UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 333-vii

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

EDUCATION AND SKILLS COMMITTEE

 

 

POST-16 SKILLS TRAINING

 

 

Monday 4 JUNE 2007

MR STEVEN BROOMHEAD and MR JOHN KORZENIEWSKI

PROFESSOR FRANK COFFIELD and MS LEE HOPLEY

Evidence heard in Public Questions 638 - 756

 

 

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Education and Skills Committee

on Monday 4 June 2007

Members present

Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair

Mr Douglas Carswell

Mr David Chaytor

Jeff Ennis

Paul Holmes

Helen Jones

Fiona Mactaggart

Mr Gordon Marsden

Mr Andrew Pelling

Stephen Williams

________________

Memorandum submitted by English Regional Development Agencies

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Mr Steven Broomhead, Chief Executive, North West Regional Development Agency, and Mr John Korzeniewski, Regional Director, North West Learning and Skills Council, gave evidence.

Q638 Chairman: I welcome Steven Broomhead and John Korzeniewski to our deliberations. We are very pleased to have two people to talk to us about skills. One is the regional director of the North West Learning and Skills Council and the other is the chief executive of the North West Regional Development Agency. Interestingly, both of you started off in the world of education as principals of colleges. You have both been around the block to some extent, and I expect you know where all the bodies are buried! We usually give witnesses an opportunity not to repeat their cvs but say where we are in skills at the moment. We are just getting under the skin of our inquiry into skills. We looked at the diploma and got that out because we wanted it to influence what the Government was or was not up to, but we are now back in the main stream and we find it an extremely complex area. This morning we spoke to the head of a major construction company, Kier. We were told that they employed some of their staff for three months to look at different sources of funding for various kinds of skills training and in the end gave up because they could have gone on for ever. The things that were available when they started disappeared half-way through the three months and so on. They painted a picture of the skills world which was extremely complex for a major employer in what appeared to be a focused sector. Why is it perceived as being so complex?

Mr Broomhead: First, I think that with skills we are at a pivotal stage in policy development terms. We have had the Foster review; we have the Leitch report. I know that the Department for Education and Science is moving steadily towards an implementation plan which it has shared with partners. The key theme of that is an employer-led and demand-led approach. First, it is true that from a customer access and route-to-market point of view many employers claim to have found it rather difficult over the years to access good advice and information for adults. That may be partially solved if the Government, following the Comprehensive Spending Review, can support the development of an adult guidance service for adults. Second, I think that the very complex funding arrangements in place before have deterred some employers from being able to access the courses that they want. Third, perhaps the courses that they want have not been available on demand and at the time and with the flexibility required in order for them to access them properly. There has been a lot of confusion. I believe that Leitch offers a golden opportunity for us to refocus on a vocational world-class skills agenda, but the devil is always in the detail about how these plans are turned into reality.

Q639 Chairman: Some very respected individuals in terms of knowing the world of skills have said that there is nothing new. People have said that it ought to be demand-led and employers ought to have a much higher profile, but governments have said that for many years. Do employers really know what they want?

Mr Broomhead: I think most employers in the past have tended to voice their concerns about short-term skill needs linked to their particular business needs and opportunities, and certainly there has been a need to take a much more medium-term view. They have had a much more reliable policy base and also labour market intelligence for those decisions to be reached. That is why I believe the regional development agencies have a part to play here. We are responsible for bringing together partners to develop a regional economic strategy, of which skills is a key theme. We will not improve productivity and competitiveness in the UK and make ourselves a world-class economy unless we join together skills, productivity and competitiveness. We have done that. Generally speaking, if the confusion experienced in the past can be addressed by Leitch it will be a good thing on which to move forward.

Q640 Chairman: Mr Korzeniewski, is it necessarily complex? What about all the siren voices that say that it should all be swept away and we should make it easily understandable, and anyway it is all the fault of the LSC?

Mr Korzeniewski: And the achievements of the LSC? I agree with my colleague that we work with a complex system. Clearly, one of our major responsibilities is to make sense of it in the North West. I also agree that Leitch provides opportunities for simplification. We think that we are in a good position to take advantage of that simplification, working locally, nationally as well as regionally.

Q641 Helen Jones: Were you disappointed that Leitch gave very little attention to the role of regional development agencies in his review, and why do you think that was?

Mr Broomhead: We were disappointed when the report came out, but we also saw it as an opportunity for DfES. The department has not always been as strong on the regional agenda as we think it should perhaps have been in terms of its recognition of regional economic strategies and the strong partnerships between ourselves and the LSE, in particular the role of the regional skills partnership. Since Leitch was published we have worked quite hard. My understanding is that government intends to publish the Leitch implementation plan on 14 June, and we have been very heavily involved in making submissions about that in a number of areas: first, the importance of regional economic strategies. Whilst we accept that there is a national skills policy with national targets, partners in each region have worked together to establish a set of regional skills priorities. My colleague and I work very closely on that. We believe that now there is recognition of the regional debate and the role of development agencies. Our employers in the North West have been waiting with baited breath for action under Leitch and now they want to see what will happen in terms of changes at the region. The evolvement of the LSC to have a regional governance structure is also very supportive of the fact that we can get regional focus around the key economic issues that should drive the skills agenda in the future.

Q642 Helen Jones: I want to tease that out a little. We hear a lot about the need for skills strategy to be employer-led, but looking to the future there are occasions, are there not, when there are no employers to lead it? You will know as well as I do that the Omega development in Warrington is a good example of that. We are looking forward to what will be there in the future and trying to train for that. What do you think should be the role of regional development agencies in developing skills, looking at the way that the economy in the region will develop in future and making sure that we have the skills to meet it? How can that best be put in place?

Mr Broomhead: Our responsibility as a development agency is very much about economic development and sustainable economic growth. That is why I believe we have a very strong partnership with the delivery side of skills in terms of the LSC in the region. To answer the specific question, one of our roles is to make sure we join up all those issues, so we will be working with the sector skills councils and various professional trade bodies such as the CBI, the chambers of commerce, Institute of Directors and private sector partners to make sure we take a much more proactive medium-term and policy and evidence-based approach to the development of skills across our region. It varies from place to place. The skills needs in Greater Manchester are very different from the skills needs in Cumbria, which is why we believe - perhaps we may have the opportunity to talk about how we organise ourselves in this matter - that sub-regional working between our two organisations is as important in many ways as regional working.

Q643 Helen Jones: Perhaps Mr Korzeniewski can come in on the back of that. Only a very small part of the RDA's budget is devoted to skills; most of the spending is on economic development. Bearing in mind what has just been said, in your view where is that money best spent?

Mr Korzeniewski: First, one of our drivers is the regional economic strategy. We have a set of regional skills priorities which are determined through the regional skills partnership. That gives us a picture of what is required in the region going forward. We can then put that against the various deliverers of skills, because we are a central body but not the only one. At high level it is not us at all. In my view, the best place for the RDAs to put their money is in the places where ours do not go, so we are, as it were, operating a pool in the region against those priorities.

Q644 Helen Jones: Assume I am an adult and I am looking to upgrade my skills. How will I know which skills will be of most value to me in the future and where I should go to get them? The planning being done at RDA level is all very well, but if I am a learner on the ground how will I know where I should be learning and what kind of learning I should be taking up which will give me the best chance of getting a decent job in years to come?

Mr Korzeniewski: At the moment I think that is very difficult. I echo my colleague's point about Leitch's recommendation about a comprehensive adult information and guidance service which should provide that. There is information available generically through things like Learndirect, but in a specific place it is very difficult at the moment. Obviously, there are intermediaries and providers who can help, but there is not a comprehensive service that can provide that for the total range of individuals. If you are in the system already you will tend to know.

Q645 Helen Jones: Mr Broomhead, referring to the priorities and targets set by Leitch, he took very much a national and sectoral approach. Does that fit with your experience of what is happening in the North West region, or do you suggest there are different priorities which ought to be addressed regionally?

Mr Broomhead: We have had quite a lot of discussion with our sponsoring department, the DTI, about this very issue. Each RDA has its own regional economic strategy and needs and, frankly, we need to reflect the fact that if there are different economic issues and needs there must be different sets of targets in different regions. Certainly, the employment and skills issues are very different in the North West from what they are in the North East. For instance, the arrival of the BBC in Media City - Salford - will produce a whole set of new needs around the creation of digital industries which will not be needed in the east of England. We need a system of variable geometry which also fits with targets. I think that we are now at a stage with the sub-national review being carried out by government as part of the Comprehensive Spending Review where we can have a discussion about national and regional targets so we can have a much more appropriate set of arrangements than we have at the moment.

Q646 Jeff Ennis: We have heard evidence from representatives of the sector skills councils that they feel that with their expanded role they are very much under-resourced. Do you agree with that statement? If so, from where do you think additional resources should be obtained?

Mr Broomhead: To be fair, they are still new organisations, and certainly they have been given a very important, pivotal role in terms of the Leitch report and its implementation, particularly in relation to the licensing of qualifications, which will then turn into funding arrangements for learning providers and colleges. In my view, if they are to fulfil that role, particularly the licensing of qualifications, they will have to be a much stronger and better resourced organisation than it is at the moment. Perhaps some of that resource should not necessarily come from the public purse, because frankly these organisations are the licensed voice of employers. Therefore, if employers believe that they want to do something for their particular sector perhaps they should make a voluntary contribution - I do not suggest a levy - towards their development. My experience is that the larger, blue chip businesses have good knowledge of and working relationships with each of the SSCs. The small to medium size enterprises, for example the ones I meet in my day job at chambers of commerce events, do not even understand the names of the SSCs. I think that some work is to be done among medium size enterprises to raise the level of awareness of those SSCs.

Mr Korzeniewski: In the North West we have a system of what we call sector skills and productivity alliances which essentially bring together the SSC, the RDA and ourselves to talk about the sectoral implications of the economic strategy and help us get that employer voice through the sector councils into regional decisions and choices. Although it is a slightly different point, in the North West we have a good track record of engagement with SSCs.

Q647 Jeff Ennis: Mr Broomhead, to go back to the point about employers making a contribution, has it not always been the 64 thousand-dollar question? In this country employers want to have everything on a plate by and large, do they not?

Mr Broomhead: Obviously, that is a big policy issue. Many employers in the past have been entrusted with delivering training. If you take a market-led approach to skills, certainly in some of the earlier elements of the discussions on Leitch I was rather worried that we would see the re-introduction of naked market forces in education and training. Certainly, the market must be more dominant, but there will always be a need for intervention particularly around learners who face disadvantage. A key issue for me is how small and medium size enterprises in particular that have never had a culture of training and professional development will respond to this. Whilst the results of Train to Gain which has been established are quite encouraging - people are ringing Train to Gain and getting advice and so on - a lot of work is to be done on a big set of cultural changes which it is hoped can be fulfilled by Leitch.

Q648 Jeff Ennis: Following your comments on making sector skills councils more visible to employers, does that not reflect the fact that some of them have got out of the starting blocks a lot quicker than others and some have a considerable way to go to show their wares to potential employers and employees, etc? Do you think there is a role for your two organisations to help the sector skills councils achieve that role?

Mr Broomhead: First, SSCs have variable visibility and performance. Generally speaking, the process has worked well but they are all new. Certainly, we feel that at regional level we can work the sector skills agreements with each of the councils to make sure employers understand more and more the work of an SSC. In particular, if the employer's pledge is to be fulfilled - that is a key recommendation in the Leitch report - we have a lot of work to do to get employers to understand the role of the SSC and what the pledge means in practice.

Mr Korzeniewski: Not all SSCs play in the same way in each region. Some are more important to some regions. Given the focus of the RES in a way that tell us the relationships and the prioritising in a particular place, we will see that reflected in regional strategies.

Q649 Jeff Ennis: Can you give a positive example of where your organisations have engaged with a particular sector skills council in your region to the benefit of both companies and potential employees?

Mr Korzeniewski: I can think of a couple: Cogent Sector Skills Council for the chemicals industry and Sector Skills and Productivity Alliances in the North West. It has been demonstrated that there is a shortage of apprenticeships particularly along the Mersey estuary where there is a conglomeration of petro-chemical firms, as you are aware. As a result of that, in our regional commissioning plan we commissioned about 70 extra apprenticeship places, so there is a direct line of sight there. We have another example of working with one or two sector skills councils. I refer to the Proskills centre which is concerned with engineering and Cogent which develop qualifications in business improvement techniques again in the North West which we have been able to use our commissioning function. I do not say I can give you an example for every sector skills council.

Q650 Chairman: You have not really said anything positive or negative - you have been neutral - about sector skills councils. You have said these are early days, but we have heard quite a lot of criticism from people like the Institute of Directors. They say that they are not the genuine voice of the employer and criticise the suggestion that sector skills councils can be put in place. I take it that this afternoon we will get a bit more of that from the Engineering Employers Federation. What is your view of them?

Mr Broomhead: Clearly, British chambers of commerce and the Institute of Directors, to take two, are likely to view the SSCs as a threat because they see them as the voice of their members and they do not want to see their policy voice diluted by another body. What we have said to those bodies in my region is that they should get behind the SSCs. They will express their own views but they ought to engage more in the SSCs and make sure that their members are aware of what they are about and their future potential. For years employers have moaned about the mismatch between the outputs from colleges and universities in relation to their own businesses. I keep telling them that this is a golden opportunity for them to get involved with a body that is likely to shape qualifications and competencies that they need. They are new at the moment, but the challenge facing the SSCs will come through the Leitch implementation plan and that will have to be met through the new national commission on skills and employment which Leitch recommends should be developed.

Mr Korzeniewski: For me, the issue is: what is the gap in the system that SSCs are designed to fill? I think that the signal from Leitch on qualifications is an important one in defining a role for them. Apart from that, I agree with my colleague that in many cases they regard them as young developing organisations. I think we can give examples where their drive has affected our planning and spending.

Q651 Chairman: Would you give them some money to be more effective in your region? In principle, are you allowed to do so?

Mr Korzeniewski: The honest answer is that at the moment we are trying to put as much money into direct delivery as opposed to capacity building. The work that we have described doing with them is expensive of our time across the region.

Q652 Mr Chaytor: As a supplementary, Mr Korzeniewski, can you think of a single sector skills council that is likely to become financially self-sufficient by 2008?

Mr Korzeniewski: That is a good question, but I am not sure that I have the information to be able to answer it.

Q653 Mr Chaytor: What is your gut feeling?

Mr Korzeniewski: I have mentioned the name of one or two which are very visible in our work in the region. In a way, I guess that that provides some kind of answer.

Q654 Chairman: Is there not a temptation for some of them to raise a bit and get into areas where you would not expect them to be and would not want them to be?

Mr Broomhead: I think that would be a matter for the new national commission because it would have oversight of and make regulatory arrangements for the SSCs. What I would not like to see is a move to create more SSCs than there are now. We came from a situation in which there were about 70 national training organisations of one sort or another. That was very confusing to both learners and employers. I think that the 25 we now have is about right, although the boundaries sometimes do not suit the needs of individual employers in certain areas.

Q655 Paul Holmes: You just said that there had been 70 training bodies and now it is better and simpler. Would that not apply equally to yourselves? We have two separate organisations: the regional development agency and the regional learning and skills council. Each has a different chief executive and so forth. Why not just create one body? Would it not be more efficient and clear? Would not employers find it simpler to deal with?

Mr Broomhead: To go back in time a little, up until 1997 we had the Further Education Funding Council and a large number of separate TECs. That changed in terms of what happened with the development of the RDAs and in particular the learning the skills council. We have seen a greater shift in the number of bodies going downwards in simplification. I was of the belief at the time of my appointment to the development agency in 2003 that there needed to be greater regional synergy between the work of the learning and skills council and its remit to deliver skills and that of the RDA whose remit is to deliver sustainable economic growth within my region. There were discussions about that out of which emerged the Bill now going through Parliament to remove 47 arms of the LSC and create nine regional bodies. We are content with that, because I and my colleague can have a strategic and operational dialogue about particular issues. I mentioned the BBC. Obviously, we can work together to shift resources if required into those areas. When we have had redundancies in places we have been able to work together round those areas. As to the big challenges in my area to do with nuclear decommissioning in West Cumbria, again we can work together on those areas. Rather than move to one body, which has been mooted as part of the Government's sub‑national review, our relationship is very strong. I am a member of the board of the regional LSC, so the economic input is made. My colleague makes his input into the regional skills partnership. I think we have a very good and strong working relationship. If we merged them it would make a very large organisation. We might be criticised for being large and having insufficient focus.

Mr Korzeniewski: We work nationally, regionally and locally and that is helpful. We are probably the only body that does that. We also work across the range from young people, including pre-16 increasingly, to adults in the workforce, so we can help to join that up as well so that particularly over time the regional economic strategy and the skills priorities should be influencing what goes on, for example, in the new diplomas and apprenticeships. As my colleague has said, he attends the existing regional board in the North West and challenges there in terms of ensuring that the plans in draft meet the needs of the regional economy as described in the RES. I believe that we have a good relationship that is both positive and challenging at the moment. I am not totally sure what we would gain by your suggestion. It is a lot to merge.

Q656 Paul Holmes: Do both of you think that London is going in the wrong direction by becoming one body that effectively is told what to do by Ken Livingston?

Mr Broomhead: We wait with interest to see how in the medium term that works out in practice. At the moment I understand that it is a set of strategic relationships between the London LSC and the mayor to try to address the big strategic issues and plan on a more London-wide basis. I am not certain that it is a merger, but I may be wrong.

Q657 Paul Holmes: But in practice the London Skills and Employment Board is headed by Ken Livingston and the London LSC will implement what it is told to do by that body, so in effect in London the LSC has been taken over.

Mr Korzeniewski: Obviously, that is a description. If I may just reflect on the differences between London and the North West, London is a region, as I understand it. The mayor's responsibilities are the same as the geography of the London region of the LSC, whereas there is no parallel for that in the North West of England. I guess that the nearest kind of employment and skills board might be Greater Manchester or Greater Merseyside as that comes forward. That would not have the same relationship with the region as the London arrangements simply because of geography. Part of the complexity for the LSC is to manage national priorities alongside regional and sub-regional ones. I think that is part of the skill of working within the learning and skills council. Whereas I can see how complexity can be dealt with in that way in London for the reasons I have suggested, I am not sure that it can be done in the same way in the North West.

Q658 Paul Holmes: But are you not saying, therefore, that London is one city and has an identity and so it is okay there but in the North West you have the needs of Manchester which are very different from rural needs elsewhere in that region? Is that not an argument for going back to the 47 LSCs instead of having a regional LSC?

Mr Korzeniewski: That would be five in the North West, which was the structure before. What we have worked hard at - I hope that you are starting to see it come through - is exactly that regional dimension in the North West which puts us in a better place than when we were five separate local councils reporting nationally and almost missing out the step of asking: what is our contribution to the regional economic strategy?

Mr Broomhead: In our region we have five sub-regional partners which are made up of the public, private and voluntary sectors. They work alongside the regional LSC and RDA particularly in offering economic intelligence about areas that require public or private sector investment. When the Bill is passed we will see the demise of the 47. They are also very costly; all have overheads. I am very conscious about my overheads with CSR around the corner. We have seen their demise. But employers in those areas want to have their say about skills issues. Our model has been that employers will work with the existing structure - the sub‑regional partnerships - to make sure that the skills voice and strategies are dealt with there. That will feed into the work of the LSC and RDA at regional level.

Q659 Paul Holmes: The North West has a good reputation and you say that you work well together, but imagine a hypothetical region where the person in charge of the learning and skills council just takes no notice of what the RDA says and goes off on different paths. What mechanism would stop that?

Mr Broomhead: I should have said the very nature of our relationship is that the North West leads for all RDAs on skills issues. If that was the case and there was tension-------

Q660 Chairman: How do you get on with them?

Mr Broomhead: Each RDA has a particular role for a particular department or policy area, so for example Yorkshire leads for the Treasury; the South West leads for DCMS. Each one of us takes a policy role. Whilst we are regionally focused we have to work across the national policy agenda. I have forgotten my train of thought.

Q661 Chairman: You were telling us about Ed Balls being a Yorkshire MP.

Mr Broomhead: We lead on skills because we volunteered to do that.

Q662 Paul Holmes: But what about the mechanism that would stop the LSC going off at a tangent in any given region?

Mr Broomhead: First, we deal with that at a national level in a proper way because of the relationships that we have in our RDAs with the LSC. One also has the regional skills partnerships and what they do should not be underestimated. They work within the context of the national policy framework and targets and also within the regional economic strategy. Therefore, if my colleague was being difficult he would have to deal with those issues through that employer-led regional skills partnership. I do not believe that those employers and other people from the public sector would allow those tensions to continue.

Q663 Paul Holmes: There is no hard and fast rule or regulation; it is down to the commonsense functioning of the groups within the region?

Mr Broomhead: Yes, and also the way in which our boards relate. I have a private sector-led board, so if there were tensions there I would have to report back to government. Ultimately, the RDA is accountable to government.

Q664 Paul Holmes: Therefore, neither of the witnesses thinks it is necessary or a good idea to go down the London route? When the Further Education and Training Bill goes through it will place a direct requirement on the LSC in London to implement the adult budget according to the London Skills Employment Board's plan; in other words, it will do as it is told by Ken Livingston's body?

Mr Broomhead: I do not believe it is necessary in my region for me and my colleague to sign a memorandum of understanding to say we will love each other for all time. It depends I think on clear agreed strategies and good close working relationships, which I think we have.

Q665 Mr Pelling: I do not think that things are as simple as they may seem in London. The mayor does not really have powers of direction over the LSC; otherwise, things would have been merged. From my understanding of London's point of view there is a desperate need for level 1 training skills to be inculcated. Were you saying in your previous answers that there needed to be greater sophistication in terms of government setting different targets regionally?

Mr Broomhead: There has been a very strong focus on levels 1 and 2 and those skills that are about employability and productivity. We have said very strongly to the DfES in the Leitch consultation that whilst that is fine in our region there is a need for levels 3 and 4 if we are to increase economic competitiveness. We need more freedom to deal with that in our region. I hope that Leitch will give us those freedoms in order to move that forward.

Mr Korzeniewski: If you start from the regional economic strategy, as we have suggested, in the North West it talks about the needs for skills at levels 3 and 4, but it also talks about the needs of those who have no skill at all, which I guess is very similar to what you have described for London. There is not that much difference between national targets and what is required on the ground. They are pretty sound. But there are nuances; people in need of level 2 already have level 1 and there are subtleties like that. That is often quite micro in the solution rather than big picture policy stuff. That is the kind of skill that is developed in each region about understanding those slight differences.

Q666 Mr Pelling: LSCs have always been condemned as being dominated by Coventry. What leverage do you believe can be applied by government particularly in the case of London to be able to argue the benefits of such flexibility?

Mr Korzeniewski: I do not feel dominated by the dead hand of Coventry. Clearly, I have to account for the delivery of national targets in the North West region through the LSCs route. That is a serious process but, as you have heard from my colleague, he also has an expectation that we will deliver to the region that which the region needs. That is often the same thing. There are however occasions when one is pooling money and making use of other money. For example, we have ESF funds in the North West that we can bring to the table and small funds from the RDA. We spend quite a lot of money on level 3. We cannot go to level 5 of course. Therefore, that is the challenge we face on the ground in the region. I simply make the point that I think that is best done at regional level rather than in five different places in a region.

Q667 Mr Carswell: What would happen to the skills base and the wider economy in the North West if the North West Learning and Skills Council and the North West Regional Development Agency did not exist?

Mr Broomhead: The development agency works to its own targets which include a contribution to the wider skills targets. We have a series of economic targets around brownfield land, skills, employment, new businesses and so on which are audited by the National Audit Office and signed off at ministerial level. In terms of the number of jobs created, for example, we have always met those targets. I think the question to ask is: if we did not exist would those jobs still be created by the market? Probably not. To go back to my example of the BBC's move to the North West, if it had not been for the RDA working very strongly with the BBC and the private sector, with the support of government, those jobs would not be moving to the North West, generating and levering in additional jobs and skills opportunities. I think that in terms of the RDA we have a very good, evaluated, evidence-based and auditable track record. We have made a significant contribution to economic growth and GVA performance.

Mr Korzeniewski: If the question is that the money is still there but the organisation is not then that is one answer. If the question is about the public funding not being there as well as the learning and skills council there is a different answer. Clearly, employers spend a lot of money on training and development and skills, but I think they spend it in a different way from government might wish some of it to be spent. We are probably talking about market failure. It may well be that spending on higher levels skills would still be there but there would be an issue about people without skills and whether or not employers would pay for them. It would be a question of market failure. If the public funding was available there would still need to be a mechanism for distributing it, however it was set up. Even in a demand-led system what we see is our role changing from perhaps originally when we were more involved in planning to a body that is more concerned with ensuring that that system works but in a different way.

Q668 Mr Carswell: Given how critically important you are to the economy of the North West, talk me through the mechanism of local accountability to people who live in that region. How are you directly accountable?

Mr Broomhead: As for the RDA, obviously we are accountable upwards to government through our sponsoring department. We are audited by the National Audit Office. Each RDA has recently been inspected. We have our own version of Ofsted through the NAO's independent performance system.

Q669 Mr Carswell: What about downward accountability?

Mr Broomhead: That would be, first, to the regional assembly which is made up of elected politicians and the private sector. Under the terms of the 1999 RDA Act they have responsibility for the scrutiny of RDA's policy and the performance of its projects. Therefore, there is democratic accountability there. There is a discussion going on with government about whether that is strong enough and it should be improved. We also have accountability through communication systems. We have regular dialogues with MPs and an annual general meeting. For the four years I have been in this job we regularly have a turnout at the AGM of 600 people. Obviously, we are a quango and suffer from the same issues about democratic accountability as other bodies.

Q670 Mr Carswell: Accountability is to officials in Whitehall and the regional assembly and that is about it?

Mr Broomhead: There are other routes. It depends on how one believes accountability works. There is a regular dialogue with local authorities about the nature of the work we are doing, but in a formal sense our accountability at local level is derived through the regional assembly.

Q671 Chairman: What about local MPs in the region? Is that part of your accountability?

Mr Broomhead: I think that is a very important part of our accountability. We have dialogues and email updates once a week and regular meetings with MPs. There is perhaps a debate to be had about whether that is strong enough and there should be more. Should there be a select committee for each region? Should there be a select committee for the regions, or one MP who is responsible for the whole of the region and is given accountability to Parliament? All those things are being discussed at the moment as part of the sub‑national review.

Q672 Mr Carswell: Given what some people might characterise as a big democratic deficit and a problem with accountability, I am quite interested in some of the matters that Ken Livingston proposes. Is it not the case that his proposal will basically make a quango that has responsibility but very little accountability finally accountable and answerable for delivering skills in London? Should that not be rolled out elsewhere?

Mr Korzeniewski: It is difficult for me to talk about London because I read about it rather than become involved in it.

Chairman: Would you not like to be elected? You could handle skills in the North West and run for election?

Q673 Mr Carswell: If people were not happy they could let you know and something would be done about it.

Mr Korzeniewski: My answer on accountability would be similar to my colleague's. We have the ministerial route through the LSC's chief executive. We have also been scrutinised this year by the regional assembly. We are trying to ensure that our new area teams meet with their MPs. We also work very closely with local government through local strategic partnerships. Obviously, it is about a smaller geographic area, but it is an increasingly close relationship with us, but the simple fact is that our councils are not elected.

Q674 Mr Marsden: The RDA has been very supportive of Blackpool's position. We have heard a lot of discussion in previous meetings of the Committee about how important it is to have a sub-regional strategy and how little Leitch has talked about this. Do you believe that there is more to be done in that area? Mr Korzeniewski, there has been a lot of talk about the importance of funding enabling skills for older learners, accepting the Government's present overall priority. Is that something on which you believe you have a grip, or is it something on which you allow other people to get a grip in the North West?

Mr Korzeniewski: Perhaps you would put the second point again.

Q675 Mr Marsden: We have heard a lot of controversy about the funding of enabling skills, or so-called soft skills. Is that something on which you feel you have a handle or is it something on which you are letting colleges and other providers have a handle in the North West?

Mr Broomhead: If I may take the first point, earlier I referred to the fact that in the North West we were moving from five separate LSC boards to one regional board. Clearly, we need to make sure that at sub-regional level, for instance Lancashire, employers feel they can have an input into the wider skills agenda so that input can then be reflected in strategies and plans and ultimately resources put into the sub-region. We want to do that. We are not creating another body, which would be complete madness, but linking that into the sub‑regional partnership which in this case is the Lancashire economic partnership. I think that there is a challenge within Leitch because Leitch talks about the establishment of employment and skills boards either within cities or other places. One of the matters about which RDAs seek clarification from the DfES is the exact purpose of those employment and skills boards and what would be their spatial definition. If we are not careful there is a danger that everybody will want an employment and skills board and we will get back to where we were before and we do not deal with the simplification agenda that we need to tackle.

Mr Korzeniewski: We are involved in conversations about the sub-regional dimension in our work going forward in the new world. We have met the chief executive in Blackpool as part of our conversations within the Lancashire office. In terms of the kinds of skills on offer, there are a number of answers to it. One is that qualifications reform is a central part of a demand-led system. One can see very easily how they can be bought-in qualifications, if that is what employers want. That is one part of the answer. The other part of the answer is that insofar as that is made manifest through the regional economic strategy - you are quite right that it is one thing that employers say they want - if it is given that level of publicity, as it were, it will become even more of a priority for Rose in terms of seeking solutions. But I believe that qualifications reform as a systemic matter must underpin that kind of change.

Q676 Paul Holmes: You have been doing the pilot on Train to Gain for level 3?

Mr Broomhead: Yes.

Q677 Paul Holmes: We have received evidence to suggest that so far it has been a disaster because people have been asked to pay 50 per cent of the fees themselves. The initial enrolment was miniscule. You have cut the contribution to one third. Has that made any difference?

Mr Broomhead: In simple terms, we have to evaluate the issue and project. Certainly, for some individuals the level of fees that they have been asked to contribute has come as a shock to the system.

Q678 Chairman: We are witnessing the collapse of the whole system of lifelong learning, are we not? I do not know about the North West, but the national figures are a disaster, are they not?

Mr Broomhead: Bodies such as NIAS and others who have given evidence here would say that.

Q679 Chairman: But the statistics show that, do they not? The number of people enrolling in courses has dropped by half a million. Surely, that is reflected in the North West, is it not?

Mr Korzeniewski: The statistics do show that and it is reflected in the North West, but the number of adults in the system who gain qualifications is growing. In the sense of the priorities being achieved the picture is a positive one.

Q680 Chairman: How do you judge whether or not it is positive, because some people say that Train to Gain is much too narrow for many employers and they want other stuff but they are not allowed to have it. They can have Train to Gain. It is like the early model Ford: you can have it in any colour you like as long as it is black. You can have training but it must be Train to Gain and for a lot of employers it is not appropriate.

Mr Korzeniewski: I see Train to Gain as a process. In terms of the training outcome you are quite right; it has been focused on level 2 with the grain of policy, but we have seen the level 3 pilot coming through, which obviously is to be evaluated. In the North West we are trialling some higher education as well through other mechanisms as part of the Train to Gain offer. A broader offer is being tested and trialled.

Q681 Chairman: You are not elected people. Are you not being a bit cautious because you are worried about upsetting people? Mr Broomhead was nodding quite strongly when I put my question. There is something really wrong with this. If we do not turn it around fast and tell the Government there is something really wrong the training opportunities of a lot of people will be lost. Is that not the truth? Are you not being a little timid?

Mr Broomhead: We agree that there is an issue, and that is why we say that the whole thing needs proper evaluation. We are aware of the cost to the individual of level 3.

Q682 Chairman: Back in your college principal days you would have been really exercised about this, would you not?

Mr Broomhead: Yes, I think we would, but we have seen cycles of policy emphasis. Back in 1997 the matter on everybody's lips was the Kennedy report which was about the celebration of lifelong learning which was not necessarily always linked to public resources supporting qualifications. We are now moving towards Leitch which is much more fundamentalist and vocational. It seems as though public sector funding should be made available only to qualifications. I think that is a very big policy debate for government to have, particularly for those people with literacy and numeracy difficulties.

Mr Korzeniewski: There has been a shift over 10 years from widening participation to the economic mission of further education that we are seeing in practice.

Q683 Chairman: But we cannot have both?

Mr Broomhead: I think you can have both but it depends on what the Bill will be. I imagine that that will be an issue for government when it looks at the total cost of implementing Leitch. You can have both; you can have lifelong learning imbedded within workforce development strategies, but whether or not you can continue to put public resources into what we call non-schedule 2 courses - flower arranging, pottery and so on - is an interesting question for the future.

Q684 Paul Holmes: To go back to the initial question, with your pilot on level 3 and 50 per cent fees, is it your advice to government that this will not work and people and employers will just not pay, or is it too early to say?

Mr Broomhead: It is too early to say. I think that is why we both agree that we need to evaluate it.

Q685 Paul Holmes: The initial take-up was non-existent, so it cannot be too early to say, surely?

Mr Korzeniewski: I think that over the summer we will see a media campaign to encourage employers and individuals to consider the importance of skills. When that comes through and it has been a continuous part of the landscape, as it were, we will start to see differences. It is a bit like the Gremlins campaign; it puts the issue of basic skills more public and more firmly in people's minds. Obviously, it is a very fast-changing environment in which we are working, but that will be a very important part of getting across the whole skills agenda to individuals as well as employers. That might well change the proportion that people are prepared to pay for the benefits they get through qualifications.

Q686 Chairman: We have enjoyed the intellectual capacity of both of you and have learnt a lot in this session. Is it worth our going to the North West to see it for ourselves?

Mr Korzeniewski: Yes; you would be very welcome.

Q687 Chairman: Can you put on some really informative stuff for us or help in that regard?

Mr Korzeniewski: Of course we will do that, Chairman.

Q688 Chairman: Is there anything you want to say to the Committee before we finish?

Mr Broomhead: No, but thank you for the opportunity.

Mr Korzeniewski: Do come to the North West.

Memorandum submitted by EEF, the manufacturers' organisation

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Professor Frank Coffield, Institute of Education, and Ms Lee Hopley, Senior Economist, EEF, the manufacturers' organisation, gave evidence.

Q689 Chairman: I welcome Professor Frank Coffield and Lee Hopley from the Engineering Employers Federation. Ms Hopley, you were supposed to be here with a colleague, Mr Steven Pedley.

Ms Hopley: No. The last communication expressed a preference for just one of us to attend.

Q690 Chairman: Is that so? I am informed that you decided to send two but withdrew one. I shall be writing to your president because I do not expect witnesses to change at the last minute.

Ms Hopley: As far as we were concerned, we were asked to send one witness.

Q691 Chairman: We never make a mistake. I will be in touch with your president. You heard what we talked about earlier. You are here because you have some expertise that we need to tap into. Professor Coffield, you are known to have very strong opinions. You have published some very interesting and robust opinions about skills training. Lee Hopley, your organisation has called for the abolition of all sorts of things. You want the sector skills councils to be culled, do you not?

Ms Hopley: We think that there should be fewer of them.

Q692 Chairman: That means you want to get rid of some?

Ms Hopley: Yes.

Q693 Chairman: Do you want to get rid of your one?

Ms Hopley: It covers quite a broad footprint unlike some of the others that cover very narrow areas.

Q694 Chairman: Therefore, do you want to get rid of your big one or the narrow ones?

Ms Hopley: We have not said which ones specifically we think should be merged or should go.

Q695 Chairman: We can guess that you will not be abolishing yours.

Ms Hopley: It is up for debate.

Q696 Chairman: Professor Coffield, where are we in all this? You heard the earlier session and know that we are trying to get under the skin of this. What on earth is going on in our skills provision? I thought that session came to life at the end when we got some honest opinions. In the nicest sense, they were both bureaucrats who had to tack when different policies and fashions came along. There have been lots of fashions and different policies over the past few years, have there not?

Professor Coffield: Over the past 10 years, let alone the past 100 years, there has been far too much change and too much proliferation of policy. I saw the amount of memoranda that you were being deluged with so I restricted myself to two charts. One deals with the sector as a whole.

Q697 Chairman: I like to think they are some of the simpler charts that we have received in this inquiry. We are very grateful for it.

Professor Coffield: I should like to make a couple of points as a result of the chart. First, the reason I am here is that I am the principal investigator of a study funded by the SRC on the post-compulsory sector. I have been doing this for the past three and a half years and am currently writing a book on it. The chart comes from the first chapter. The first thing I say is that this is the result of endless tinkering by different governments and different administrations at different times. We do not have one coherent system; we have a sector which is unbelievably complex. The first and obvious conclusion I reached when I looked at it three years ago was that we needed simplification and rationalisation. Over the years I have come to the conclusion that more change would be a mistake. I think that a cost benefit analysis must take place before any further change is introduced to this sector. The advantages are obvious. One would have less duplication and overlap and administrative savings; one might have clearer roles and responsibilities, and one would certainly have clear communication. The whole system might be less baffling to learners and all those who work on it. Our research has shown that there are huge disadvantages from the constant turbulence in the sector. There are economic costs and redundancy costs in abolishing the 47 LSCs. Considerable numbers of people were paid off with large sums to the public purse. There are also human costs. A lot of people out there whom we have interviewed are very angry with the system and the way it has treated them both within public organisations and among employers. The Government is trying to involve more and more employers, but all those good employers who came forward and went on the councils of the 47 LSCs have now been disbanded. To put it mildly, they are disgruntled.

Q698 Chairman: Especially as they had been members of the training and enterprise councils beforehand?

Professor Coffield: But usually it has been another set, so there is a serial group of employers who are being upset by government. There is also the loss of social capital. One of the interesting things I heard when sitting behind the two witnesses this afternoon was how well those two men got on. It takes time to build up social capital in the form of good relationships, personal relationships and networks. Those two men know of the possible duplication and overlap between their two organisations. I would leave them alone now to get on with it. A general factor that has been created by the endless change is the spread of uncertainty. The people working in these bodies are losing commitment to the whole organisation because they are waiting for the next reorganisation to come post-Leitch. My last point is that every time you restructure you lose two to three years. You are diverted from the main tasks by the meeting of targets. I think that the heart of the system is teaching and learning. You will notice that at the bottom of the system I squeezed in the learners who are supposedly the beneficiaries of all this public money. They are the people who are neglected. There is endless talk about the structures, roles and responsibilities of organisations, but what we should really be talking about is: how do the most disadvantaged learners get on in this sector?

Q699 Chairman: Ms Hopley, what is your view on this?

Ms Hopley: I very much agree with what Professor Coffield has said. The learning and skills sector has been in a state of flux for some time particularly from the point of view of infrastructure. In addition to many of the points already raised, there is an issue as to employer engagement. It is apparently so important to the learning and skills councils, the regional skills partnerships and sector skills councils, but particularly for small and medium size companies that have an interest and want to become engaged in the learning and skills sector. How do they do it most efficiently? Where is their voice best heard? Is it at the regional level, the sectoral level or with the LSC? I think it is very confusing for employers who wish to become involved and influence the system to know how best to do that.

Q700 Fiona Mactaggart: When I discovered that the two witnesses would appear together I thought that perhaps the clerk was trying to play a joke on me. It seems to me that in very fundamental ways you disagree. Professor Coffield would argue for more compulsion on employers. In his lecture in December that was one of the things he suggested might assist - correct me if I have it wrong - whereas that is anathema to the employers federation. To summarise it, the federation argues for a market and Professor Coffield argues for equity being more of a driving force. It seems to me that there are some real conflicts in your evidence, but you concur on one important issue, that is, the muddled landscape, in the language of the federation, which is summarised by the chart that has been produced. There is a muddled landscape. I think you may argue for sorting out the muddle in different ways. I have heard Professor Coffield say that we should not change anything but do we want the music to stop now? I think one does want to change some things. Can you deal with the critical changes that are necessary to make the landscape less muddled? What would you get rid of?

Professor Coffield: I want to correct you on the question of compulsion. The one thing that I like about Leitch - I do not like much about it - is the pledge of employers. I think that we need a half-way house to give them time finally to put their house in order. I studied the TECs and remember Mr Hollins saying that they were the last throw of voluntarism. We have been through all that; we have had 20 years to try the TECs and it has not worked. This is the last chance for the employers to put their own house in order. I think that they are entitled to that and to be told that government will act by 2010 if the SMEs do not move. We have wonderful employers in this country but they are islands of excellence in a sea of indifference. It is that sea of indifference and cultural changes in this country that are incredibly difficult to deal with. I would give the employers the extra time and only then would I move to compulsion.

Q701 Fiona Mactaggart: Is that the only change you would make, or are you answering the first part of my question? I should like you to answer the whole of it.

Professor Coffield: I think the sector is crying out for a period of consolidation. Any more changes risk meeting the major targets that Leitch has put in front of the sector. I think that it would cause more harm than good to go for more structural change.

Ms Hopley: As to compulsion, there is a range of factors and constraints that firms face when accessing training. For example, the Chairman kicked off the session by giving the example of a large construction company that could not find its way round funding or accessing training. Imagine that being done by a firm of 25 which does not have dedicated HR or training personnel. It will be incredibly difficult just to find what one needs. The last thing one wants to do is to send someone off to do a part-time or nine-month qualification and end up not meeting the objectives. That will be incredibly off-putting. I believe that Train to Gain has a valuable role to play here and it could help to smooth some of the complexity for smaller firms and help them access the best form of training. There are also issues around stimulating demand, particularly in relation to smaller firms. From a manufacturing point of view that is where organisations such as the Manufacturing Advisory Service can step in. They are well regarded within the industry. It looks at things like generating productivity improvements. The next step on from that if one wants to sustain those productivity improvements is to consider whether some training in x, y or z would be appropriate in order to gain benefits from some productivity-type intervention and refer them to a skills broker. The same could be said of things like the Design Council of the Carbon Trust, for example, when making investments in energy-efficient equipment. But I think that the landscape needs to be sorted out and there must be a supply of information and advice for small and medium size companies, ensuring that the training that is required is available. Leitch picked up on the whole predict-and-provide approach before. It has not delivered that in every case. Even the LSC mentioned earlier that it was moving away from trying to predict what employers need and then provide it. It is becoming more of a funding body in response to demand. Before one starts to talk about compulsion one needs to get smaller firms in the main to train better and ensure that the training required as part of a business strategy is there.

Q702 Fiona Mactaggart: You referred to something else which I thought was in common between the two bits of evidence, that is, the need for a stronger connection between skills in the economy generally and productivity. I thought that was a uniting factor in both sets of evidence. Ms Hopley has given one example, but I would be interested in any other examples of how that could be done. I think it is quite important for us as politicians to assist if we can in order to create a stronger demand for appropriate skills.

Professor Coffield: My example is that I think there needs to be more clarity in policy about what some of this training is for. Some of it is clearly for equity. In the research we have been doing we have met many employees who have never been trained in 20 years. They have had no training whatsoever and yet they are doing important and dangerous jobs, for example street lighting. Suddenly, they now have to do health and safety, which is all to the good but does not improve productivity. I think we should be clearer that some courses are for reasons of social equity, for example young people coming from school without basic qualifications in English and maths. That is a deep failure of the school system that should be put right. On the other hand, we must not forget that a large part of the training should be about improving the quality of training and the goods and services that we are producing. That is another type of training altogether and that is what will drive up productivity, not social equity training. The two are constantly confused in policy.

Q703 Fiona Mactaggart: Do you concur with the evidence given to us by the Engineering Employers Federation that, "Key skills should no longer be a compulsory component of frameworks; instead, we believe that the Government should ensure" - I would love to know how - "that those leaving state education have key skills at least at level 2"? We are trying. Looking at both sets of evidence I have a feeling that there is a slight sense in which others should do other things and you will do these things. Professor Coffield, one of the themes of your evidence is that teachers should be left to teach, for which I much support, but you are saying that we should get rid of all this fluff; we need to teach and learn, whereas you, Ms Hopley, say that you should be allowed to do the stuff that you want to do. In a way, our job is to try to make sure that all the other bits are done. How will we do that?

Ms Hopley: You are referring to the basic issue of skills and that is where the pledge comes in. Qualifications up to full level 2 are now paid for through Train to Gain. Employers will be given the opportunity to sign up to the pledge. Clearly, it is unacceptable that there are people in the workforce with inadequate numeracy and literacy skills which will also be a problem for employers. If they need to build on those with other skills, not necessarily full qualifications, that needs to be remedied. There is a question as to whether or not that should happen in the workplace. Clearly, people should not be entering the workforce without basic numeracy and literacy skills, but it happens.

Q704 Fiona Mactaggart: Should it prevent them getting employment?

Ms Hopley: Obviously, I am not saying that. I guess it comes down to what employers are willing to pay for. Employers are willing to pay for higher-level skills, less so to rectify to failings of the school system. Training paid for by the public purse is available, but there must also be a demand from individuals because sometimes they are unwilling to admit that they have a problem or that it is embarrassing; or they do not want to do it on their own time. I do not think we have quite got the balance between the individual's responsibility and the responsibility of the employer in the workplace.

Q705 Chairman: Professor Coffield, Ms Mactaggart is making a serious accusation.

Professor Coffield: What accusation?

Q706 Chairman: I think she is saying that you are flaffing around a bit in terms of the evidence you have given. On the one hand you do not want anything changed; on the other you do. You have your cake and eat it.

Professor Coffield: There is one thing that I do want changed, and could be changed. This sector suffers desperately from a number of young people who come from schools with poor qualifications, or no qualifications.

Q707 Chairman: But all the evidence given to this Committee is that it is improving year on year.

Professor Coffield: But you are still left with about 45 per cent. Because you are concentrating on those who can get qualifications you neglect those who cannot.

Q708 Chairman: We on the Committee know that they do not all get five As to Cs, but you cannot extrapolate from that that 45 per cent are not fit to go into employment.

Professor Coffield: I did not say that; those are your words, not mine. I am saying that they are leaving without decent qualifications. Their English and mathematics have been neglected by the schools.

Q709 Chairman: To settle it, are you saying that 45 per cent leave without decent qualifications? If they do not get the As to Cs they do not have decent qualifications - full stop?

Professor Coffield: They do not have good qualifications in the basic skills. If you look at any FE college they come in with serious deficits. One of the things that we need to build into the system is the foundation learning tier. A very useful, thoughtful suggestion, which incidentally came from the LSCs, is that there is not enough investment in young people coming in at 16 and 17 to bring them up to standard. They do not need to be at level 1 and level 2; they need to be at level 3 to stand a chance in employment in future, and yet here they come in at level 1 from schools. Our research shows that the FE colleges do an excellent job. One of their great successes is that they turn young people back onto education who have been turned off it by 11 years of neglect in schools, because they will never get to the Cs in schools. I do not blame teachers; it is an indirect consequence of government policy. The significance that is attached to those targets means that teachers cannot deal with everybody and so they concentrate on driving up those Ds and Es who can become Cs. It is the people underneath that, the Ds, Es and Fs, who will never become Cs and are neglected. We need targets for them, and that is a serious problem for the future. If you look at the other figures NEET numbers are not going down. The Government was very successful in early years but they are now beginning to creep up.

Q710 Fiona Mactaggart: Dealing with that very point, you have just proposed a change, which I would support, but what you have done is what politicians do, ie you have identified a particular problem area which is a group of young people who are capable of being well served in FE. Not all of them get into FE but it is clear that the further education sector is rather good at dealing with this class of young person.

Professor Coffield: But no one else wants to teach them.

Q711 Fiona Mactaggart: What you are saying is that we should have targets for them. That is exactly what you have criticised the Government for doing when faced with a problem like this. I am not trying to trick you, but that is what politics is like. One says that in order to tackle one bit of the problem one takes a bunch of people who are good at dealing with it and give them that job and one probably needs to name the job in order to make sure it happens. That is what you have done and yet in your paper you say we should not do that; they should decide it for themselves.

Professor Coffield: I do not think I said the second part of that at all. What I ask for is more equity for this section of the community. Suppose we begin to treat the group I describe as well as higher education students and fund them at anything like the same level. People who teach in FE get less than those who teach the same subject in schools. People who teach in adult and community education get less than FE; people in work-based learning get less than others. There are deep inequalities in the system. I ask for some of those inequities to be treated. The DfES's memorandum to this Committee says that when resources allow it will do something for this group. I do not think that is good enough; I think we should move quickly to invest heavily in this area and drive down the NEET group as quickly as possible.

Q712 Chairman: You describe a situation that we all know about: for far too long young people in the education system have not had their needs and potentials recognised and serviced, but to be fair here is a government that has increasingly promoted post‑14 education for young people to get out of school and into work-based learning and FE. You can go to the average FE college and find hundreds, if not thousands, of 14 to 16s. This is not a government that is doing only the same thing; here is a government that has changed quite a lot of policy in order to liberate those 14 to 16s sitting at the back of the class who may not be academic scholars but may have a lot of potential in other directions.

Professor Coffield: I give you that point. It is true that this Government has paid more attention to this sector than any government previously, and the investments are significant. All I point out is that in the FE colleges that we have visited for the past three years there is still a major inequality between the investment that goes into those who aim for higher education and those who go for levels 1 and 2.

Q713 Chairman: But the per capita spending on FE has increased faster than in HE, has it not?

Professor Coffield: It is certainly not as high as it is for schools. There has been a 46 per cent increase in real terms for FE since 1997; it is 65 per cent for the schools.

Chairman: I referred to HE where spending has been much more modest.

Q714 Fiona Mactaggart: The gap between HE and FE has narrowed but it is still very significant

Professor Coffield: Yes, but one can point to another gap which is the gap between FE and schools. FE people do not really compare themselves with HE but with people who do similar work in schools, and there is still an eight per cent difference in salaries between them. Again, the Government says that it will deal with that when resources allow. If you wanted to change the atmosphere in FE colleges and bring with you the goodwill of the whole sector I would make that a major item of policy.

Q715 Fiona Mactaggart: Does your research tell you that goodwill produces learning achievement among students?

Professor Coffield: I think this Government has been very good at saying they will do a deal with people - nothing for nothing, something for something. One part of the deal would be equalised salaries and the other side would be major changes in teaching practices and investment in the development of teachers in FE. I think that could be a very good deal. You invest in them in return for more continuous professional development.

Q716 Fiona Mactaggart: I think I was asking a slightly different question to which I do not know the answer. Do we have enough understanding of what produces real gains in achievement by learners in FE? Do we know what it is that really makes the difference in their achievements?

Professor Coffield: I will give my answer and whether or not it is right I leave you to judge. I think that what makes a difference is good quality teaching; it is the quality of the staff and their commitment to students to give them a second chance and turn them back on again to education. In our research FE is full of people who are deeply committed to that and overall they do an excellent job. Of the youngsters we have interviewed the thing that has turned them round is the deep respect they have received from their tutors. That has made them respect themselves and the teachers and they begin to learn. It is that high quality relationship between tutor and student that has turned them round.

Q717 Fiona Mactaggart: Yet the higher paid teachers in schools did not give it to them?

Professor Coffield: The higher paid teachers in schools are concentrating on those who can get As, Bs and Cs because they have targets to meet.

Q718 Mr Chaytor: I want to ask about the concept of a demand-led system. First, Ms Hopley, do you assume that this is a given in terms of the future of the training system? Second, what do you understand it to be, and how would it be different from what we have currently?

Ms Hopley: I believe that the Leitch review was quite clear on the need for a demand-led system. I do not think that that means exclusively employers; individuals also have a role, but it must be underpinned by informed customers who understand what is available and what is best for their business. I do not think that is necessarily what we have at the moment. That brings me back to my point about SMEs knowing exactly what type of training will help them achieve their objectives. I think that the recent consultation on funding of a demand-led system was promising and something of which we were broadly supportive. There is a need to move away from predict and provide where lots of labour market forecasting and manpower planning are used to try to determine what provision should be made. Even as an economist I recognise that quite often forecasts are wide of the mark. There are particular difficulties with this type of labour market forecasting which looks broadly at what types of jobs will be needed in the future but says very little about what training is needed to underpin that provision. To put more purchasing power in the hands of informed customers will lead to a demand-led system which in part will be through Train to Gain. I believe that learner accounts which are to be rolled out later this year, hopefully after a successful pilot, will have a very important role to play from an individual's point of view.

Q719 Mr Chaytor: But in terms of employers the criticism over many years has been that they have been dissatisfied with the publicly available provision through the colleges. Why have they not been more proactive in either seeking out provision through private providers or delivering it themselves on site?

Ms Hopley: A lot of the training that employers access comes through private providers, less so through FE colleges. Lots of large company with the clout to go in and the critical mass of people for whom they want training do that. I think it is more difficult for a small and medium size companies. Too often they are presented with a menu of provision and they can either take it or leave it and that is not always what is necessary. Sometimes maybe a level 2 qualification may not be stretching or demanding enough but perhaps level 3 is initially too much but that is all that is on offer, so employers are given the choice to take it or leave it or find a private provider who is willing to do that. It is difficult for a small and medium size company essentially to develop training as well as everything else.

Q720 Mr Chaytor: Do you see any sign that the system has changed in the past few years?

Ms Hopley: Not particularly. I think that the brokerage offering of Train to Gain could make a difference, but that has not been going long. I do not believe there has been that much publicity of it as a national offering at the moment and I think we must wait and see.

Q721 Mr Chaytor: Professor Coffield, do you agree with Ms Hopley's analysis, or do you approach Leitch from a different point of view?

Professor Coffield: Forty years of looking at the education system in Great Britain, Scotland and England, tells me that this is the highest risk strategy I have ever seen any government propose. I am very concerned about what the outcomes might be. First, I do not understand how the demands of millions of individuals and tens of thousands of employers come together to form national priorities or respond to the public good. Second, let us try to predict what will happen in the market that will be created. Is it not likely that both private providers and colleges will start to concentrate on those courses with high volumes of students which are cheap to deliver? That is what anyone does in the market; you bring in as much money as you can quickly to preserve your organisation. What happens if that becomes the performance by both the private providers and colleges? Expensive courses are immediately threatened with low numbers and those will be engineering and construction which are the very things we need for productivity. The second thing that may happen is that courses for the disadvantaged and those with learning difficulties will not be very popular and so may be dropped. What about courses with small numbers in rural areas? I can see the LSC being forced to intervene as crisis after crisis hits the newspapers. Senior managers in colleges in two different parts of England whom we have interviewed predict major problems within five years; they see that there will be a need for another restructuring within five years if this system is introduced because it will create such serious problems. They predict serious destabilisation of a number of colleges up and down the country.

Q722 Mr Chaytor: Is your prescription just the status quo? You are not in favour of radical change in terms of structural reorganisation?

Professor Coffield: Of structures, yes.

Q723 Mr Chaytor: But in terms of the flow of funds and how they are accessed do you just argue for the status quo?

Professor Coffield: No, I do not. To come to the second chart that I sent, which is entitled "Key tasks proposed for the sector", I have added five or six to that list since I submitted it as I go on reading and trying to understand the system. I think that the sector is trying to do too much. I just wonder how much radical change the sector can cope with. Just look at the list of things they have to do. I would go for the main priorities here. I do not think we can do all of this simultaneously; they are being pushed in all sorts of directions at one and the same time. There must be a concentration on the major issues. By the way, in that respect I accept what the two previous witnesses said. The priorities differ regionally, sub-regionally and locally.

Q724 Mr Chaytor: How are the priorities to be agreed? That is part of the problem, is it not? Your priority would be the NEET group, whereas the government and employer priority would be increasing the skills of those already in the labour market.

Professor Coffield: We need both. After all, the heart of this Government's policy has been economic prosperity and social justice and both interact. Those are exactly the two priorities that I would have as well.

Q725 Mr Chaytor: You think there is a continuing role for strategic planning?

Professor Coffield: Yes.

Q726 Mr Chaytor: Is that through the LSC or RDA?

Professor Coffield: Both. The meeting this afternoon needed a bit of planning and the smoother it runs the more planning has been done. This is a small business here but compare that with trying to run all of this. How can you do all of this without planning? I think that is a bit of rhetoric on the part of Leitch; I simply do not see how you can move to another whole system of 14 to 19 without planning. Will the LSC plan the 14 to 19 but leave adult education alone and let it just go to the market?

Ms Hopley: Up to now some of the issues with planning have been the attempt to marry both a regional and sectoral approach with no one really taking the lead. I do not think there has been that much engagement between the two. Maybe the North West is different, but we have heard that some sector skills councils find it quite difficult to become engaged at regional level. For example, it was the case that one member of the skills for business network would represent the whole network on a regional skills partnership. One might have someone from Sentra covering Lantra, Cogent and e.skills in one region. That is not engagement and it is not particularly joined up. We were quite pleased that Leitch went for the sectoral approach because RDAs are essentially arbitrary regions and their economies are influenced by the sectors that make them up rather than by any geographical reasons.

Q727 Mr Chaytor: Do you think there is a problem with the way in which employers engage? There is a limit to the amount of time that any committed employer can give to being represented on the proliferation of working parties, task forces and partnership groups that have been set up. Is there a way of cutting through it or simplifying it?

Ms Hopley: I think there is. If it is to be a sector-based route and that is the way organisations that understand how businesses evolve respond to competitive challenges and how they affect the skill needs of today and in the future that is the horse you will back. We say that you should engage with the sector skills council, but at the moment it is very difficult. Does one engage with the RDA, the local LSC, regional skills partnership, the sector skills council, the EEF or CBI? If we go down the sector-based route then it is easier for companies to see how they can make a difference and where their time is best spent.

Q728 Fiona Mactaggart: If I understand Professor Coffield's paper correctly, he is more focused on neighbourhoods and local strategic partnerships as a planning centre than the sector. I think there is a conflict between these two. I represent Slough which has a very diverse economy but as a place is very powerful. How does one deal with the vision of getting everyone locally around the table, because at least they are local, or driving things via sectors? Is there not a conflict here that will never be resolved?

Ms Hopley: From a training supply point of view the needs of a steel company in the North West are not that much different from those of a steel company anywhere else in the country. The training, qualifications and national occupational standards are not different around the country. That is where sectors make a difference because they understand the needs of the industry and how the skill needs are likely to evolve, whereas it is unrealistic to expect a region to have that depth of understanding of skill needs of all the industries contained within it. That is perhaps where sectors have an advantage.

Q729 Mr Pelling: Mr Chaytor asked about demand-led skills training. Under a compulsory system would you return the moneys to the employers so that they would decide the skills training that they wanted?

Professor Coffield: We can look at what already happens in this country with construction as the model. We can look to Germany where there is a fund developed by employers regionally and locally. The large employers put in more; the smaller ones put in less. They decide on what the quality of training should be. It is done in a very harmonious way. But the advantage of that kind of system is that the culture of training changes because everyone starts to be trained. One has licences to practise in which we are very much in favour. It makes for more cultural change. One of the things that arose in the earlier session was the problem about fees going up. That is a major cultural change. In this culture neither individuals nor employers is used to paying for education and training. You can see the resistance to change. Yet with these targets all of it is supposed to happen so easily; it goes up to 371/2 per cent and then up to 50 per cent. The first time you try it it does not work; you cannot change things over night like this. In all these things the speed is too fast for cultural change.

Q730 Helen Jones: Should the responsibility of the public sector be to fund training which is specific to employers or to fund training which is transferable?

Professor Coffield: I think that the public sector should pay for the fundamental training of basic skills and so on probably up to level 2 to make sure that no one leaves schools without that. After that, I think there is a combination of advantage between the employer, individual and society. I see that as being more a matter of one third, one third and one third, but it should all be on the public purse. The situation created with Train to Gain just now is that if I was a small employer in any part of Great Britain I would watch to see how much I could get from the public purse before I trained at all. Why should I train them when there is so much public money available for just getting accreditation of the skills that my staff already have but for which they do not have qualifications?

Q731 Jeff Ennis: My first question is directed to Ms Hopley and relates to the Government's establishment of the new national commission for employment and skills. Do you see this new commission performing a useful role?

Ms Hopley: Do we know what it is going to do? Potentially, yes. With the SSDA being rolled into it there is clearly still a need for some monitoring, evaluation, licensing etc of sector skills councils. There must be oversight of those bodies. There is probably a need for one organisation that can take a strategic overview, if you like, of the skills agenda. Recently, it has been quite bitty. One has DTI doing a bit and the Treasury and Department for Education and Skills are involved. No one really had the lead. I think it is good to have a potentially independent organisation that can take that strategic overview, if that is what it will do, obviously taking direction from national government policy but also having a feel for what is going on on the ground through sector skills councils, RDAs etc. That may have been missing in the way that the Skills Alliance and various other organisations have come together to date.

Q732 Jeff Ennis: Given the evidence you have submitted, are you disappointed that the learning and skills councils were not also brought into the commission?

Ms Hopley: At the moment I do not have the detail to see what the relationship between the two will be. I imagine that it would be close since it would be a national funding body.

Q733 Jeff Ennis: Given your earlier responses, Professor Coffield, about letting sleeping dogs lie in terms of restructuring, do you have any views on that?

Professor Coffield: I would be poking the dogs all the time but I would leave them where they are. Look at what Leitch suggests. He wants to relicense the LSCs and they are not three years old. That is the English problem, if I may say so. The LSC is still working through the last reorganisation; it has not completed it. Not all the teams are in place throughout the country to move from 47 LSCs to 148 local partnership teams. Before we even have them in place we are off on another reorganisation. I think this is a diversion.

Ms Hopley: I do not think it is the intention to re-license LSCs straight away. That was always going to happen as part of the process.

Professor Coffield: I just give it as an example of the constant turbulence in this sector.

Q734 Jeff Ennis: You feel that the situation will not help at all but will make it worse?

Professor Coffield: I think this change would divert most people in the sector away from their main job: to have fewer targets than we have at present and to concentrate upon improving the quality of teaching and learning. Those are the major issues that I believe face the sector.

Q735 Stephen Williams: Ms Hopley, as regards Train to Gain the evidence that your organisation put forward was that employers would value that service only if it was impartial as well as knowledgeable, but one of the problems that you also identified was that the brokers were given targets by government and had to deliver or emphasise certain courses and a lot of the funding is now directed at level 2 rather than elsewhere. Do you think that impedes their impartial nature?

Ms Hopley: One part of Train to Gain is the funding element. The brokerage is open to levels beyond level 2. If an employer wants to access level 3 a broker can provide options as to where that can be found but there is not necessarily public funding available. It would be inappropriate if they said they should do level 2 if the employer demanded level 3. That is not what the brokerage service is designed to do. The initial feedback on the brokerage service that we have had has been broadly positive. There are issues to do with individual brokers perhaps, but most of what we have heard is basically a training issue; it is not a massive hurdle that cannot be overcome. They have to be impartial; they cannot act on behalf of a particular college or try to push things. To my knowledge, they do not have targets which means that they must push through x number of level 2 qualifications.

Q736 Stephen Williams: Several college principals have said to me in the past that they think Train to Gain gets in the way. Maybe they speak from the perspective of seeing themselves as good colleges because good colleges know their local employment market and have good relations with employers. These brokers are more of a barrier and unnecessary intermediary whereas employers and colleges could be closer together. Is the impression of the particular sector that you represent that these brokers are needed because that bridge is not there?

Ms Hopley: Are you talking specifically about further education colleges?

Q737 Stephen Williams: Yes.

Ms Hopley: The use of further education colleges by employers is pretty low. I think the last national employer skills survey showed that less than 20 per cent of employers used FE colleges.

Q738 Stephen Williams: Why do you think that is?

Ms Hopley: Perhaps because the training that they demand is not offered or they have an arrangement with a private provider that can tailor provision which is available at their premises which perhaps the FE college cannot provide. There are a number of reasons.

Q739 Chairman: It could be cheaper?

Ms Hopley: Or it might not be. I do not know; it would depend on the content. Brokers are not confined to recommending further education colleges either. They have to outline where the provision is, whether it be in an FE college or a private provider; it is the one that is most appropriate for the employer.

Q740 Stephen Williams: Have you come across any evidence that the brokers are improving the relationship between employers and FE colleges?

Ms Hopley: I think it is too soon to say. It is intended to have a feedback loop where a broker will recommend some provision; people will be sent on training and there will be a follow-up to see whether the objectives have been met or whether the employ wants to take it further with additional training. For the length of time Train to Gain has been up and running I do not think we can be that far through the feedback loop.

Q741 Stephen Williams: Professor Coffield, I enjoyed your lecture - admittedly I skim-read it - in particular your description of the learning and skills sector as a vast and complex world and your invitation to the audience to hold onto their mind in case they lost it during the course of the lecture, perhaps when they looked at the various diagrams. You also say that it is a world that remains invisible to most politicians, academics and commentators. The Chairman often remarks that when we have these sessions we have a few commentators here. Are you basically saying that in this country policy-making is elitist and most of the people here who comment on what we do just have no empathy with or understanding of the skills needs of the majority of the population?

Professor Coffield: I do not think lack of empathy is the problem; they just do not have experience. Having interviewed 131 officials, my experience is that none has come through this sector; they have all gone through the sector that I went through: grammar schools, universities and onwards. But we have a group of six million learners in society and most people do not know the work of FE colleges. Adult community centres or work-based learning is another world for most policy-makers. The other problem is that there is not a lack of empathy; it is the amount of change and churning that goes on within the Civil Service. It is very difficult to go back either to the LSC or the DfES on a particular issue and find the same person in charge. We have been doing this study for three and a half years. The only constant in that time is my own research team. We are the only ones who have stayed together; everyone else has changed both in FE colleges and throughout the sector. Because of the turbulence everyone is moving round, sometimes from box to box within the sector, but they wear a different hat and have different loyalties.

Q742 Stephen Williams: But is there any alternative to that? Basically, you despair at the 21^st century method of policy-making with revolving doors and a minister's need to hold onto his agenda every day in case somebody else tries to blow him off it. Is there any alternative to making policy?

Professor Coffield: I believe that in one of its latest documents the strategy unit at the Cabinet Office has suggested that maybe if we had more senior civil servants shadowing principals of colleges and other major parts of the sector, seeing it at the grass roots and being alongside it to observe the strains and tensions in making all these policies work simultaneously instead of just talking about it, that would be immensely helpful. That suggestion comes from government.

Q743 Stephen Williams: Several of us as MPs take part in different shadowing schemes. I do that with scientists. I do not have a science background and I find that useful.

Professor Coffield: I agree.

Q744 Chairman: What is your reflection on the different experiences of the devolved assemblies? Are they doing it better? Do they have a remit here?

Professor Coffield: I must say that we are not doing a comparative study but it is interesting to note that one of the most interesting parts of Foster is the appendix at the end which does some cross-cultural work. He looks at the same kinds of sectors in Ontario, Canada, Denmark and Germany. One of the major conclusions it comes to is that all of these countries have highly successful post-compulsory sectors and do not have the major regulation that we have in England. This sector is over-regulated. The one major conclusion is that in other countries, including Scotland, professionals are more trusted and are part of the policy-making environment. Part of that is to do with size. In Scotland it is possible to have all the FE principals in one room which you can hardly do in England, so size does make a difference.

Q745 Chairman: You appear to be very much in favour of the college sector providing education, but when I talked to senior persons in the construction industry I was told about their problem in going to colleges. They know their supply chain. The fact is that 60 per cent of the houses they now build with modern methods of construction hardly require the use of bricklayers because parts are prefabricated offsite. They need a whole new set of skills. What they are about is not training their own employees but the SMEs in their supply chain so that they go along to a college supplier and say, "Can you do this?" and the college is deeply reluctant to stop providing plumbers and bricklayers in a conventional mode. Is that something you recognise?

Professor Coffield: I think there is something in that complaint. One of the issues that colleges find so difficult is that they are funded for long qualifications and a lot of employers want bits of qualifications. That is part of the tension between the two sectors. I think there is a need to move more quickly towards a credit system where you can do smaller bits of work and have them accredited by colleges, and for that to be funded by the LSC and to build on it over time towards a qualification. That is a move towards a lifelong learning system. We do not have it yet. Unfortunately, the LSC funds long qualifications and most employers do not want all of them; they want bits and pieces of it. We need to be more flexible.

Ms Hopley: I believe that a more modular approach to gaining qualifications is important, and not just for employers, because when learning councils are rolled out how they engage in learning will be important from an individual perspective. I was not sure whether you are concerned with the appropriateness of some of the training offered by providers.

Q746 Chairman: Yes. The other comment they make is that when their people go into the FE college they will be told, "We know that you have come to do this but wouldn't you rather do that because we already have qualified teachers to teach it and it is more difficult to provide teaching for the training that your employers said they want?"

Ms Hopley: I now sound like a broken record, but the sector skills council input, which understands how technologies are changing, should be influencing to a greater extent the supply and content of qualifications. There is no point in having boat-building courses in wood when the primary manufacturing material is fibreglass or something else, but that still happens.

Q747 Chairman: What is your view about apprenticeships? One of the constant themes in life, if you look at skills training, is apprenticeships. We have had them for ever; they are the longest form of training that we have, and we have an amazingly ambitious target to have 500,000 apprentices. What do you think of that ambition?

Professor Coffield: I am in favour of it. My concern is the quality of it. By all means go for the quantity, but the quality must be very high. Lorna Unwin who appeared before you has very serious concerns about the quality of some of the work placements to which these young people go.

Ms Hopley: There is an issue about quality, but we have to look beyond young people. I do not think that the target of half a million apprenticeships will be met through the traditional 16 to 19 year-olds; it will have to come from those who are now within the workforce.

Q748 Mr Marsden: Professor Coffield, perhaps I may return to the issue of older learners. I have looked at your lecture and there is much in it with which I sympathise. The thrust of it is: let teachers teach and let learners learn. A lot of that, not all, will produce its own reward and therefore the Government can feel happy with it. But is there not a problem as identified in Leitch in how one approaches older learners? Leaving aside whether or not the 21^st century way of doing things, to which my colleague Mr Williams referred, can achieve this - assuming that we want to do it - is there not a problem about saying we can just let older learners learn, because we know that given demographic change if we waved a magic wand tomorrow and skilled up all young people to the levels we would like to see they still would not make the grade? We need a system where we help older learners not just to learn but to acquire additional skills. What is the balance between some of the mechanistic approaches perhaps that Train to Gain might provide, even if we get a large number of employers involved with older learners, and the sort of enabling skills about which I asked the LSC and RDA earlier? How do we get that balance between pure libertarianism on the one hand and a rather mechanistic approach on the other?

Professor Coffield: I do not think these are so divided in the lives of the adult unemployed as we have been looking at in two parts of England, the North East and London. Many of the unemployed adults we have interviewed come in for all sorts of reasons, most of them not about employment in the first instance. They come back either because they realise they cannot help their own children with their homework, because they do not have the basic skills themselves, or because they are women who have had two or three children and come for confidence-building reasons. Slowly but surely, we have noticed that when we go back to look at the same people over the three years their ambitions change; they begin to realise that they have abilities and can go back into the workforce.

Q749 Mr Marsden: I understand that and am sympathetic to it, but when we have had government ministers before us and have, putting it bluntly, chided them for too mechanistic an approach and say that they cutting too much money from adult learning and so on they say that they can fund enabling skills but they have to see an element of progression. What you are suggesting does not really have a timeframe. I taught for the Open University myself for 20 years and so I know the sorts of things about which you are talking, but how will that fit into the sort of 2020 timeframe that Leitch and other commentators say is very important for us to have in mind?

Professor Coffield: I accept the main point you make that the major job is to train the people who are already in the workforce rather than simply to improve the quality of the young people who come into the workforce. I apologise that I have lost my next point and so I will pass it to my colleague.

Q750 Mr Marsden: Ms Hopley, first, do you accept the principle that we have to put much more emphasis on skills for older learners and, more importantly - assuming you accept that - so far is there much evidence that this is something that employer organisations such as yours have signed up for?

Ms Hopley: To clarify it, are you talking specifically about older workers?

Q751 Mr Marsden: I am talking of older learners who are either outside the workforce at the moment and may come into it or who are in the workforce and need to retrain.

Ms Hopley: Are we talking about the over-50s rather than the post-19 people?

Q752 Mr Marsden: Certainly not post-19.

Ms Hopley: There is certainly a recognition, maybe more so in manufacturing, about the ageing workforce within the sector and that people will need training to keep them not in the role they have been performing for the past five, seven or eight years but perhaps to move them into a new role and to keep them productive within the company for longer. I think that employers are increasingly beginning to recognise that this is not something that they have done in the past but must do so now and in the future. There is also an issue about the willingness of employees to do that. In a survey we conducted a couple of years ago we found that staff reluctance was quite a problem for increasing the quality of training given to employees. Employees just did not want to do it.

Q753 Mr Marsden: Older employees or any employees?

Ms Hopley: I just wonder whether the problem is perhaps more acute among older workers who think that they are coming to the end of their working lives. I suspect that may be so.

Professor Coffield: Perhaps I may return to the point that I forgot. My answer is that I think we need a broader definition of progression. At present if you do level 2 mathematics you cannot get funding for level 1 language or anything else, for example IT. If you are good at this you may not be good at that at the same level. At present even if you go to level 2 and move across that is not considered to be progression. I think that is too narrow.

Ms Hopley: I agree with that point.

Q754 Chairman: This has been a very good session. Is there anything that either witness will regret not having said to the Committee if we finish the session three minutes after six o'clock? Is there anything that you wish you had been asked?

Professor Coffield: I believe I have been treated very fairly.

Ms Hopley: I have nothing to add.

Q755 Chairman: Ms Hopley, I think your evidence has been first rate, but the message that will go back - I will send it in other ways - is that I do not like the way your organisation has handled this matter. I shall be taking it up with your president and chief executive.

Ms Hopley: I will have to check to see what happened. It is my understanding that we had a request for only one representative from EEF to attend.

Q756 Chairman: We were given two representatives.

Ms Hopley: Subsequently, we were contacted and asked whether it could just be one.

Chairman: The message we have is that the Engineering Employers Federation has not taken this Committee seriously enough. If it wants to be taken seriously I want a dialogue with it as to why this has happened. Professor Coffield, it has been a pleasure to hear from you. Perhaps both of you will remain in contact. This is a very important inquiry and only with your help can we make it a good one.