing was that there were changes
to general education requirements which did put up fees there, more than we
desired, but I think it was trackable back to changes which were made in the
nature and structure of the qualifications.
From my perspective, it is an absolute legitimate inquiry which is one
of the reasons why I went straight back and went, "Oh my God, what have we
done?" - and we can show just over a 20 per cent rise in six years, which, as
you will know, roughly tracks inflation over that period - because I was very
concerned to find out the extent to which we were doing that to anyone. I think there is a genuine question here to
be understood about why fees have gone up and why exam fees have gone up, and I
would like to see a piece of independent work by someone who would actually
understand that in terms of volume and pricing and the type of
qualification. I think it is a piece of
work we need to do.
Ms Sutcliffe: As a supplementary to that, I think the
other recognition is that over that period there was a real shift from what
might have been called "uncredited learning" to accredited learning because of
the great push, started with FEFC,
certainly picked up by LSC, that for courses to be eligible for funding they
needed to have accredited outcomes, which clearly with progression pathways can
only be a good thing, but I think, again, that has to be a component part, I
would suggest, over that significant growth.
Mr Watson: I want to try and join this topic back
to the original topic, which is if there is a concern that the total exams bill
for the nation is too high, then consideration of how we run the qualifications
system going forward is, it seems to me, a good moment to try and find ways to
reduce the total cost. I hope two
things have come out quite clearly already.
The first is I think there is a general belief with the people sat on
this table here that the bureaucracy is becoming an overhead for us which we
are struggling to manage, and the only way we manage it is by employing people
and people are a heavy cost for all of our organisations. The second thing is we have recently had an
interesting experience with diplomas, which I know the Committee has just
reported on, a heavily employer-driven enterprise. I think we got 18 months through that process before anybody
started to worry about the cost, and I would argue that if cost had been one of
the design constraints early in that process we would not have the diploma qualification
we have today, and the cost of that somebody somewhere will have to bear for
those diplomas to be rolled out. For
me that is a real risk in having Sector Skills Councils playing too
authoritative a role with too little understanding of the costs of delivering
certain kinds of qualifications. It is
the easiest thing in the world, as Sector Skills Councils have done in the past
and are still doing, to publish a notion of a 20 unit qualification or a 200 unit
qualification, I think you quoted once, Chris. Sitting at a desktop doing
employment needs analysis, that might look like a very attractive proposition,
to those of us who would have to deliver these qualifications, we would
instantly recognise that a 200 unit qualification was going to bring a cost to
the public purse which nobody would think was sensible.
Q592 Paul
Holmes: I have three very
specific questions on this cost one still before we move on and perhaps we just
need, therefore, one person to answer each one. First of all, it is not strictly
a skills one but it is related to what you have just said. Six years ago I was a head of sixth form and
one reason why the cost of exam entries was so expensive was we moved to
modularisation. The latest review is
going to move it from six units to four at A levels, therefore will the fees
drop by a third?
Mr Watson: Only as likely as a school cutting its
roll by a third would release
the overheads by a third.
Q593 Paul
Holmes: So it will not, okay.
Generally across the board, the exam boards have made a lot of use of
new technologies, students register on-line, results go out on-line, markings
are done on-line, you are using less qualified people to mark smaller chunks
on-line, surely that should have brought the costs down, or are you saying the
36 per cent increase in the three years would have been even more if you had
not moved into on-line marking?
Mr Watson: It is not really the topic we are on
today but, in simple terms, I would say, all of the savings you talk about are
real savings but they have been realised off of a pretty substantial capital
investment and those technologies do not come for free. It takes a long period of piloting on
relatively small volumes to get those types of technologies to work reliably. I am sure in the longer term there will be
benefits to be realised there, but on a strict short-term payback basis, none
of the things you have alluded to produce a net cost saving for us right
now.
Q594 Paul
Holmes: The QCA certainly feel there might be a problem here because
they are suggesting that the fees for the new diplomas, which you have referred
to that might be very expensive, there might well be a cap put on that. Are you saying you would be totally opposed
to that?
Mr Watson: I would say, much as I have said to
Ken Boston at the QCA, that tinkering around the edges of what we charge might
have an impact of a couple of per cent somewhere and that is a discussion we
can keep on having. We are a not for
profit organisation and we are only ever going to charge what it costs to provide
the service we provide, plus enough just to be sure we are safe and that we can
invest for the following year or two, nothing more than that because we have
got nobody to give the money to. The
real crux of this is where does the cost come from. I think the discussion we are having here about what drives
qualifications reform, how often do qualifications change, how many different
bureaucrats do we have to engage with in order to bring a qualification
successfully to market, those are the major drivers of cost for us. I will happily sit down and discuss with QCA
and anybody else how we strip that system down and streamline it. Not only then do I think we will be able to
drive some costs down, I think potentially we will have a more responsive qualification
system, which is what Leitch was talking about.
Q595 Paul
Holmes: Moving on to a slightly different area, the Qualifications
and Credit Framework sounds like a very good move. If you move to modularisation, so a student, in whatever
particular field it is can do part of a course, and they may not fill the whole
course requirement but they will still get some credit for it and then they can
add on to that later on, how is progress going on that?
Mr Humphries: John and I lead for the awarding
bodies on the discussions on the QCF, so it is probably appropriate that we
pick this up. I think we have all
shared the aim for a modular unitised credit rated framework, it has been
around for a long time. My organisation
wrote a paper nearly five years ago advocating it and setting out an initial
design. The frustration, first of all,
is that five years on we are still not there yet so it is going slowly is the
honest answer. It is a multi-faceted
programme. You cannot have newly formed
qualifications until you have new National Occupational Standards from Sector
Skill Councils which are modularised.
The second thing is there needs to be enough flexibility and choice in
those to give the learner the option of partial completion. The jury is still out. We have not yet seen a single National
Occupational Standard which meets that requirement. There is a timetable which brings the first ones into visibility
in 2008, hopefully leading to qualifications in 2009. The timeframe is, assuming all goes well, we will see those in
2009. The reality is at the moment it
is not clear there is going to be enough choice to make that real for the
learner, in other words there will not be enough options and electives, freedom
of choice, in the National Occupational Standards. That is something where the
jury is still out. The second thing is
whether the funding regime is going to permit learners to follow that route
because at the moment there is still a full intention that only full
qualifications attract the level of public funding, so it is very unclear how
the funding regime is going to support this at the moment. I guess, for me, those are the big issues
which are unresolved.
Q596 Paul
Holmes: The Association of Colleges have said they do not see how
the work on Sector Qualifications Strategies is lining up with the work on the
Qualifications and Credit Framework, and if the Government or the LSC, as you
say, are suggesting that funding will only go to a full qualification, not a
partial, it is a bit of a shambles?
Mr Humphries: I guess the full answer is we have
not worked out how to make all these bits chime properly together yet. There is time in the timeframe. As I said, the first new National Occupational
Standards are not due to appear until late next year anyway, so we do have time
to get this underway, and a lot of the testing and trialling which is going on
at the moment is designed to try and get inside that, but there are big issues
unresolved. Certainly, there is an increasing
concern that Sector Qualifications Strategies and National Occupational
Standards are not creating a unitised modular structure, they are not creating
the freedom of choice, they are not creating the choice of options and
electives which were assumed when the concept was created and then, secondly,
that the funding regime at the moment is not designed to encourage and
incentivise people to behave in that way, in fact it is going to be designed to
encourage them to take qualifications within a limited timeframe. Given that the new funding regime at the
moment is moving increasingly towards output related funding - the Chairman
will remember that from the 1990s - then there is a big issue about whether it
will even be feasible for providers to be able to offer that flexibility
because if the individual does not complete the whole qualification, they may
lose too much of their payment to make it viable. There are some big
issues.
Q597 Paul
Holmes: Is there one person or one body that carries the can for
making all this fit together? Is that the
QCA or is there nobody?
Mr Humphries: It is a thing called the
"Vocational Qualifications Reform Programme Board", which is a four nation body
with the four nations' Departments for Education, the four nations'
qualifications regulators, two representatives from Sector Skills Councils and
two representatives from awarding bodies on it. John and I are the two
representatives from the awarding bodies and it meets monthly to seek to get
all of these issues resolved.
Q598 Paul
Holmes: Are you in regular talks with DfES, QCA, LSC?
Mr Humphries: Very regularly. LSC is there as well, I am sorry.
Q599 Paul
Holmes: Yet there still seems to be all this disjointed work going
on which is cancelling each other out.
Mr Humphries: I think there is a pretty shared
commitment, to be honest, to try and get all this working.
Mr McNamara: We are trying to join it up and, as
Chris said, that funding issue is a key issue.
One of the good things which has come out of the work so far is the
closeness we are getting to actual data, because the fact is in this country we
have not got data which shows what vocational qualifications have done and are
doing; we do not know the numbers. If
you said to me today, "How many VRQs are we doing in engineering?", I could not
tell you because the data we have collected is a direct result of the work we
have done as part of that process.
Certainly in terms of numbers of qualifications, if we get on to talking
about that later we can go into some of the detail around that, what the
numbers actually are.
Q600 Jeff
Ennis: If we can now turn specifically to some of the 2020 targets
which Leitch set out. For example, he
said that we should have more than 40 per cent of adults qualified to level 4
or above, 95 per cent of adults to have functional literacy and numeracy
skills, a doubling of apprenticeships between now and 2020 and more than 90 per
cent of adult learners qualified to at least level 2. Are these the right sorts of targets we should be aiming at, and
are they achievable, or is there anything which Leitch has missed out or got
totally wrong?
Ms Sutcliffe: I
would like to go back to a point I made in my opening comment about it is
helpful to have targets for sure, but they could be seen as rather blunt
instruments and they could be seen, again, as an economic response. It is clear there has to be an economic
response to the issue of global competitiveness and preparing and getting the
country equipped to cope going forward, but it is "Where is the individual in
all of this?" As with all organisations,
how could we not support the drive to make good a deficit model for those
adults in or aspiring to be in the workplace who have not got a threshold of
employability, and I think it is quite useful to define that in this level 2
target. What is difficult, however, and
it has been alluded to already, is at the moment we have got a very, very tight
definition of what currently constitutes level 2. The idea of being able to achieve level 2 from a variety of
routes, to tap into an individual's interests and motivation and also the
employer, again, we are severely hampered and restricted. Certainly by "we" I mean the system as a
whole, providers particularly, and hence the initial feedback from Train to
Gain in terms of numbers coming through that is not perhaps as good as we might
have wished. I think there is something
about what is the offer which can be made available. The other thing, of
course, to bear in mind is that some individuals without any qualifications who
do not need to go through a level 2 because they are already experienced in the
workplace and they already have the skills.
It is very much about ensuring that people are given an opportunity to
perform and achieve at a level which best suits where they are at that
point. Certainly level 4 we think is
the right way to pitch it. For all the
obvious and known reasons, we have to be an economy which is able to compete on
higher skills delivery rather than a low skills economy. As a starting point,
yes, but, please, do not just let us say, "If we get those targets", because, I
have to say, if we were saying 95 per cent of the country is achieving at level
2, if we had 40 per cent at level 4, we could tack targets and labels on to
these people, but would it make this economy any more competitive than we find
it now? There is something much more
fundamental, I would suggest, than simply being in a position to count
more.
Q601 Jeff
Ennis: Are the Leitch
targets useful for the employers, John or Alan?
Mr McNamara: I think many of my employers would
look at those targets and think, first of all, "What is level 2?", because most
small businesses I know, and successful small businesses, whether they know it
or not they are training all the time, from induction to customer service. They might not want a qualification for that
or aspire to one but that is going on.
Just by counting the number of level 2 achievements, I do not believe,
is a true reflection of what is actually going on out there. I think there is a big mismatch, especially
at the SME end, and I am talking for that segment that there is a mismatch
between what that means in terms of their day-to-day business. Clearly we will play a part in making sure
we can try and deliver that, but with Train to Gain, as it stands at the
moment, if that is the only route, that is a very, very prescribed route. To be frank, most of our qualifications,
which are short, sharp, focused, delivered on many occasions on the premises
themselves, would not fit into that template and, therefore, they will not
affect the uptake.
Mr Stevenson: In the food manufacturing industry
I think Train to Gain has, indeed, started something, it is beginning to change
the culture. The culture of the food
industry generally is not particularly training friendly, you tended to get
through as best you could but just with the minimum amount of training, mainly
on hygiene precautions and health and safety, so that has considerably
assisted. I think there is a concern in
the industry that, perhaps, the targets are extremely ambitious, and there is
also an issue on the funding as to where the funding is going to come. If I could go back, I think one of the
things which is now beginning to help the Sector Skills Council, which, as I previously
suggested, has been a slow starter, is that it has had very traditional
industries to try and combine together, with the fish industry, the meat
industry, the bakery trade. There has
been a fair bit of work for them to do in trying to bring those industries
together and getting some sort of consistent message coming from them towards
training. They have started on a number
of things, such as the national academies, so, yes, as I said, the jury is o.
Q602 Jeff
Ennis: John, I think earlier on in the evidence you said that the
performance and relationship between employers and the individual Sector Skills
Councils can be described as good on occasions but overall it is patchy. What is the difference, from an employer's
perspective, between the performances of the sectors? What makes a good Sector Skills Council as opposed to a patchy
response?
Mr McNamara: I suppose there are three things I
would look for. First of all, does that
skills body use existing networks, trade associations, professional
associations, what is already on there, where employers normally meet, be they
large or small, including SMEs, that is the first point. The second point, do they take a strategic
view of that sector or sub-sector, do they provide decent labour market
information, information which guides employers in the decisions in terms of
skills deployment. I think in some
cases that has been incredibly good, in other places non-existent. Last, but not least, is that Sector Skills Council
directly involved in trying to obtain, where it is appropriate, public funding
for skills training and qualifications and for me those are the three measures
for any small employer.
Q603 Jeff
Ennis: What about listening to employers as well?
Mr McNamara: I guess that is part and parcel of
the labour market information work and engaging with networks, I guess.
Q604 Jeff
Ennis: One final question, Chairman, to representatives from the
awarding bodies. Could it not be perceived that the objections which the
awarding bodies have got to the expanding powers of the SSCs are very much a
question of protectionism, shall we say, in not wanting to lose control of your
fiefdom?
Mr McNamara: If you think we want to have this
current system protected where we spend all day negotiating with umpteen
different public bodies, having our costs driven relentlessly upwards by the
management cost of dealing with all of those, and being forced to keep hundreds
of qualifications on the books which are burning up my charitable resources, I
cannot possibly imagine I want that world protecting at all.
Q605 Jeff
Ennis: What is the alternative then, Greg, in your opinion?
Mr McNamara: I think the alternative is
two-fold. The alternative is to be
realistic about what this sector-based approach can deliver, and I think there
are kinds of sectors and kinds of job roles for which that model is potentially
very powerful, particularly for those where it is a strict licence to practise
and it needs very tight prescription by an industry. I would argue that kind of system is kept healthily in control
and in check by also allowing other innovation to flourish by other means. There are plenty of good qualifications
which did not emerge through this bureaucratic model but emerged through a
partnership between employers, individuals and these bodies.
Q606 Jeff
Ennis: There is not enough flexibility in the new machines?
Mr McNamara: Yes, and if there was any suggestion
that we would somehow seek protection out of all of this, I would challenge
it. I said to QCR, "I think it would be
a very healthy pilot to pick a sector and attempt the Leitch solution but also
allow alternative provision to be marketed freely with relatively little
restriction and a very low level of regulation, just fitness for purpose, let
us find out what learners and employers in the end find most attractive and
most responsive. The difficulty we have
got is gradually as the strength of the bureaucracy has grown it has become
ever harder, as I talked about in 2005 with Enterprise Qualifications, to get
the competing alternative even into the field of play. I have to say, that is not a world I want
protecting at all.
Mr Humphries: There is a sense in which, Mr
Ennis, the system we are currently building could make life easier for awarding
bodies if we did not care about the impact on learners and employers, because
there is a perfect excuse for if your qualifications do not fit, "Well, the
Sector Skills Council told us that is what we had to do. It doesn't work, it is
not our problem, it is their problem".
The difficulty is we are already starting to see some of these problems
arise. My organisation is 128 years
old. We have been around all that time
because somehow or other we must have kept track ---
Q607 Jeff
Ennis: It is the recognised
market.
Mr Humphries: --- of employers needs or they
would have stopped using us years ago.
My concern, and genuine concern, which has been around for all of my
time, 25 years working in this field, is that we have a principal
obligation to two groups of people: the learners who want to progress in the
world of work, which is what my system, my qualifications, cover, and the
employers who want to employ them. It
will never serve City and Guilds' interests or our reputation or credibility to
be able to put stuff on the market which either does not sell or is not
wanted. I have got one simple desire
here, to have a system which gives employers and individuals what they need,
and this is a genuine concern that we may be getting some of it wrong and a
desperate concern to make sure we get it right.
Q608 Chairman:
All governments, for the 25 years, you have been involved with a lot of
organisations, what is the heart of it?
Why can we not get it right? Why
are we so good at getting it wrong? It
is your fault, Chris, you are the constant theme here!
Mr Humphries: Chairman, I have been around too
long!
Q609 Chairman:
Twenty five years of anarchy!
Mr Humphries: To be honest, I think the answer is
we distrust learners' and employers' own choices too much and I think this is
something we have heard said in many areas of education, not just vocational. We really need to have three things. We do need a good understanding of the way
in which the industry goes - I have supported the SSCs in that role ever since
NTOs were around - but we need also to trust the fact that employers and
individuals have personal and individualised needs, customised and tailored
needs, which somehow or other the system needs to respond to. If you look at the last 20 years of
activity, it has often been around government creating institutions which seek
to tell the world how it should behave.
Whereas, I think their objective should be to help the world get what it
needs, that probably means giving guidance, direction, support, encouragement,
promotion out into the sector, and ensuring that the market works well through
informed demand and the freedom to put into the marketplace those things which
work. Remember why City and Guilds
operated, and other awarding bodies like RSA from the vocational sector and
BTEC, is they were saving the costs of 400 colleges and 5,000 training
providers each going out and developing their own curriculum, their own exams,
their own assessments and all that sort of stuff. We were created and we have survived because the cost of doing it
5,000 times over, and each of them trying to talk to employers, was going to be
completely unworkable. Somehow or other
we need to recognise the value which that has and the value which SSCs bring
and realign them back into a relationship which is about partnership.
Q610 Chairman:
You have put your finger on it in what you have said there. On the one hand, you are saying free up
employers to decide what they want and the inference from it, that sounds very
Leitch to me, on the other hand, the individuals. But over those 25 years, which I have just accused you of
being the subversive element, we have tried trusting employers and trusting
individuals time and time again and the reason different governments keep
saying, "We are going to try this. We
are going to try that. We are going to
try NTOs. We are going to try SSCs", is
because freeing up those two does not seem to work because we seem to have
awful employers in terms of how much they care about training their staff and
individuals who do not seem well motivated to get training.
Mr Humphries: Yet, if you look back over the last
ten years, there have been some remarkable successes. Whether or not someone wants to sit there and tell them they were
doing the right or wrong course, I am not sure, but participation in the
further education sector has risen dramatically, the volume of employer
training has risen dramatically, and the number of people doing apprenticeships
has risen dramatically. There are lots
of things we have been doing right, but there is an extent to which you can
over-engineer these things, and my concern is I think we might be getting to
the point where over-engineering is starting to happen. If you look back two years, by the LSC's own
figures, of course, the number of adults participating in the system has
dropped by a million and to the end point where in September last year we had
less adults enrolled in the adult further education sector than we had in 1997.
A hell of a lot of things have been happening, and I think often we go for the
draconian change rather than progressive re-engineering, and that sort of
pendulum swing you can get can often be more destructive than going for
continuous improvement.
Q611 Stephen
Williams: There is not much left on this section to ask, Chairman,
but I will follow on the theme which you were doing about this overarching
theory behind Leitch. If I could start with one of the employers, John
McNamara. At the moment, as someone
representing the hospitality industry, do you think the qualification bodies
and colleges and the whole infrastructure of training and education do not
offer you what you need in the hospitality sector? Do you feel it is not enough demand-led at the moment?
Mr McNamara: That is a broad area. Obviously we do represent small businesses
as a professional body. We also own an awning body called BIAB, so that is a wholly owned part
of our charity, and we deliver through 580 centres across 5,000 different
locations in the UK. That ranges from
college provision to independent work-based learning provider provision. In an SME sector it is very, very difficult
to release people from frontline duties to go and attend a college programme
for more than a day or two a week, very unusual in our sector for that to have
effect. Some of the larger employers do
it very successfully, but for the 85 per cent of SMEs it is very hard to do
it. What we found, as an awarding body,
is that delivering short, sharp chunks of learning, some of them regulatory,
sometimes taken in colleges or with independent work-based learning providers,
is quite effective in delivering that.
What we have had to do as a body is deliver different solutions,
different learning, especially on the entrepreneurial side at level 3 where we
are training people, helping people and equipping people to survive in business
more effectively. To deliver that in a
traditional format is very difficult, so we have broken that down into short,
sharp chunks of learning delivered in a variety of venues, some of which are
colleges. I suppose I would argue, for
my part of hospitality, it is very difficult to get our sorts of employers to
engage in FE colleges on extended programmes.
We have tried to design programmes which meet that need.
Q612 Stephen
Williams: If I could summarise, Chairman, what you are actually
saying is for your particular sector you are meeting your own demand
effectively because you feel the rest of the educational infrastructure cannot
meet it because it is not an appropriate setting?
Mr McNamara: To a certain extent, yes.
Q613 Stephen
Williams: Can I ask a question of Chris Humphries, City and Guilds,
Chairman, and of the two awarding bodies as well. From your submissions you seem to be expressing a concern that
the approach of Leitch of setting targets is bit top-down, and one of your
submissions described it as a "command system" rather than a demand
system. Have we got a tension here
between a Treasury commissioned report, so it is Mr Brown's report, have we got
the Chancellor pulling levers in the Treasury saying, "This is what shall
happen in the economy", but what it purports to be doing is saying, "This is
going to be a demand-led system"? Is
there a conflict there?
Mr Humphries: There is a tension, I think, in any
of these systems around the question of "Whose demand is it anyway?" and I do
not just mean between the learner and the individual. In one of the papers which is going to the Vocational
Qualification Reform Programme Board this Friday is a question which says, "How
do we ensure the system is really led by employer-demand rather than by SSC
desire?" That is a question which has
gone in with the full approval of the SSC network in appearing in that paper
because, the point I was making earlier, if you have to represent one and a
half million employers in 14 sub-sectors as part of your remit, then the chances
of you ever being able to cover every sector in detail is very, very
limited. The tendency is to look for
quick answers and to try and have as few answers as possible. If that is the result, if what the SSC
decides can be done by employers is all which is allowed, then the desire to
create a demand-led system does end up creating a command-led system, the
command in this case coming from the mix of policy and Sector Skills Council
activity. Then you have to add the
third dimension, which is, "Does the leaner get a voice in demand anywhere at
all?", and the answer is "You can build learner-demand in as well, providing
you make the thing flexible, create that unitised modular credit weighted
framework which enables people to accumulate bits and pieces and get enough
flexibility". My belief is you can create a system which has all of that, and
in the outline design of what was conceived for the Qualifications and Credit
Framework is that potential, but it is possible to do things in parts of that
process which then suddenly narrow it all down again. If there is no choice or units or electives or the option to do a
business start-up programme in training to be a plumber, because you would want
to be a self-employed plumber, if we do not build that flexibility in, then you
have just constrained the learner-demand.
If you do not allow them to take the French language as part of a
project management programme, because your company happens to operate in Europe
as well, have you constrained it from the employer point of view? In other words, there is nothing wrong with
the ideas, the policy, the philosophy behind this system, our concerns come at
the way in which it is implemented. It
seems to me there are some important choices being made here which we need to keep
as flexible and open as possible.
Ms Sutcliffe: It is part of our submission, we felt
in the demand-led, you have got the demand from Government, you have got the
demand from employers and you have got the demand from individuals. I think it becomes complicated then if you
are thinking about 14 to 18, the intention to keep young people in some form of
education training up to 18, then who really should be exercising the
demand? I see that absolutely as Government
having to because government
would be paying and, therefore, want to have close involvement through your
various agencies about the nature of the provision which is made available to
those young people as they move through a system. Just as Chris says, then when you start with employers, okay,
there might be a deficit model where government would be very interested in
supporting employers to make good that threshold employability, but as soon as
you move beyond those, you are into employers exercising their own choice of
what it is they need to meet a skills gap, a training gap, and equipping
themselves going forward and then, again, the additional factor of what is
motivating an individual. That is a
very complex set of different ages of people, different sorts of organisations
at different stages in time all putting demands in and how do we then create a
system which can cope with that. The
only way is very much, as was enshrined in the original proposals behind the
QCF where you have got this maximum amount of flexibility, that is then enshrined
by the funding regime going forward over time and, as clearly put in Leitch,
there will be the taper, government pays 100 per cent at that end and the
individual and employer pays 100 per cent at the other. We have got to have a regulatory backup
system which allows for a smooth move across that continuum from one to the
other. At the moment, it is all very much at this end, and what will happen is
the bespokeness of the provision we all continue to do but somehow it continues
to fall outside what is seen as being possible to be counted into how skilled
are we as a nation.
Q614 Stephen
Williams: I have got one supplementary based on what Isabel was
saying but not to Isabel, back to the hospitality industries, on this question
of raising the education and training participation age - which I think we are
supposed to call it - to 18. The
hospitality industry, if my impression is correct, probably disproportionately
employs more younger people straight from school than many other sectors. What is your sector's view on raising that
training age to 18, given what you said earlier about the difficulty of
releasing people into training?
Mr McNamara: Clearly it is a challenge for the
sector to overcome. Again, I speak from
a particular sub-sector which does not get public funding for most of its
training, and anything which can improve access to that is what we would expect
sector skills bodies and professional bodies like mine to be fighting for, at
whatever age. Bear in mind, we also
have a number of employees in the sector coming back to work, or in the older
age brackets anyway, who should also attract some level of support and some
level of funding as well.
Q615 Chairman:
Should we not sometimes ask the question, be it a large business or a small
business, "Why should the taxpayer pay to make a company train its people so
they are more effective to make a better profit for the company?" I find it
strange going to a very large company, which is one of the most profitable
companies in the universe, and we are giving them money under Train to Gain to
train their people who they would have been training anyway. Is it a nonsense world?
Mr McNamara: I guess with LSC budgets of £12
billion a year, the CBI figures and IoD figures range from £33 to £40 to £50
billion of company money spent on training, you could argue that does include
release time as well as the actual training money spent, but there is a big
balance argument there about companies already spending considerable resources
on training, some of it accredited, some of it not. My particular beef is trying to get as much state support for
small enterprises that traditionally have not had access to funding or find it
complicated to get hold of the correct advice for a range of provision. I am not suggesting that every single
training programme or development programme could be funded, it is clearly not
that simple.
Q616 Chairman:
What I am saying to you, John, is I can understand why your members, because
they are small and have more of a struggle, should get state funding,
taxpayers' money, rather than Tesco or Sainsbury's or Asda. That is the conundrum, is it not? Can I ask you a separate question. In the last session we had last week we had
a representative from the Sector Skills Council in hospitality who said there
was this dreadful shortage of chefs. I
always make it a rule not to go into a restaurant which has a card in the
window which says "Chef required", but he said there was a five per cent
undersupply of chefs. With the best
will in the world, here we have a culture at the moment obsessed with chefs and
cooking and Gordon Ramsay and Jamie Oliver and so on, and there must be a
tremendous desire to be a chef now that it is seen as a glamorous
occupation. What on earth has gone
wrong with your industry that you cannot find enough chefs or train enough
chefs?
Mr McNamara: It is a tough business, a tough
competitive world and a hard environment to work in. If you look at the figures we have, they indicate that chef
numbers in some of the better business schools are buoyant, they are going
up. As a sector, again, we have
recently introduced a catering qualification aimed at pub businesses mainly
which are introducing a new provision for catering on the back of the smoking
ban especially, that is an important area, and it has been an interesting story
getting that qualification accredited.
It is going through the process now but we have had, as Chris was
indicating earlier on, about 14 stages, I would say, Chris, to try and get it
to the stage of being accredited, and even that qualification will not, under
present rules, attract public funding.
What we want on the new QCF, or the NQF as it is now, is public
recognition that our learners should aspire to have the recognition of having a
qualification which is nationally recognised.
It is not an easy answer but it is a key issue for the industry.
Q617 Chairman:
Deadweight then. Should we be giving
big successful organisations money to train?
Mr Humphries: You know the final report of this
Skills Task Force from 2000 for the first time proposed that we needed to have
a system of, what we call, "tripartite responsibility" where it is absolutely
clear what the state pays for and it is absolutely clear that employers and/or
individuals need to contribute to the rest of that according to the benefit
they gain. I think it is a simple
matter to divide it up. There is a
reasonable expectation that the state should produce young people who have a
level 2 and reasonable levels of literacy and numeracy. We also know that the gain for the
individual and the employer does increase according to the levels studied. In 2000 we were advocating, "Go out and
negotiate with industry a basis for sharing the costs of training" because, of
course, it is not reasonable for the state to pick up all the cost and in a
lifelong learning system there is no way the state can afford to do it. It is rather worrying that we are seven
years on from then and we still have not started the process, although the
Leitch Report has, again, reminded us of the need to do it. I think there is a big government and
industry issue here which is about sitting down and agreeing the basis on which
the costs of education and training, particularly in the vocational adult
sector, are shared. You are absolutely
right, it is not sensible and not reasonable for the country to expect, and for
industry to expect, the state to bear all the costs, but it is complex and you
do have to agree the parameters by which you divvy up out the costs, so let us
get on and do it.
Mr Watson: I would set against all of that,
though, the need to keep individuals involved in learning if we want to get to
some of those 2020 targets. I do not
think we will get to the 2020 targets simply by linking everything which goes
on in the education and training system to short-term needs defined by
particular employers, regardless of whether the employers pay or not. Just to illustrate that, still the single
most heavily used vocational qualification used in this country is CLAIT, which
is over 15 years old. It has been taken
by three million people and, despite all the forecasts to the contrary that by
now everyone must know how to use a computer, it is still the most heavily used
qualification. When we go and try and
understand why, it is not anymore because it accurately describes a particular
skill which employers say they want, it is that for many women returners and
many older people looking for a career switch, it is a course of study which
they find motivating, they find reassuring, even if they have acquired some
skills informally it gives them the confidence that they formalise those
skills. Above all, very often it is a
way back into work for people, to do something which gets them feeling that
they are getting back into touch with work.
I think that is a beautiful illustration because that is one of those
qualifications which those who talk strictly in terms of defined sector needs
find it very hard to get to grips with. "It must be outdated. It is a scandal that we spend so much money
on it still", actually that is performing a very important role. If we are going to get anywhere near the
2020 targets we have got to allow for qualifications which get individuals
involved in learning, almost regardless of what the specifics are that they are
coming through the college door to do.
Q618 Chairman:
One of our witnesses last week said many employers in his sector still
advertise for a qualification which has not been available for 15 years
and that is an interesting lack of information
Mr McNamara: Chairman, seven per cent of the
sector advertises for 7061/7062, so that means 93 per cent do not.
Chairman: We will move on to looking at awarding bodies
and intermediaries with Gordon.
Q619 Mr
Marsden: We have heard a lot about, not least just in the last
couple of minutes, the shelf life of various of these qualifications, but I
would like to start off, if I may, with you, Isabel, going back to the written
evidence which Edexcel submitted. You
argued in there that many employers do work with qualification developers at
the moment, quite reasonably, but that, perhaps, a lighter-touch regime would
boost employer engagement, particularly in achieving accreditation from the
QCA. Imagine you are Ken Boston for a
moment, how light-touch does that have to be to achieve real results in terms
of improving employer engagement?
Ms Sutcliffe:
I will try and answer the question, but I think it comes back to we are in the
business of wanting whatever we develop in response to a perceived need to be a
success. I have mentioned before that
those of us with strong vocational qualification heritage, that is all founded
on working very, very closely with individual groups of employers, an employing
sector, to ensure that we really understand what their needs are and then are
playing that back to them in the form of the qualification. Where you would say, "What satisfies enough
employer engagement?" and the evidence which we then put forward as part of our
accreditation process through to QCA is, to me, seen in the way we, as Edexcel,
organise our business. We do have a
lighter-touch system working now for the accreditation of qualifications,
thankfully the days of it being two years in terms of putting a submission into
QCA and hearing whether it is accredited or not are well past, thank
goodness. We have got a much more
mature system working in terms of an awarding body's relationship with its
regulator where the regulator is taking an overview of our systems and processes,
and built into the development process of all of us, as awarding bodies, is
that key factor of how we engage with employers. Instead of looking at the detail of an individual qualification,
you are looking at a process. Providing
we can show that in meeting an employer's demand we are talking and taking lots
and lots of care over ensuring it is not necessarily an isolated demand,
particularly when we are talking about something which has been nationally
available, that seems to work quite well.
Q620 Mr
Marsden: That is all a bit woolly.
Maybe it has to be but I am just saying, there is no magic button you
would press.
Ms Sutcliffe:
No, and there cannot possibly be because - stating the obvious - employers, by
definition, are a very diverse set of organisations. It is very easy to say - and I speak as an employer myself - what
we do not get and what is not good, but when charged to be absolutely
articulate about what your needs are, it becomes quite difficult, not least
because their business is not in teasing out training, learning outcomes and
being able to then put them into a set of assessed activity, that is our
expertise.
Q621 Mr
Marsden: Chris, if I could take us on from there, you rightly
reminded us you have been around a long time and you said you would not be
around if you had not been doing something right with employers. Moving beyond City and Guilds, do you think
it is true across the board that qualifications are in need of reform because
they are not sufficiently responsive to employer needs, or are we looking at
particular black holes in particular sectors?
Mr Humphries: I think we have had two types of
qualifications in the sector and they have been meeting different needs. The vast majority of qualifications which
are on the NQF that are approved by their NTOs and get onto the National
Qualifications Framework, NSS as it is now, have usually gone through two
stages of good testing. They have
either been developed in conjunction with groups of employers, they have
usually then been signed off by the NTO.
I think the vast majority of those cases you can argue both from the
initial testing with groups of employers and the NTO side, most of those are
now reviewed every two to three years where they used to be reviewed every five
to six years. The rate at which they
are updated and modernised has really halved or doubled, depending on how you
measure that. That is part of the
reason why it is essential to keep light-touch because if the review process
takes too long and you have to do it every three years, then the gap between
need and delivery is getting bigger.
The whole set of second groups of qualifications, which were designed
more for the learner, to meet the needs of individual learners, perhaps
learners doing lifelong learning, doing a bit of tasting and testing or looking
to update and professionalise and modernise through short courses a set of
skills they already had, these have a much less measurable impact, both in
terms of benefit for employers. A lot
of the criticism which has been focused on qualifications over the last few
years has been on those short courses which serve as, immediately, the sort of
thing John was talking about.
Q622 Chairman:
John said he had to produce his own because people like you did not do the
short ones.
Mr Humphries: City and Guilds does not do short
courses, there is no question about that, we do not, we do full-scale
courses. We do create modular
programmes where people can do bits and pieces. They are all modularised, but we still design them in the context
of a qualification which qualifies you for something. It is not us that stops John putting the short courses into the
market place, it is the policy today. A
lot of the focus has been on the extent to which those things can be seen to be
making a visible and tangible employment difference.
Q623 Mr
Marsden: This is the debate between soft enabling skills or hardwire
skills, essentially.
Mr Humphries: In part, it is also the debate
about whether you allow someone to do small bits of learning in a modular form,
and that is enough, or because of the challenge which is seen to exist around
how many qualified people we have, whether the public priority for expenditure
should be on the full qualifications.
It is that latter thing which has driven a lot of the behaviour.
Q624 Mr
Marsden: Fine. Thank you.
Greg, I wonder if I could bring you in here and ask you one or two basic
questions about what happens to your own agency, OCR's agency. What would you say the rate of turnover is
for the qualifications which you produce?
Is it possible to quantify?
Mr Watson: Pretty much everything at the moment
is turning over on an annual basis. I
would have to go back and check exact statistics if the Committee wanted
them. At the very least, because we are
in a period of stasis, because Leitch is up in the air and the QCF is slightly
up in the air, we have got a lot of things now on very short accreditation
cycles. In fact, when you read the
misleading numbers of qualifications which are often quoted in speeches and papers,
much of that reflects the fact that we have currently got three or four
parallel versions of the same qualification which is being re-licensed
annually.
Q625 Mr
Marsden: This is the new improved version, it is not a new
thing? I am not being critical.
Mr Watson: No, honestly, it is very often not
even newly improved, it is simply re-licensed for another year while we work
out what we are doing long-term.
Q626 Mr
Marsden: You would argue then that these figures which are thrown
around of 6,000, 10,000 are based on a misunderstanding of what is actually out
there, that in real terms the real number of different products is far less?
Mr Watson: Without a doubt. In fact, John and I were talking about this
the other evening. We are three-quarters of the way towards the real answer
through some work that the auditing bodies have been doing collectively. The sweepstake ticket I have got in my desk
says 500 will be the final answer.
Q627 Mr
Marsden: In that case, I am tempted to ask why you have not been
more successful in your PR in persuading the rest of us all who constantly
quote these things, but I will not go on to that!
Mr Watson: For the same reason that CLAIT is
still heavily used after 15 years, I
suspect.
Q628 Mr
Marsden: Let us talk about the new things which you launch. Of the qualifications which you do launch
that are new, how many of them fail to stimulate enough demand? How many flop?
Mr Watson: Of the ones which we have conceived,
consulted with employers or universities and schools and colleges about a
launch, I would say our success rate is 75 per cent. Of those which are born of a sector skills strategy of some sort,
less than ten per cent, off the top of my head.
Q629 Mr
Marsden: That is a very interesting differential, is it not? What
happens to them? How long do you leave
them out there before you decide, "This is not selling", to put it
crudely?
Mr Watson: The shortest time would be about three
years. There is a lead-in for a
typical college of the year before launch needing to have it in a prospectus to
recruit students for it.
Q630 Mr
Marsden: Chris, what about you?
Mr Humphries: We have a significant number of
qualifications which do not have any sales, but in every case they are
qualifications we have put into the market at the request of an NTO or an
SSC. Many of them are there for very
legitimate reasons. They are
qualifications at level 4 and level 5 where the sector desperately wants to
persuade people in their industry to up-skill and they cannot do that unless
there is something in the marketplace.
Then there are others where the sector is keen to get a particular group
or occupation to take up training and, again, you cannot do it, so we will
often put things into the marketplace at the request of an SSC in order to
allow them to promote to the sector in order to do it. We accept that is a loss-maker for us in the
context of trying to provide a complete service for the industry. What we have found recently, through work we
have been doing under this Vocational Qualification Reform Programme, because
the awarding bodies have a strand of work ourselves in that, is that the most
significant number of those vocational qualifications which have low take-up,
the SSCs themselves do not want to remove from the market, because we have
asked them, because they are still keen to try and get their industry to take
them up, so you plan that into your business.
Q631 Mr
Marsden: A cruel or cynical person might say that the SSCs were
anxious to keep them out there because it justified their existence.
Mr Humphries: I would not say that, I would say
in our relationships there is always a genuine industry reason behind them
seeking to do it, particularly the higher level qualifications where it is a
hard sell to get the industry to take up those. Given that this predates the SSCs and dates back to the NTOs as
well, I would not say that.
Mr Watson: To shed a bit of light on the
problem. OCR itself has a formal
approval process for deciding to go ahead with a new qualification. It does not have 13 steps in it, it has two. What is interesting is, having seen a couple
of cycles through now since I have been involved in post-19 qualifications, I
am beginning to get interested in those qualifications which come back for a
second run when the first run failed. I
have been going back and reviewing the papers which were submitted with the
original internal proposal and I think the most regular feature which I
discover in those that have failed is that they were originally claimed by the
NTO or the SSC as licences to practise, "These will be mandatory from..." and
there is usually a date quoted in the paper.
Many, many times, when we go back to understand why that qualification
never took off, in truth it is because there was not appetite for that kind of
very strict licence to practise in that particular sector, although there was a
desire for it.
Mr Humphries: It was more intention and desire.
Mr Watson: Yes, but because it did not acquire
the status of a licence to practise, no learner felt compelled to go and get
it.
Q632 Mr
Marsden: Isabel, could I possibly ask you quickly, would it help,
both in terms of public perception and also in terms of practical utility, if
some of these qualifications had a sunset clause in them? You would say, "If
they do not reach a certain target market within three or five years, that is
it".
Ms Sutcliffe: I
think the system works quite well as it does at the moment in terms of review,
evaluation and remove if because I think we all have similar systems for
keeping existing qualifications under review, particularly those with low
take-up. We would have an annual
review, those with no take-up and the reasons behind it. It is a long process to remove anything
because you are never quite sure where a learner might be on a journey for all
of those reasons. We have had some
issues with what seems to have been rather arbitrary accreditation end dates
placed on qualifications, which is the same sort of thing because you are never
quite sure if you are going to get an extension or you can get it reaccredited. An employer using a qualification is one
thing, but if you think about a college or a training provider looking at a
range, it makes their planning going forward quite difficult if they do not
know whether to brave security for
something they want to invest in, it could be planned as well as people, to get
a programme off the ground.
Q633 Mr
Marsden: The answer to my question is basically no?
Ms Sutcliffe: Yes.
It works okay, so there are lots of other things to fix.
Mr McNamara: Can I give a very brief view from a
professional body. Any awarding body,
professional body is very, very close to employers in designing qualifications
at the design stage, as we do. We do
not launch anything without an employer group, sometimes with the regulator if
it is regulatory, but if it is business building, it is employer-led, we design
it, we float it and we test fly it.
There have been a number of cases where we have not launched a
qualification because it does not work, and if it does not work we do not
launch it. We build in our own sunset clauses because, certainly at level 3,
those qualifications which build into a larger suite of level 3s are designed
to improve bottom line. If they do not
improve bottom line they will not fly and that is an inbuilt part of the
process. Other awarding bodies I know
do the same thing, but it is becoming more and more critical for that to
happen. To pick on Greg's point, the
work we have done on Strand 4 in terms of numbers, it looks like it will be
between 500 and 1,000, which is on that framework, if you get the data right,
if you count it right, if you codify it properly, and we are getting into that
data now. As you say, the fact that
people are still on platforms saying, "It is 5,000. It is 6,000. It is
22,000", these are real figures and real complexities which we are trying to
break through.
Q634 Mr
Marsden: Chairman, I wonder if I could come finally to the issue of
accrediting in-house training, which touches quite sharply on what you have
said. Can I stay with you, John,
possibly Alan might want to add something on this as well. There has been a lot talked about employer'
own training programmes and the point at which they come into sync with things
that come from outside. Would it be
possible, or sensible, for those training programmes to be accredited and
effectively brought into the National Qualifications Framework?
Mr McNamara: I think in some cases the short
answer is yes. We already accredit some
organisations' qualifications and they put them through the rigour of external
assessment, an external look, and they are accredited. I think into the future, as long as that
externality is brought forward for those organisations coming into the
framework, why not.
Q635 Mr
Marsden: I mentioned that particularly because we had a very
stimulating session not so long ago in this section of the inquiry with union
learning reps. It is fairly clear from
the evidence they gave, and, indeed, from the written evidence we have
received, that some of the more dramatic things in terms of trying to engage
adult learners come from that in-house short-term training.
Ms Sutcliffe:
Absolutely.
Mr Stevenson: I was going to fully support what
has been said. The Meat Training
Council has concentrated on management development. As an industry, it has a weak management structure. In many cases it is family orientated and
does not always follow the rest of the family as they go back. They have the ability to manage a company
properly. We have done knife skills, we
have done supermarket courses, all designed in-house with the help and support
of employers and the industry generally and these have been launched. Generally, in the case of knife skills, they
have now been accredited and management development as well.
Mr Humphries: This has been happening for many
years. The three examples which Ken
Boston gave in his QCA review this year were all employers which City and
Guilds is already accrediting and they are training for. Tesco's training, Orange is another one,
London Underground's training, all of their training is both meeting national
standards, completely accredited within the framework, and branded Tesco's as
well as City and Guilds in the National Qualifications Framework. These things are being done already and in big
volumes when you consider the whole of Tesco's training.
Q636 Mr
Marsden: We had evidence from the 157 Group of Colleges, and other
people in the FE sector have certainly said to me personally it would be a
great help. Why is there such a
dichotomy of understanding between what seems to go on in FE colleges about
this and what, as you say, is already happening on the ground floor?
Mr Humphries: Because, of course, this training
takes place in Tesco's stores, not in colleges. The training is Tesco's in-house training but they changed - if I
use them as an example - their training
procedures to meet ours and QCA's requirements, they changed their staff
development requirements, they changed their reporting and assessment
requirements because their staff said, "We would like to have your training accredited". They changed and built in new systems into
Tesco's so that their staff training would meet the externally accredited
requirements of the National Qualifications Framework but, as a result of that,
the training takes place inside Tesco's.
It happens to be externally accredited and assessed by us but it,
therefore, is not happening in colleges or training providers, it is happening
in the employer's premises.
Q637 Mr
Marsden: You are saying it is not a question of reinventing the
wheel, it is a question of better communication and better understanding
between the different sectors?
Mr Humphries: And encouraging the practice
because what I must say to you is when we took Tesco's proposition we had to go
to the QCA main board in order to get it through because the tendency of the
staff was to reject this as a model for acceptance within the framework. It was quite a battle to get it accredited
and accepted that the standards were being maintained. What we need to do is make it easier for it
to happen, providing external quality assurance requirements are
met. What you cannot afford to do is
have acme stores provide
training which is not comparable to the network and then have them taken up by
Wal-Mart or Asda later and have them say, "This is crap. Why was this
accredited? These people can't do the
job". Maintaining quality remains
critically important, but let them bring it into the framework through external
quality assurance, sure, why not.
Chairman: I have got to call a halt to this. It has been a very good session, and I think
some of you might prepare yourselves for coming back again because we just
started getting under the subject. It
has been a very good session. Alan,
John, Isabel, Greg and Chris, can I thank you all very much for your attendance. As I say, we have learned a lot, but we may
have to come back to you. As you are
travelling away from here, if there are things which we should have asked you
or you should have said to us, get in touch.
Most of you meet us a lot of the time anyway. We want this skills inquiry to be a rather good one and we will
not do that without your help. Thank
you all.
