 House of Commons |
Session 2007 - 08 Publications on the internet General Committee Debates Education and Skills Bill |
Education and Skills Bill |
The Committee consisted of the following Members:Nick Walker,
Tom Goldsmith, Mick Hillyard, Committee
Clerks
† attended the
Committee
WitnessesSusan
Anderson, Director of Human Resources Policy, Confederation of British
Industry
Richard Wainer, Principal
Policy Adviser, Education and Skills, Confederation of British
Industry
Tom Wilson, Head of
Organisation and Services Department, Trades Union
Congress
Caroline Smith, Learning and
Skills Policy Officer, Trades Union
Congress
Brian Lightman, President,
Association of School and College
Leaders
Martin Ward, Deputy General
Secretary, Association of School and College
Leaders
Anna Cole, Parliamentary
Specialist, Association of School and College
Leaders
John Freeman, Association of
Directors of Children’s
Services
Kim Bromley-Derry,
Vice-President Elect, Association of Directors of Children’s
Services
Councillor Les Lawrence, Chair
of the Children and Young People’s Board, Local Government
Association
Public Bill CommitteeTuesday 22 January 2008(Afternoon)[Hugh Bayley in the Chair]Education and Skills BillWritten evidence to be reported to the HouseE&S 01
Association of Directors of Children’s Services
E&S 02 Association of
Colleges
E&S 03
Barnardo’s
E&S 04
Local Government Association
E&S 05 Confederation of British
Industry
E&S 06 Trades
Union Congress
4
pm
The
Committee deliberated in
private.
4.5
pm
On
resuming—
The
Chairman:
Susan Anderson, the director
of human resources policy from the CBI, and your colleague, I take it,
Richard Wainer—could you introduce yourself
please?
Richard
Wainer:
I am Richard Wainer, principal policy adviser
on education and skills at the
CBI.
The
Chairman:
You understand the procedure: you will get a
range of questions from members of the Committee, starting with the
Front Benchers from the three parties but leaving plenty of time for
the Back Benchers to ask questions, and possibly for the Front Benchers
to come back in. We are looking for brief questions and brief
answers.
Q
9595
Mr.
John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con): Welcome
and good afternoon. The Bill makes no mention of training provided
directly by employers, or how that could count towards a qualification.
It does not propose ways in which we can involve employers more
closely. In your briefing note, you say that many 16 and 17-year-olds
in employment have become disengaged by classroom-style teaching. My
question is, does the Bill do enough to encourage employer involvement?
Is there a danger that 16 and 17-year-olds in employment who spend one
day a week in the classroom will not necessarily gain competencies that
will be valued by their
employer?
Susan
Anderson:
That is quite a few questions to answer.
The feedback that we get from our members, particularly on
apprenticeships, is that with these young people, who particularly want
to use practical-type skills and enjoy the hands-on aspects of
apprenticeships, the most difficult thing can be to get them to go back
to the college for that one day a week. Members of ours,
for example in construction, say that that is a
real difficulty because many of the young people have failed
to thrive and a high number of those who enter
employment or are in that NEET category have very low levels of
qualifications. Our members tell us that the young people thrive in the
workplace situation but do not like going back to college typically,
because they see that as going back to something that they did not
enjoy and did not relate to. I think that that is an issue. What we do
need to do, in looking at qualifications, apprenticeships and national
vocational qualifications, is ensure that—I recognise that this
is partly an employer issue, not just one for colleges or private
providers—they are relevant to young people and do deliver the
important numeracy and literacy skills that employers are looking for,
in ways that are relevant to young
people.
There are
some problems at the moment with apprenticeships which we know need to
be addressed, and we are having conversations with the Government on
that, and indeed with anybody who wants to talk to us. Similarly, we
think that there are problems with vocational qualifications, that too
many of them do not reflect the needs of businesses, the skills and
competency needs of business, so again we are working with the
Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, and indeed the sector skills
council, to try to ensure that qualifications better match
employers’ needs, because if they do not, young people do not
see the point and employers do not value them. There are some very
important changes that need to take place before the Bill comes into
effect.
The
Chairman:
Before you go ahead John, may I once again ask
for quick questions and answers? Nine out of 40 minutes have gone and
there are many members of the Committee who want to ask
questions.
Q
96
Mr.
Hayes:
Sorry, Mr. Bayley. I shall be very
quick. You say that you have developed a 12-point plan to ensure that
more employers are prepared to participate, particularly in
apprenticeships. I share your view about that. What, in your view, are
the main ways in which apprenticeships should be reformed? Would that
include a statutory definition with a minimum level of employer
engagement and
mentoring?
Richard
Wainer:
There are three particular issues around the
apprenticeship programme that need reform. First, more high-achieving
young people need to be encouraged into the programme, whether through
ensuring that employers have better access to schools to promote the
excellent opportunities that many employers provide or through
improving careers guidance to counter the academic and gender bias that
we often find. The second issue is ensuring that the apprenticeship
programme is much more flexible to business needs and can adapt quickly
to changing skill requirements. Thirdly, it is about ensuring that
there is effective support in place for small employers who want to
engage in the
programme.
Q
97
Mr.
Hayes:
Through group training
associations, perhaps, and perhaps you might also share the view that
there should be an all-age careers service to provide the kind of
advice that you have just mentioned. If I could be allowed a small
suffix, what would you do about NVQs, which you also
criticise?
Susan
Anderson:
We would like an all-age service, but as a
matter of priority, we need to get better careers advice to young
people at the key stages—11, 14, 16 and 18. If we had to
prioritise, although we would love to have an all-age service and would
like apprenticeships to be open to people of every age, we would
prioritise young people at school, particularly at 14 and
16.
Q
98
Mr.
David Laws (Yeovil) (LD): Is there a real risk that the
measures in the Bill could increase unemployment for 16 and
17-year-olds?
Susan
Anderson:
We fear that that could be an unintended
consequence, which is why we have said that although we think this is a
necessary step, it is not a sufficient step. There are issues that need
to be tackled, but we are confident that they can be. They really must
be addressed. Our fear is about not only the number of people in
economic inactivity, the NEETs, but the 65,000 or so young people who
are currently in employment that does not lead to a
qualification—there is obviously no problem with the 100,000 who
are doing an apprenticeship scheme or nationally recognised
qualifications. Some good skills enhancement is taking place with young
people who are currently in employment, but it is not leading to a
nationally recognised qualification. If we cannot get qualifications
right and do more on that, we could end up as an unintended consequence
tipping more of those young people either into schools where they may
not have a good range of options or into unemployment. That could be an
unintended consequence if we do not get things
right.
Q
99
Mr.
Laws:
And the ones who are particularly at risk are the
65,000 whom you mentioned, who might be substituted for migrant workers
or
over-18s?
Susan
Anderson:
That is a very real risk if we do not get
the system right so that more employers are able and want to offer
apprenticeships, and if we do not get qualifications that they can see
the point of. If they do not add any value for an employer, although it
is going to be rather hard to persuade a young person to go, why would
the employer not choose an 18-year-old or already qualified Polish
worker who has all the right attitudes? That is a
danger.
Q
100
Mr.
Laws:
Given the Bill before us, is the answer to that
problem to try to make the training, education and qualification
requirements more flexible, or are you concerned that some youngsters,
in existing employment that is not certified in the way described in
the Bill, are learning useful skills and disciplines such as being in a
workplace, attending on time and such basic skills that it would be
better to engage in than go through qualification hoops for the sake of
it?
Susan
Anderson:
That is something that we must be aware of.
Certainly young people—I have already pointed to those who do
not feel that college is for them—are gaining good employability
skills. Some of those employability skills that our members have
identified as so important are: self-management or just turning up on
time, at the right time, day in, day out; team working; and customer
care. You can get all those skills in a work situation. In fact, it is
often the best way to gain those skills, which is why we think that
work experience is so important.
Those are skills that you can
get. They are the softer skills. One of the things that we would be
looking to happen between now and when the Bill comes into effect is
some way of accrediting those skills without young people having to go
into college. Let us think about numbers and some of the
things—for example, we could learn what has happened in terms of
successful apprenticeships. It does not have to be people with
clipboards following young people around, but in order to find some way
of accrediting those skills that young people are getting in the
workplace we would be very happy to work with the sector skills
councils and the QCA. That would be one of the necessary steps to take
place. We need to emphasise that young people are getting very valuable
skills from training that is not necessarily off-the-job training. We
must take account of that. We must not get to feel that it is not quite
training if it is not off the
job.
Q
101
The
Minister for Schools and Learners (Jim Knight):
I am
delighted to see in your submission the very straightforward sentence
from paragraph
2:
“The CBI
supports the Government’s proposals to raise the participation
age.”
Would
you set out for us the benefits that inform that support? What do you
think that employers should contribute themselves in order to secure
those
gains?
Susan
Anderson:
We know that, from an employer perspective,
employers’ biggest concerns are with the low number of young
people—sorry, our concern is literacy and numeracy. We are not
getting enough people coming out of schools with the right literacy and
numeracy skills. That is employers’ No. 1 concern. They also
feel that we need to improve those employability skills that I have
already mentioned—those soft, generic skills around team
working, business awareness, customer awareness, as well as literacy
and
numeracy.
In
terms of what employers can contribute, we certainly as employers have
a role to play—whether through work experience or other
means—to ensure that young people recognise the benefits of
those employability skills. I think that that is where we think we can
play a role. Certainly when it comes to apprenticeships and, indeed,
diplomas, delivering numeracy and literacy skills or helping people
appreciate the appliance of those skills is very
important.
There are
things that employers can do. But why do we think that this is the
right thing to do? What we want to achieve is improved literacy and
numeracy. If this is something that is necessary to achieve that, then
I think that our members believe that it is the right thing to
do.
Q
102
Jim
Knight:
I am sure that some would argue that we should get
literacy and numeracy right before the age of 16. I would agree. There
is plenty that we have done, and more to be done. Equally, through work
experience and built into the new diplomas are functional literacy and
numeracy. We can do some of that employability through key stage 4. I
would be interested in what is specific about 16 to 18 where you
think that that is helpful—perhaps around certain sections of the
population that you might have concerns about. Then, in respect of what
employers can do, I gather that you have some nervousness about the
burden of checking whether or not a young person is participating
before employing them. Do you think that there is another way of doing
that, which is less burdensome on
employers?
Susan
Anderson:
In terms of what is helpful, as you say, we
would rather hope that young people would have reached good levels of
numeracy and literacy—by good level, I mean equivalent to a C in
English and maths. Too many are not achieving that. If some of them can
carry on studying English and maths—numeracy and
literacy—beyond the age of 16, so that they have a chance to
catch up, I think that will be very successful. If we will deliver that
result through the new diplomas and through apprenticeships that
deliver literacy and numeracy in ways that young people can relate to,
because they can understand why these skills are so important in their
chosen occupations, then I think that will be very helpful. I think
delivering it in that way will engage young
people.
Where we get
worried is in relation to your remarks about our problems with
employers getting involved in policing the system. If we do not have
qualifications or training that engages people then, frankly, they will
not be interested in turning up at a college. While they will come
along with a piece of paper, or will tell you that they are going to
the college, the employer is going to be very hesitant about thinking
that they will actually be committed to attending the college. There
are employers who feel that nothing has changed, who think that the
qualifications are no more relevant, who, a year down the road, may
have had some experience with young people who arrive with bits of
paper saying they are going to college and then it does not happen.
Those employers will say, “I have had some experience of this,
it didn’t work, and so I have to question the piece of paper
because clearly neither it nor the oral commitment to attend could be
trusted. I had to go and check that the course and the college existed,
and that they had signed up, because experience tells me that I could
not trust
them”.
I know
the Bill says that employers should not have to get involved and that
the onus is on the local authority. However, I think employers’
question will be, “Where can you track down this young
person?” It is an employment. Is the local authority person
checking up on these issues? Where are they likely to find the young
person? They are likely to find that if the young person is not at
home, he or she will be in employment. Does the employer really want to
have the official responsible hanging around the factory gate or
invited in at lunch time? I think our members are a bit sceptical that
they can divorce themselves as easily as is proposed from any policing
that lies with local authorities, but I would certainly be interested
in any reassurances you could give us on that
front.
Q
103
Jim
Knight:
Now is not the time for me to give reassurances,
though it may come up when I myself give evidence. To be absolutely
clear, are you saying that employers are really concerned about ongoing
burdens, rather than just the initial burden of saying at the start of
the employment, “How are you going to fulfil your duty?”
and “Let’s be clear about what we need to do as an
employer to allow us to fulfil our legal obligation, and you to do what
you then do as a young
person,”?
Susan
Anderson:
There are two aspects of this. In one case,
young people come with the course already chosen; in the other, you
take them on and then say they have to find a course. That might look
simple set down on a piece of paper, but when you have had some
experience as an employer who wants to do the right thing, how are you
going to feel when experience has shown that the young person is not
turning up to the college and you start to think that you should be
doing what the law says? That is something that our smaller member
firms will really feel uncomfortable
about.
Q
104
Nia
Griffith (Llanelli) (Lab): You have already partly
answered my question, but I would like to explore further the idea of
accreditation. We have some very good examples of big
industry—factories and so forth—being able to make a very
clear agreement with a college about the skills needed, and the one day
a week release being very successful. The issue for many smaller
businesses is that skills are more difficult to identify, as, perhaps,
are some of the softer skills. How would you see that form of
accreditation developing? Do you see learning-based union reps being
involved or do you envisage a system of mentors? You clearly have
expertise in the workplace, and the idea of having a form of
accreditation that is totally relevant is obviously very attractive.
Would you see that as a way forward? How would you manage to bring a
form of accreditation to the
accreditation?
Richard
Wainer:
It is absolutely right that we need better to
recognise the high-quality training that goes on in many workplaces.
Our surveys, and surveys from other organisations, show that although
employers spend £33 billion a year on training, only a third of
that training leads to recognised qualifications. So, there is a lot of
training and investment in training that leads to higher skills and
improved productivity that is not counted in the Government’s
statistics and would not be an appropriate route for a young person to
take. You are absolutely right: we need to put in place better
mechanisms to recognise and accredit the very high-quality training
that is going on in workplaces. We are working on pilots with the QCA
and some big household names to ensure that the process is as easy as
possible and identifies the barriers to employers accrediting their
high-quality training so that more firms can follow that path if they
want to.
Susan
Anderson:
If the large firms do it, that can trickle
down to the smaller firms. If a large hospitality firm identifies what
is a high level of skill, that helps to inform the qualification and
can help the smaller firm.
On the second point,
there is a lot of good training in smaller firms, where what works best
is having a mentor—someone who really takes an interest in you
and helps you to realise how to enhance your softer skills and
employability skills. A mentor can work alongside you and talk you
through how to handle difficult conversations and deal with awkward
customers. The whole idea of mentoring—union learning reps have
played a good role in terms of
mentoring—particularly in smaller firms, is that you get an awful
lot of people who really want to give something back and help young
people. There must be a role to help those who are mentoring. That
comes back to our earlier point that training does not have to be
formal, off-the-job. On-the-job training can be just as
effective.
Q
105
Mr.
Oliver Heald (North-East Hertfordshire) (Con): The NEETs
whom you talk about in paragraphs 6 to 8 have no qualifications and
many of them cannot read or write. Is it correct that the response to
that problem is not apprenticeships because you cannot do an
apprenticeship if you are in that sort of educational condition? If so,
why are you saying that the answer is for those youngsters to stay on
beyond 16, when they have had 10 to 12 years of statutory education and
obviously have not learned anything? Why would they learn anything in
those two further
years?
Susan
Anderson:
I do not think that they have not learned
anything. They certainly have not achieved the standard of numeracy and
literacy that we as employers should be able to expect, but they have
acquired a degree, albeit a low level, of functional numeracy and
literacy.
Susan
Anderson:
Not to a satisfactory level, but I do not
think that they are completely illiterate. It is not that they cannot
put together a couple of easy sentences.
Q
107
Mr.
Heald:
Why then are charities such as Rainer running
literacy courses for people to get a certificate for the building trade
in health and safety, and those kids just cannot read and write? Why
are they doing that if those kids are functionally literate? They are
not.
Richard
Wainer:
To come back to your first question, we
cannot see this raising the participation age in isolation. If that
were the only thing the Government were doing, it would fail to achieve
an increase in attainment. With the reform of
apprenticeships—making sure that when diplomas come in they are
of a high quality—providing different learning routes for young
people who do not like the formal classroom environment has to be the
way to engage young people. That certainly does not mean
taking the focus away from improving literacy and numeracy up to the
age of
16.
Q
108
Mr.
Gordon Marsden (Blackpool, South) (Lab):
Is there not a danger of constructing a false dichotomy between the
idea that you either do learning or training, or have 16 or
17-year-olds in a job? I have heard the concerns that you have about
getting them on board, but should the CBI not take a more active role
and then encourage employers to regard the situation as an opportunity
for more work-based learning?
Susan
Anderson:
It is not our job to educate people. As I
have already said, young people thrive in what is a very
different—you could certainly call it a
learning—
situation, but it is not our job to give young people literacy and
numeracy, to educate them. We can help them to apply it and improve,
but I would not take away from what it takes for teachers to give
people literacy and numeracy. I do not consider it to be our role as
employers. It is our job to train people to do their jobs; it is not
our job as employers to give people literacy and numeracy skills.
Employers just do not have those skills.
Q
109
Mr.
Marsden:
I understand that. I did not ask you about
literacy and numeracy; I asked you about work-based learning. Perhaps
you were picking up on Mr. Heald’s point. Let me
press you a little further, because you talked earlier about the
importance of integrating in-house training into qualifications, with
which I agree, but where would you draw the line? There is a difference
between the just-in-time in-house training, which is designed to meet a
company’s specific need at a specific point, and other training
that benefits and makes the employee’s career more progressive
within that company and, possibly, outside it.
Susan
Anderson:
I do not think that
training should be integrated into a qualification; a qualification
should reflect the skills and competences that employers need, because
if it does not, there is no point in an employee having a
qualification. Employees will not value it and it will not add anything
to that individual’s employability. Although we recognise that
the right qualifications can enhance the employability of a person,
whether young or old, a qualification that does not reflect
employers’ competences or needs is just a useless piece of
paper.
Our problem
with the current system, as my colleague Richard said, is that too
little training—very high-quality training—does not lead
to a qualification, because the qualification system is not right.
Employers are doing an awful lot on training the work force, and of
course, we can always do more, but when you consider that employers
spend £33 billion on training, you cannot say that by and large
employers do not do their bit, or play their part, when it comes to
training people.
Q
110
Angela
Watkinson (Upminster) (Con): You referred to employability
skills. How important do you rate verbal communication skills in
enabling pupils to interview well for college places, apprenticeships
and jobs, and in interacting with people when they get there?
Susan
Anderson:
We would say that communication skills are
essential, whether that is in terms of written communication skills, of
speaking skills, or indeed of listening skills. They are equally
important. When we did a report in 2006, which actually the then
Department for Education and Skills supported us in doing, we asked
employers to tell us the sort of problems that could arise from poor
literacy and numeracy. By literacy, we were including those very
communication skills, so if employees could not speak up and say that
they did not understand when they had been given some oral
instructions, clearly, they could go away and do completely the wrong
thing because they were not able to articulate what they did not
understand—never mind get the interview. So, I would agree with
you that oral communication is as important as the written
word.
Q
111
Mrs.
Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab): Many employers, as you
have said, take great responsibility for their training, but some do
not. I have heard some confusion about the level of responsibility, and
some are concerned that others, including colleagues, do not bear the
responsibility for training that they should. What would your response
be to a suggestion that there should be a duty on employers to
collaborate with schools and other local learning bodies to provide
training? Given the responsibility for 280 hours in a year, would some
of your concerns be alleviated by the fact that those 280 hours could
be met outside the normal working week?
Susan
Anderson:
In terms of a duty to collaborate, my view
would be that it is not necessary. I think it would not be appropriate.
If we talk to companies, many of which are working very successfully
with schools, some of them think it is more appropriate to collaborate
and to work in partnership with universities, some of them choose
colleges, and others encourage their employees to get
involved—whether through being a school governor or hearing
young people learn to read. The employer gets involved in a variety of
ways. I have to say, though, about a duty on employers to collaborate,
that to be frank you would not want some employers to be involved in
schools. There are lots of very good employers out there—I would
be the first to argue that—but we need to be a bit careful.
There are some employers that frankly should not get involved with
schools. I can say that because I am with the CBI. We need to be
careful. There are lots of things going on, but you certainly cannot
force employers to do something, and as I say, at the margins, some
would not be appropriate.
Richard
Wainer:
On the 280 hours provision, we need
flexibility. If firms were told that they have to release your young
person, your employee, every Friday for a year, there would be
concerns, and that would discourage a lot of employers from providing
those employment opportunities. However, if colleges and training
providers are able to work around the needs of the business, that will
mitigate that risk significantly.
Q
112
Mr.
Nick Gibb (Bognor Regis and Littlehampton)
(Con): Apprenticeship levels 2 and 3 are down. Will there be
enough apprenticeships to meet demand, and will they genuinely be
employer-based?
Richard
Wainer:
We have a Government target of about 500,000
young people doing apprenticeships by 2020. I think that we support the
Government’s ambition on that, but we have concerns not only
about quantity, but about quality; that will be the issue. When we talk
to our employers, who provide really good schemes and get very high
completion rates, it is clear that we need more employers to be more
intimately involved in the delivery of apprenticeships if we are going
to drive up quality in that programme and if apprenticeship is really
going to be a firm basis for a young person’s
career.
Q
113
The
Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for
Innovation, Universities and Skills (Mr. David
Lammy):
I am pleased to hear you emphasise completion
rates and quality, which obviously accounts for the overall figures.
Would you agree?
Susan
Anderson:
Absolutely. We have seen some significant
improvements in apprenticeship completion rates. As Richard mentioned,
many of our members achieve 90 per cent. or 100 per cent. completion
rates. So it can be done, but it does require quite a lot of effort. We
have surveyed our members to see what is holding more people back, and
there are some issues—both about the design of the
qualifications themselves and the bureaucracy that need to be
addressed. But we are aware that there is the review, and we are very
hopeful that the sort of concerns that we have identified—they
are articulated in a longer paper that I am happy to share—are
addressed as part of that review.
The
Chairman: It must be a quick answer. I am governed by the
clock.
Susan
Anderson:
I think apprenticeships generally are
valued by employers, and we are seeing more employers who are saying,
“We would be prepared to get engaged if it is the right
qualification.” I think we are
positive.
The Chairman: I am
absolutely governed by the clock in these affairs, and I need to draw
this session to an end. I thank both Susan Anderson and Richard Wainer
for giving evidence, and I also thank the CBI for providing written
evidence.
Susan Anderson:
Thank you all very much.
The
Chairman:
We have our next set of witnesses. Tom Wilson is
the head of the organisation and services department at the TUC, and we
have Caroline Smith, who will introduce
herself.
Caroline
Smith:
I am the learning and skills policy officer at
the
TUC.
Q
115
Mr.
Gibb:
You say in your brief for Second Reading that the
TUC does not support “a compulsory approach that could result in
young people being...penalised via the criminal justice
system” for non-attendance. Will you expand on that and the
reasons why it is the TUC’s
view?
Tom
Wilson:
Those who were fortunate enough to attend the
TUC congress in September would have heard quite some debate on this.
The crux of the issue is that many members feel very uncomfortable with
the notion of criminalising young people in some sense. It is that
aspect of compulsion and enforcement that people have concerns about.
To put that in context, we support the overall thrust of the policy and
strongly support the Government’s aims. Our further wish, and
our expectation, is that it is unlikely that it will be a real issue
when it comes down to it. I am not ducking the question, and measures
will need to be put in place. However, we would expect those to be more
like attachment to earnings measures and nothing that would involve
young people being imprisoned or anything of that
sort.
Q
116
Mr.
Gibb:
So when we come to scrutinise the Bill clause by
clause and to table amendments, do you think that we should try to take
out the criminal sanctions and replace them with civil sanctions such
as county court enforcement procedures? Would that improve the Bill
from your perspective?
Tom
Wilson:
The TUC view is that those measures would
need to be looked at very carefully bearing in mind exactly the
criterion that I indicated: will the measures lead young people to feel
that they are in some sense being criminalised? There is whole spectrum
of measures that could be taken. Some might lead us down that road, and
we are concerned about them, but others might not lead down that road.
Certainly, there are many ways of encouraging, supporting and
facilitating young people, which is where the TUC is coming from. That
is the kind of direction that we hope the Government will take, and we
believe that they will do so.
Q
117
Mr.
Gibb:
You also say that apprenticeship
places need to be the cornerstone of raising participation. Are enough
employers offering apprenticeships in sufficient numbers and of a high
enough quality to meet such
demand?
Tom
Wilson:
Frankly, no, not in anything like the numbers
that the TUC, the Government and, mind you, the CBI would like to see.
We strongly support the Government’s aim of radically increasing
the number of apprenticeships, and that many more of those should be
high quality apprenticeships based at work. Many good employers are
leading the field in this area, including blue chip companies, and they
show what can be done. Our aspiration, as the union movement, is to
work closely with those employers to help them to develop those kinds
of apprenticeships and radically to increase the number available to
young people.
Q
118
Stephen
Williams (Bristol, West) (LD): It is clear from what
Mr. Wilson has said so far that the TUC does not support
compulsion, and that it would prefer entitlements instead. In paragraph
1.5 of your evidence to the Committee, which deals with entitlements to
level 2 and level 3 qualifications, you imply that you would wish to
see a lifetime entitlement to level 2 training. Is that
right?
Caroline
Smith:
Yes, indeed. Certainly, we support the
Government’s existing policy on access to level 2. However, we
think that it needs to be backed by statutory rights to paid time off,
because one of the biggest barriers to accessing those forms of
training is time.
Q
119
Stephen
Williams:
So, from what you are saying, if, say, by the
time someone has reached 18 and they have gone through this compulsory
staying on in education and training but they have not attained level
2, you think that it would be preferable for there to be a right to
have paid time off and free tuition, and that should continue after 18.
Is that what you are saying?
Caroline
Smith:
Yes. It is crucial that there is consistency
between the policies for young people and adults, and we really would
not want to see any inconsistencies emerging between
them.
Q
120
Stephen
Williams:
The Leitch report relies on an employer pledge,
which you have also mentioned in your evidence, up until 2010. What do
you think that the Government should do in 2010 if the employer pledge
has not been met for making sure that everyone has attained at least
level 2?
Caroline
Smith:
The commission for employment and skills,
which was established last year, will look at that; the Government have
made a commitment that the commission will look at that question. We
really think that it is incredibly important that there are proper ways
of continuing a momentum to ensure that there is a review that takes
place and that the issue is properly and independently looked
at.
Q
121
Stephen
Williams:
In paragraphs 1.7, 1.12 and 1.13 of your
evidence, you deal with the sectors that currently employ large numbers
of young people: hotels; restaurants, and retail, etc. I am not clear
about something in the percentages that you give. The percentages that
you give in paragraph 1.7 are the people who do not have quality
training at the moment. Is that what you are saying
there?
Caroline
Smith:
Yes. Those figures were taken from the Green
Paper consultation document. They are about the proportions of young
people who are in work but not receiving training at the moment. The
message really is that there are particular sectors that have a high
proportion of young people without training, so I think that, in
particular, the role of sector skills councils needs to be looked at. I
think that there need to be levers within sectors to make sure that
those young people in those sectors get access to
training.
The
Chairman:
Stephen, I shall be accused of not being very
good at numeracy if I do not move on, but you can try to catch my eye
again in just a moment. David Lammy.
Q
123
Mr.
Lammy:
How do you think that the proposals in the Bill in
relation to adult skills complement the union learning fund and
unionlearn?
Tom
Wilson:
Pretty well, really. Obviously we are very
proud of unionlearn and union learning and the number of union learning
reps that we have; 20,000, and rapidly rising. They are a real,
positive force in the world of learning at work. What the Government
are proposing on adult learning is something that very much goes hand
in hand with that.
It might be helpful to the
Committee if we also briefly mentioned the train to gain programme.
Again, that is something that forms the background, the kind of
funnelling background, to this expansion of adult learning
opportunities. That could also be enormously helpful in expanding
opportunity as this drive to raise participation to 18 takes hold. So,
our view would strongly be that those kinds of proposals would be very
much in line with the developments that we would like to
see.
Q
124
Mr.
Lammy:
We have had some suggestions on the Committee about
the reasons for keeping young people in education when their literacy
and numeracy are not up to standard. Presumably, from your own
experience with members who have basic skills levels, you might have a
view on why people might not have adequate literacy and numeracy
levels.
Tom
Wilson:
Yes, we do. We are talking about some of the
most challenged and disadvantaged people in society, really. Many of
them, of course, are young people, but many of those young people also
grow up into older workers who have equal needs and some of the stories
that we have learned through our unionlearn work are really quite
harrowing. They show the immense potential that has been wasted, the
potential of people who really had a lousy time at school, to put it
bluntly, and who have been given all sorts of opportunities, through
unionlearn and through the union learning rep
network.
The types of needs that those
people have are pretty basic, in many cases. They are literally
reading, writing, literacy, numeracy and also the softer skills of
confidence, verbal fluency, personal self-organisation and motivation.
Those are precisely the kind of skills, both the harder skills and the
softer skills, that the skills for life programme and level 2 can give
people.
The
other important point concerns the accreditation of
learning, which is going on in parallel with this exercise, through the
QCA. In the past, many of the skills that both young and older people
might acquire and use have not been recognised and accredited. That
will change. With that kind of portfolio, and with those skills
properly recognised, they can further reinforce and boost their
self-esteem and confidence. It might well mean that employers find that
they move on to better and further employment elsewhere, but in the
interests of employers as a whole, we think that this will be a wholly
good thing that most employers should
welcome.
Q
125
Sarah
McCarthy-Fry (Portsmouth, North) (Lab/Co-op): When Stephen
Williams said just now that you seemed to be saying that you were
opposed to compulsion and in favour of entitlements, you did not
respond. Looking at your evidence, I thought that that was a little
simplistic. Would you like to expand on that point? If all the caveats
that you have put into paragraph 1.4 were there, would you not accept
that, as was told to us in somebody else’s evidence, the
compulsory element could galvanise all those elements into place? Would
you be more in favour of a compulsory approach if all those caveats
were in place acting as a force to bring in those additional support
services?
Tom
Wilson:
As I have said already, we think that this is
a complex area. There is a spectrum. It is not really: “Are you
in favour of compulsion, or not?” It depends very much on
exactly how that is implemented. Certainly, at Committee stage, we
would expect there to be a whole range of measures, and as I have said
we will look at those very carefully. The test that will apply is
whether it leads to criminalising young people, or young people feeling
that they are being criminalised. If the answer to that is yes, and
people do feel that way, it would be counter-productive.
That is precisely
what we seek to avoid, as too do the Government I am sure. We strongly
support the notion of a very strong expectation, and the creation of a
culture in which it is the norm, that all young people should continue
until the age of at least 18, if not beyond, whether at work or at
college or on an apprenticeship. Some might continue at school, but
this is not about raising the school leaving age. In that
sense, we think that entitlement is the right kind of language. This
should really be about ensuring that young people are not forced, in
that criminalised sense, and that young people have such a range of
opportunities available to them that they are happy to take up whatever
is appropriate for them. We think that that range of entitlements needs
to be explored much more. To be frank, we think that employers need to
do far more as well.
Tom
Wilson:
We want to have a look at exactly what is
proposed at Committee stage. Certainly we are very concerned about the
real dangers of
criminalisation.
Q
127
Mr.
Laws:
May I ask you about the categories that Stephen was
talking about in paragraph 1.7? Clearly one of the risks was of shaking
people out of jobs that might be a lot better than the alternative.
Thinking about youngsters employed in certain sectors, but who are not
getting certified educational training, and the fact that they might be
in smaller businesses and so forth, do you think it realistic that the
majority could be accredited in the work place, rather than through
formal education? Are you confident that they could be usefully
accredited, so that we do not simply create a paper factory, rather
than provide real skills and
opportunities?
Caroline
Smith:
I shall answer that in two parts. One of the
key issues in the accreditation of, for example, what employers might
provide already in the job, is ensuring that, if measures are taken to
help recognise some of that training, it is of a high quality.
Furthermore, transferable skills must be included. Particularly in a
labour market with increased agency work and casual employment, it is
really important, particularly for young people, that they receive
accredited skills and training that can be taken elsewhere and that are
not just reliant on a particular employer recognising that
accreditation.
In
terms of whether it is realistic in those sectors to ensure that access
takes place, it will not necessarily occur in every workplace with
every employer, and that is why the issue of leavers is very important
if we want to ensure that training takes place across different
workplaces. We suggest looking at sector skills agreements, the
questions of sector levies in particular industries, the questions of
licence to practise—those are the mechanisms that are in place
to ensure that training is made available to
everybody.
Q
128
Mr.
Marsden:
The Skills Minister mentioned the impact of union
learning reps and union learning. The Bill has significant implications
for information, advice and guidance and in particular expanding that
into the adult area. Building on the success that you have had with
union learning reps, what role would you see for unions and the TUC in
that
process?
Tom
Wilson:
The Bill proposes the creation of a legal
entitlement to level 2 for adults. Similarly, creating that same sense
of entitlement to a universal adult career service is exactly the kind
of thing that would mesh well with the work that union learning reps
already do in the workplace. Union learning reps are champions
for learning in the workplace. They do many things, including
encouraging people to take up learning opportunities and advising their
fellow workers about the kinds of opportunities that may be available.
I do not pretend that they are all qualified and experienced advisers,
far from it, but they are skilled at encouraging people to look on the
web, talk to people who are experts, talk to people in personnel or
other unions—there are many sources of advice. If there were a
good information, advice and guidance service—an expansion of
the currently existing next steps and University for Industry
services—that was universally knitted together across the entire
country, and where people were confident that they would get
high-quality, impartial advice, that is exactly the kind of thing that
union learning reps could tap into.
Q
129
Mr.
Marsden:
I agree, and indeed the former Select Committee
said as much in its post-16 skills report. The implication of that, of
course, depends on funding. If you have to prioritise around a major
expansion of adult skills, for which particular groups in society would
you prioritise the funding of that expansion?
Tom
Wilson:
The TUC is pretty clear: prioritise the most
vulnerable first. By vulnerable workers we mean those who currently
have either no skills at all or just skills for life. I am talking
about the very low paid, agency workers, temporary workers, people who
move from job to job, moving in and out of benefit. In many cases, the
real fundamental problem of those workers is their lack of skills. We
would not accept such a prioritisation, but if there were to be one,
that is the group that would take
priority.
Tom
Wilson:
ESOL would be very much part of that. In our
view, ESOL is very much a workplace matter—I will refer you to
my colleague in a moment who knows more about this that I do. Social
cohesion is important and the community role of ESOL is important, but
much of that can be accessed through work.
Caroline
Smith:
There is a very important point to be made:
the work that has been going on in the workplace with ESOL is not
distinct from social cohesion. The work that unions have been doing on
ESOL has been linked to social cohesion and we were concerned about the
earlier funding changes and the ending of the universal entitlement to
ESOL up to level 2. A recent consultation has been published, and we
have differences about the fact that there are many needy groups of
people. It is difficult to set different needy groups against each
other. One thing that we certainly want to reiterate, and will be
looking to stress, is the remaining importance of the workplace in ESOL
provision. We will examine that in our response to that
consultation.
Q
131
Mr.
Heald:
Do you agree that some people who cannot read,
write and add up by the time they get to 16 feel a deep sense of shame
and stigma about it? It is difficult to persuade somebody who has
already done 10 years, a lot of it hiding from the teacher because they
are afraid that they cannot really engage in the
class, to stay on at school or in a college, or take a particular
workplace training opportunity. Is it not right that the strength of
what you have been doing through union learning representatives is the
softer approach, encouraging people, engaging them and making it much
less a difficult thing to do? Is that one reason why you are not in
favour of compulsion—that it may just reinforce all the bad
stereotypes, difficulties and stigmas that this isolated group already
has?
Tom
Wilson:
As I have said, our reservations about
compulsion are about whether the form of it takes that route. We do not
think that that is necessarily the case. One of the great successes of
union learning reps is that they are people who work alongside others,
and whom others trust. If somebody does have a sense of shame, as you
put it, about
their—
Q
132
Mr.
Heald:
Do you think that that is the wrong way of putting
it? It is a stigma, isn’t it? There is something
there.
Tom
Wilson:
Well, there is a whole range of things, and
it is complicated. A lot of working people feel very angry that the
system has let them down and that they have gone through 10 years of
school and emerged unable to read or write. They may not feel shame,
they may feel quite the opposite in some ways. But yes, there can be
that.
The real point
is that with the right kind of support, people who have come through
with very poor basic skills can be turned around, if I can use that
phrase, very quickly. It is not about their staying on at
school—if it were, they would be very apprehensive, and we would
not support it either. But that is clearly not what the Government are
talking about; it is not about raising the school leaving age, it is
about creating different sets of opportunities, perhaps through
apprenticeships or other appropriate frameworks tailored to the needs
of such people.
For
example, one particular need that they might have is for literacy and
numeracy learning that is directly relevant to what they are doing at
work. For example, if you can talk to people who are working in a shop
about numeracy through pricing and such things, and their understanding
of the need to calculate a 10 per cent. discount on a sale or
something, that may be a far more effective way of teaching them about
numeracy than a cold classroom example. That is why we strongly support
the work-based
approach.
Q
133
Jim
Knight:
I was going to ask you what you thought
employers’ duties should be, but there is something else that I
feel the need to clarify. I agree with you, in paragraph 1.4 of your
helpful submission to us, that
“the primary focus should be on
support, encouragement and an attractive learning and skills offer for
young people”,
but I
want to be really clear about what your view is on compulsion and
enforcement. We have just heard Mr. Heald say that he thinks
you are against compulsion, and we heard Mr. Williams say
the same. Mr. Gibb’s questioning was on whether you
were perhaps in favour of civil enforcement but not criminal
enforcement. I want to be really clear about whether you are against
compulsion, whether you are for a duty to participate but against
enforcement, or whether you
are in favour of civil enforcement but against criminal
enforcement—exactly where you sit in that range of possible
positions.
Tom
Wilson:
I do not think that we can be quite as
precise as that until we have seen the detail of what is going to be
presented in the Committee. What I can say quite clearly is that,
first, we have very strong reservations about compulsion; secondly, we
are strongly opposed to anything like criminalisation—criminal
enforcement, to use your distinction from civil enforcement—and
thirdly, that it is very much about entitlement. We think that there
should be a far stronger entitlement for young people to have a much
wider range of funded, paid time off. There should be a much greater
duty on employers—to come back to an earlier question about what
would happen in 2010 if employers had not got to the Leitch targets, we
would expect them to be made to do so. We are quite keen on compulsion
on employers, provided that they need it, which we think is quite
likely on current evidence. Within that framework we want to look at
precisely what is proposed in Committee. I am sorry that I cannot be
precise, but I think that that gives you a flavour of where the TUC
is.
“if young
people are to be given the best chance of succeeding in the world of
work, it makes sense for them to remain in education or high quality
training until they are
18.”
Obviously,
I completely agree and am delighted that you say that so clearly. To
some extent it goes back to Sarah McCarthy-Fry’s questioning on
what you said about entitlement. Do you think that it is possible to
achieve entitlement without that cultural shift in aspiration saying
clearly that people should remain in education and training until they
are 18, and that there is a way of enforcing it, if support does not
work? Can we achieve that entitlement without a stick to go with some
big carrots?
Tom
Wilson:
It depends enormously. The language of sticks
and carrots is itself—forgive me for saying so—somewhat
black and white. We strongly agree that, yes, we need an enormous
culture change, and, yes, there needs to be a very strong climate that
this is absolutely the thing that young people should do in a strong
moral sense. Whether that in turn requires quite that degree of
absolute compulsion with a possible criminal penalty is the point at
which the TUC begins to have question marks, but we are with you up to
that point.
Q
135
Mr.
Hayes:
Obviously, the Bill translates entitlements and
turns it into obligations. Notwithstanding that, you place key
emphasis, and I agree, on apprenticeships. Is your view, as mine is,
that apprenticeships would be assisted by a statutory definition, that
pivoted around employer engagement, a level of workplace training and
mentoring, which would be a proper test of the acquisition of real
vocational competence leading to
employability?
Caroline
Smith:
We absolutely support apprenticeships, but
certainly one of our concerns is around quality. While absolutely
recognising that there are some fantastic
apprenticeship programmes out there, unfortunately there are some that
are not offering decent pay or high-quality training, and there are
some real differences across the board in what is meant by an
apprenticeship. We would certainly agree that looking at establishing a
definition of an apprenticeship could potentially be a mechanism for
boosting and levering up quality. Obviously, it would depend upon the
detail of any legislation defining an apprenticeship, because it could
be defined in a restrictive, as well as, expansive way. So, it would be
very much what, at the end of the day, the detail around that
was.
Q
136
Mr.
Hayes:
Would there be a trade-off in your estimation
between completion and rigour? I do not have a fixed view about that,
but if apprenticeships are going to be demanding—both of the
employer and of the trainee—there may be some implicit affect on
completion. What is your
view?
Caroline
Smith:
That is an interesting one. Certainly, the
issue completion is very important. I am not necessarily convinced that
there would be that relationship between completion and rigour. Within
the apprenticeship system, you would be looking to ensure that supports
are in place to help ensure completion, for example, the notion of
ensuring that support and mentoring are in place, and of having checks
and balances around the apprenticeship programme. I think that it is
about those types of measures and about a package of measures, not just
legislating for a definition of apprenticeships. On its own, that would
be one factor, but I think that you need to have wider support
mechanisms around
that.
Tom
Wilson:
I will briefly add to that; there is some
evidence that the higher quality apprenticeships have higher completion
rates.
Q
137
Sir
Peter Soulsby (Leicester, South) (Lab): May I once more
return to the issue of compulsion and clarify that I have understood
what you are saying? Am I right to think you are saying that you are
not opposed to the principle of compulsion, but that what concerns
you is the potential for criminalisation of young
people as a result of compulsion and the potential for
counter-productive, negative results from the imposition of
sanctions?
Tom
Wilson:
All I can do is quote the precise terms of
our policy which, after some discussion, was decided at the congress
last September, which was that we had grave reservations about
compulsion; that it would depend on the precise way in which it was
done; and that we were certainly not in favour of anything that looked
like criminalisation. We did not think that criminalisation or any
criminal-type sanctions were remotely necessary and, indeed, would be
counter-productive, but we very strongly supported the
Government’s overall aim of giving a very powerful message to
all young people that this is something they should do.
Whether you
need compulsion to achieve that message is something about which we
have grave concerns and reservations. It depends on exactly how a range
of sanctions are framed in Committee. We are certainly looking to see
precisely what is being proposed. The debate at our congress was very
clear that our members are very worried indeed and have major
reservations about this being compulsory in the sense that, say,
ASBOs are compulsory. They felt that this would be counter-productive.
It is not the sort of thing that would necessarily
encourage young people. Since we are all starting from that aim of
creating a climate and a culture of expectation that young people
should stay on to 18 in some form of training, we wanted to see
precisely what kind of framework the Government were proposing to
encourage them to do
that.
Q
138
Sir
Peter Soulsby:
If there were not to be compulsion, do you
have an alternative for creating the level of participation that the
Government and you are clearly very keen to see
achieved?
Tom
Wilson:
I think we have an awfully long way to go in
terms of creating opportunities for young people, such that the number
of NEETs could be reduced to a tiny proportion of what it currently is.
If I may take issue with one or two of the figures from the CBI, it is
our view that employers do not spend anything like £33
billion on training, and that something like a third of employers in
this country provide almost no training at all. Another third provide
some but, frankly, in our view, it is pretty inadequate.
Compared to
many of our competitor nations, particularly in Europe and America, we
provide very little training for vast sections of the working
population. In our view, the answer to your question is that first you
should bring employers up to speed and make sure that they are
fulfilling their obligations to their communities and to their workers
to make sure that they provide the right kind of training opportunities
for all people—young people and older workers. Only then, when
we have done that, would it be appropriate to look at whether we still
need compulsion to tackle that very small remaining
number.
Q
139
Mr.
Laws:
We detected that Mr. Knight might have
been trying to break up the consensus between the TUC, the Liberal
Democrats and the Conservative party on compulsion. In case of
doubt—in case you suddenly find yourself being quoted in other
terms—your document in November, after the September conference
to which reference was made, has a very clear and concise summary of
your position. My understanding is that you have not changed that. It
says, in one sentence,
that
“the TUC does not
support a compulsory approach that would result in young people being
penalised by the criminal justice system for
non-attendance.”
My
understanding is that the TUC has not changed its position on that
issue since
then.
Tom
Wilson:
No. I have sought this afternoon to use the
opportunity to try to amplify what that means, and to put more emphasis
on the point that we are not in favour of anything which criminalises
young
people.
Q
140
Mr.
Gibb:
However many times Labour Ministers or Back Benchers
ask the question, the answer from the TUC is the same, as
Mr. Laws has just cited. You can cite the evidence to this
Committee as well: the TUC has some reservations, in particular around
a compulsory approach that would result in young people being forced
into learning. Mr. Wilson, in your November briefing you
said:
“Further, the use of
financial penalties may have unintended outcomes and create additional
barriers for young people from disadvantaged
backgrounds.”
Could you
please expand on that
viewpoint?
Tom
Wilson:
Our concern there was that if NEETs or young
people who have not been achieving employment do so and, for the first
time in their lives, are in receipt of a wage and if they have to hand
over a chunk of that wage in the form of a fine, because they have not
been going to college and so on, it might be a disincentive to their
taking up employment. What we are not concerned about—what I
suspect may be behind your question—is whether it will be a
deterrent to employers. Our view is that if we live in a country where
employers are honestly saying that they would not offer 16 and
17-year-olds employment because there is an obligation to provide some
sort of training it would be a pretty shameful admission. We would not
expect most employers to admit that, nor do we expect it to
happen.
In the
retail or hospitality sectors where many young people are employed,
there are enough examples of good employers who provide that kind of
training for young people for us to know that it can work perfectly
well. It is not necessarily a disincentive to employing young people in
that way and we strongly support those who argue that it should not be
a serious disincentive, nor do we think that the CBI and others have
seriously argued
that.
Q
141
Mr.
Lammy:
Would it be right to say that although you have
reservations about compulsion in relation to young people you agree
with compulsion in relation to employers and the training
levy?
Tom
Wilson:
That is quite correct. As I said, if the
evidence is that by 2010 employers are not meeting their Leitch targets
we would be strongly in favour of introducing some form of compulsion
as Caroline said, whether that takes the form of a levy, a licence to
practise or some other system. The devil could be in the detail and it
very much remains to be seen exactly how it would work. A sectoral
approach might be appropriate. If by 2010 employers are not meeting
those Leitch targets, something pretty drastic by way of enforcement
will certainly be needed.
Caroline
Smith:
Certainly in terms of the level 2 arrangements
we would support statutory rights to paid time off,
too.
On the whole, most employers
will act rationally, so why are they not investing in training? If they
felt there was a financial need, an imperative for their business to
invest in training, they would do it, because they are not in the habit
of cutting their own throats. What would be their commercial reasons
for not investing in training, in your
experience?
Tom
Wilson:
I suspect that part of the problem is that
for an individual employer it may not be in their interests if their
competitor employers are not also investing. But ask any group of
employers and it is likely that they will agree
that they should all invest. It is rather like the early days of health
and safety legislation when employers
collectively agreed that some kind of collective regulation was
necessary because it was not in the interests of an individual employer
to bear the extra, added costs of not killing or injuring their
employees. I am not saying it is quite like that, but the economic
arguments are analogous; this is the sort of thing where all employers
need to move together, it is rationally in the interests of the economy
and the group of employers as a whole, but it may not necessarily be in
the interests of a particular individual.
Q
143
Mr.
Walker:
So what type of training should employers be
investing in for their work force in, say, the catering
sector?
Tom
Wilson:
It depends enormously on the sector. In
catering, the great majority of employees have only the most basic
kinds of qualification, so the priority would be skills for life in
level 2—basic hygiene certificates, food handling and that kind
of thing.
Q
144
Mr.
Walker:
What would be the incentive for employers to do
that? If there were an incentive you could argue that they would
already be doing it. I do not understand; if they are not doing it, it
is because there is a lack of an incentive to do
it.
Tom
Wilson:
One kind of incentive would be a licence to
practise. For example, a restaurant would not be allowed to practise
unless X proportion of its employees had been properly trained and were
licensed and qualified in food handling and that kind of
thing.
Q
145
Mrs.
Moon:
I would like to be absolutely clear on the issue of
compulsion. Is it compulsion to engage young people in employment,
training and education? Is it the sufficiency and variety that is
required to be provided for young people? Is it the requirement
actually to look at the meeting of individuals’ needs and
whether they have been met, before you actually move
to—
The
Chairman:
We have now hit the deadline and I am supposed
to stop the debate but you can over-run a
bit.
Tom
Wilson:
To be honest, Mr. Bayley, I am not
sure that I can add to my previous answers on this
one.
The
Chairman:
We are all perfectly clear on compulsion. I
thank the TUC for your written evidence and I very much thank Tom
Wilson and Caroline Smith for appearing before the Committee. I am
sorry I had to squeeze colleagues’ questions at the end but you
will know that I am required absolutely to stick to timetables, unlike
in Select
Committees.
Could we
ask our witnesses from the Association of School and College Leaders to
come up to the table please? While they are sitting down, I would like
to welcome Brian Lightman, president of the association, Martin Ward,
deputy general secretary and Anna Cole, the association’s
parliamentary specialist.
“In
particular we do not support the potential application of criminal
penalties for what is a civil matter”.
Can you expand on the ASCL’s view
on the issue of
compulsion?
Martin
Ward:
Yes. We certainly agree with the idea that it
should be compulsory for young people to be engaged in educational
training up to the age of 18 and we welcome the fact that the
Government intend that to be the case. What we are unhappy about is the
possibility that we might find young people being put in the position
of entering the criminal justice system for not attending. I spent many
years as a sixth-form college principal and trained myself not to call
16 and 17-year-olds “children” because they do not like
it. But as far as the law is concerned they are children, and it does
concern us that we might find ourselves in a situation in which we are
locking up children because they are confused and ill-advised about how
they are conducting themselves, rather than because they have done
something
awful.
Q
147
Mr.
Gibb:
I do not think that there is anything in the Bill
that would result in custody. But if it were short of locking up, if it
were simply criminal sanctions, a criminal offence to fail to comply
with an attendance order, would you still be
unhappy?
Martin
Ward:
We would, because it would still leave them
with a criminal record and that would not be helpful to them, possibly
in their immediate future or further down the line. We do not think
that it is going to be useful to young people to put them into the
criminal justice
system.
“we are
concerned that to be relevant and therefore covered by the Bill
employment must be for 20 hours or more per week. We do not think it is
right that employers should be able to employ young people on half-time
contracts and therefore be
exempt”.
I presume that
you do not want an employer who employs someone for one hour a week to
be covered by the Bill, and you want it to be fewer than 20 hours a
week. Where would you put the requirements for training in terms of
hours per week, if it is not 20 and it is not
one?
Martin
Ward:
We did talk about that on the way here. We have
not come up with a very definite view but the figure that we were
looking at was more like 16 than 20. You are quite right. Clearly it is
possible for someone to be in full-time education, for example, and be
doing a Saturday job. That would not make that employer responsible for
them in this way. What concerned us about a figure as high as 20 was
that the not-so-good employers that both the CBI and the TUC talked
about might subvert the system by offering a lot of 19.5 hour
contracts. Of course, they might still do that if we set the level at
16, but then, for a young person in effect to be doing full-time work,
they would have to be holding at least three contracts, which would
perhaps be less likely than holding
two.
Q
149
Mr.
Laws:
From your experience of the young people who at
present do not stay in education beyond the age of 16, what are the
major factors that account
for that departure from the education system, and do you have any sense
of what the proportions are of young people who would fall into the
major categories of explanation that would have caused them to leave
the
system?
Brian
Lightman:
The numbers in that category are very
small. In my experience as head of a large school, the majority of
students already do stay in full-time education until 18. A very small
proportion—well under 10 per cent.—go outside education
at that stage. In my experience, those youngsters are very needy young
people who lack self-esteem and need a much higher level of personal
support from a very early stage in their education. That is the key to
keeping them in education. That is where the individual advice and
guidance part comes in. We need to do a lot
there.
Q
150
Mr.
Laws:
Would many of those people have their needs
addressed and therefore stay on if the curriculum was changed, or are
most of the high needs that you see much more about emotional issues,
health issues, family background and special
needs?
Brian
Lightman:
It is partly to do with the curriculum.
Obviously, changes are under way and there are all the things that we
are doing not only through the new vocational courses and the diplomas,
but through wider changes in the methods of teaching and learning that
we are employing now—personalised learning and so on. However,
in my experience, the biggest need that youngsters in this category
have is for pastoral support. For example, in my school, we have a
student support centre, where we identify children who are at risk of
exclusion or of leaving school with no qualifications when they reach
16. We identify them as early as we can—at the very latest, when
they come into key stage 4—and we do not find that they do not
want to access the curriculum. We thought originally we would be giving
them an alternative curriculum. They do not want that. They want to
access the curriculum, but they need individual support and help to
organise themselves and, sometimes, to get through the school day,
because as someone said earlier, some of those people come from
terrible backgrounds where the circumstances are awful. Sometimes they
come into school in the morning and you could not possibly expect them
to go through a day’s teaching in the classroom until they have
had some personal support and help to enable them to do
that.
Q
151
Mr.
Laws:
When I asked a head teacher in my constituency
whether the Education and Skills Bill and the compulsory leaving age
should go ahead and whether that would address the needs of that bunch
of young people with very high needs, he said that in his experience
some of the young people you have been discussing find it very
difficult, for the reasons you have given, to engage at 16 or even
before, whereas they are quite ready to come back into the system later
and can usually benefit more. Do you lean towards agreeing with him or
do you think that the Government are right and that if we put in much
greater support and a more relevant curriculum, many or all of those
people could stay on at
16?
Brian
Lightman:
I am probably going to sit on the fence
slightly and give you both answers to that. Yes, there will be people
we will not succeed with. We have to
be realistic. This is an enormously ambitious agenda and it will take a
long time before we reach the noble aspiration of trying to get
everybody to achieve. However, the sort of steps we are putting in
place will help to achieve that with a lot of people. I have experience
in my own school of doing that, but it is time-consuming. It requires
an enormous amount of effort on the part of many people and it requires
a co-ordinated approach across the whole of children’s services,
but that is certainly not a reason for not doing
it.
Q
152
Jim
Knight:
I am interested in exploring with you a little
more what needs to be done pre-16 in order to make the job post-16
easier, largely because of a more engaged cohort of young people. The
children’s plan sets out several changes that would happen
between now and when the current year 6 become the first cohort that it
applies to: qualification and curriculum reform, apprenticeships,
expansion of the foundation learning tier, diplomas, pastoral support,
one-to-one support, which we talked about, and personal tutors. What do
you think are the most important for us to prioritise, and what more
should we do that we have not already set out in order to make the job
post-16 that much
easier?
Brian
Lightman:
The children’s plan contains enough
measures, and the right measures, to improve support and to develop it
further. It is going in absolutely the right direction to develop the
pastoral support and tutorial help we provide. But the key issue is
that that support is not something that can be bolted on. It is not the
latest thing that we add to what we do in schools. If the support is
organised properly, it will be in an absolutely co-ordinated
way.
That
is why in our brief we were very concerned about the separation of
individual advice and guidance, and careers education and guidance. If
I am talking to a child, I am not going to think which one I am doing,
and it will be the same for a careers adviser who is giving advice. We
have to plan this in an holistic way. Similarly, a head of year is not
separate from the process of taking children through their whole
education. We do not want to move back to an old-fashioned
pastoral-academic divide. Therefore, we have the measures in
place.
What we need
to do now is to make sure that we build on the work that has been done
on personalised learning: for example, the Specialist Schools and
Academy Trust is very much leading on deep support work and those types
of model. Lots of schools are developing those sorts of approaches, and
that is the way that we need to go to encourage students from an early
stage to stay
on.
Martin
Ward:
Another factor is the strong need to work with
the parents of young people while the children are still at school. It
is relatively easy—difficult, but relatively easy—to
reach the parents during that phase. In some cases—some already
believe it—they need to be persuaded that what we all prefer for
their children will actually be right for them, and that their children
should carry on with education or training beyond the age of
16.
Brian
Lightman:
May I make one further point about the
parents of secondary-age children? Parents of very young children get
enormous support—antenatal support, post-natal support, health
visitors
and so on—but it is much more difficult for parents of teenage
children to access support. Lots of parents say to me, “Help.
What should we be doing? How can we help?” Again, there are
measures in the children’s plan to help with that, but it is
important that we help those parents to understand the complex maze of
qualifications and opportunities for their
children.
Q
153
Jim
Knight:
I will ask just one more question. Do you think
that there are any young people who cannot participate in education or
training post-16? If so, should we exempt them from the duty? If not,
should all young people be expected to participate and supported in
doing
so?
Martin
Ward:
There are probably no categories of young
people who should be completely exempted. However, we have to accept
that it will be very difficult for some young people to be engaged
constantly during that period. Reference has been made to this. For
example, we have to allow that it will be difficult for young parents
and other young people who are in other senses carers, for young people
who are having terrible crises in their family life of one sort or
another, for young people who are substance abusers and who need to be
weaned away from that before they can be engaged in anything else, and
no doubt for other groups of young people as well, to be engaged all
the time. The sort of support that we might seek for those people will
be expensive, of course, and will become increasingly expensive per
head as we approach the last ones—the Pareto principle, which we
refer to in our briefing paper, applies here. The last ones will be
very expensive, but if we can give them that expensive support then we
should be able to engage everybody in some
sense.
Q
154
Angela
Watkinson:
I am in some difficulty, because the moment
after I indicated that I wanted to ask a question, Mr.
Lightman proceeded to answer it before I had asked it—and I was
impressed by his comments, particularly on pastoral care in schools.
Mr. Ward then proceeded to answer what would have been my
follow-up question, but could I persuade him to reflect a little
further on the implications for schools and colleges? The provisions of
this Bill include children with special needs statements, and there are
costs and practicalities in providing for them up to 18.
Martin
Ward:
Yes, clearly some young people are much more
expensive to educate and train than others. That has always been the
case, and will continue to be so. Colleges and schools are used to
dealing with students who have statements of special educational needs;
they have learning difficulties, or sensory or physical disabilities.
Clearly, they can be and often are more expensive to teach, but
colleges and schools know how to do that. However, as we try to
complete the process, we will indeed have a larger number of young
people for whom it will be difficult to provide the sort of support,
per head, that they will need and deserve.
Q
155
Nia
Griffith (Llanelli) (Lab): I very much appreciate your
comments about starting young and getting the parents as well as the
young people engaged. Ultimately, when you have brought
them
through the system and given them all the possible support you can, is
there any alternative to compulsion in having some sort of sanction?
Otherwise, how does compulsion become
compulsion?
Martin
Ward:
We could be accused of willing the end but not
the means here. We would emphasise a point on which I think we all
agree: we should start by persuading or enticing young people, and we
should make sure that a wide range of suitable provision is available
to them all. Until that is the case, it would be quite wrong to compel
them or to penalise them in any way for not going along with our
desires. We need to start at that end. We would argue that that will,
in practice, bring in virtually every young person.
Who will be left? Some young
people will be in a sort of crisis, as we have described before; some
will have mental health problems and will not be behaving rationally.
It seems to us that those remaining categories of people deserve not
punishment, but more help. It would still be possible, then, to say
that we expect everybody to be involved, but that we will not actually
lock them up. Now I know that is not actually in
there.
Q
156
Nia
Griffith:
Do you not think that is what will actually
happen, in practice? Even if we go for a compulsory model with
potential criminalisation at the end, there is still a lot of time in
between, so if you look at the processes indicated in this
Bill—at all the support mechanisms that would be put in before
anybody got to that final stage—would that not actually be doing
what you say?
Martin
Ward:
Well, yes, the intention is clearly that very
few young people should find themselves at the point of criminal
penalty, and that is right. A cynical response would be to say that not
many people find the criminal penalties are applied when their children
do not attend compulsory schooling—we have had that for many
decades in this country. Another cynical response, drawn from my
knowledge of people that age, is that most of them will be able to duck
and weave quite nicely for long enough to get to the age of 18. That
will be only a year and a bit away for some of them, because one slight
oddity of the arrangement is that they enter this phase at the end of
the school year when they turn 16, but they leave it on their 18th
birthday, which may not be that long for some of
them.
Going back to
the point we made before, a less cynical response would be that if we
have offered them the things that we think they should have, such as
good opportunities for education, good apprenticeships and employment
with good training attached, and we have closed off their option of
going for employment that does not have good training by gripping
employers and obliging them not to employ young people on that basis,
there will be virtually no young people who have not already entered
the categories that we want them to be
in.
Q
157
Nia
Griffith:
Is there anything more that you think should be
in the Bill on that hierarchy of support? I thought that there might be
some things that you wanted to come back to us
on.
Brian
Lightman:
I do not think that there needs to be
anything additional in the Bill. I think the crucial thing is that we
are talking about a culture change and a
mindset. It is a bit like when pupils come to the school in year 7: I go
into their first assembly and welcome them and tell them that they are
going to be working with us for the next seven years. I think that is
the key issue. We are saying very publicly that there is an expectation
and that we want everyone to achieve this. We know that there will be
some with whom we have less success, but our aim is to get as many
people to that stage as possible.
Q
158
Mr.
Walker:
I am a great fan of no one getting left behind.
That is a laudable aim that we should strive to achieve. However, a few
months ago, the leader of our party was in an inner city and a
youngster in a hood walked up behind him and gestured. That scene is
played out across many towns and cities across the country. There are
some extremely damaged and excluded young people out
there—dangerous young people to be perfectly honest. How are we
to reach them? You rightly pointed out that that will take a massive
effort on behalf of many agencies. Have you any thoughts on how that
can realistically be achieved?
Brian
Lightman:
We are not underestimating the scale of the
challenges, but at the same time, we are not talking about everybody
being in that situation. We are talking about a very small minority,
but they are precisely the sorts of people whom I was talking about
when I described our student support centre. When you actually get to
know those people, you find that they have enormous problems with
self-esteem and that they lack confidence. They are normally hiding
something underneath that hood. They are the people we need to start
working with early, because we will not get there when they are 16. By
that stage—once they are out there in a hoodie—we are far
too late. We need to get them at 13, 14 and earlier, work with them
intensively in school and get them on track so that they go down the
right
routes.
Q
159
Mr.
Walker:
I totally accept that point, but the Bill will
become an Act within the next 12 months, and there are young people out
there aged between 14 and 17 who will be covered by the Bill. Yes, in
future, we can identify them earlier, but what are we going to do in
the immediate future for those who are already between 14 and 16 or 17
who will be covered by the Bill? I do not expect you to have answers,
but we need to turn our minds to
that.
Brian
Lightman:
We have to take time. We are not going to
solve all the ills of society in one year. At the same time, however,
if we are not doing enough now with 14 and 15-year-olds, we need to get
moving with it as soon as we can. There is a strong commitment across
our profession to do that. Certainly, in our membership, I know lots of
schools and colleges that are really doing things to try to motivate
those youngsters and do the kind of things I have described.
Martin
Ward:
It will require provision in a lot of different
contexts, offered in different ways and places with different
organisational arrangements around them. One of the strengths of the
Bill is that it is not raising the school-leaving age—it is not
saying to these young people, “You must continue in school or
college.” Instead, it is giving them alternative routes, which
potentially will lead them in the right
direction.
Q
160
Mr.
Heald:
We had the Association of Colleges earlier, which,
I think, represents FE governing bodies. They were saying that the
costs of raising the participation rate to 100 per cent. are less than
might be expected. You are on record as saying that keeping the last 10
per cent. of recalcitrant young people in education and training will
not come cheap. Others have expressed concerns about the ability of FE
to soak up reluctant students without damaging the learning experience
of the rest. Is it not the experience of those who are teaching people
who want to learn to read and write, but who have not managed it in 10
or 11 years of statutory education, that you have to have small groups,
bags of counselling and support, and have to tackle quite a lot of
social problems as well? Is that why you think this will be quite
expensive? What do you see those costs
involving?
Martin
Ward:
I have already alluded to the point we were
trying to make: the Pareto principle operates here. The first 10 per
cent. of young people are very easy to teach. They teach themselves.
The last 10 per cent. are going to be much more difficult. Per head,
they have simply got to cost more than the first 10 per
cent.
Martin
Ward:
Colleges are already used to many of these
young people bringing their problems with them into the college
context. Years ago, when David Blunkett was Secretary of State, he used
to allude to his days as an FE college teacher and talk about the
problem of “Bricklayers 2” on a Friday afternoon. Young
people are often resistant to that type of provision and that element
of their work. I think colleges are already quite good at this, but it
is not going to be cheap because they are going to need extra support.
The next group of students, the ones whom we have not yet managed to
hook, will need more support
still.
Brian
Lightman:
If you want to break down the costs, you
are going to need additional staff who can offer specialised support.
For example, in our school we employ a youth support worker who
provides specialised counselling and mentoring to young people. That is
an extra member of staff. You have an extra teaching assistant within a
very small class to give those children one-to-one support because
often they have something like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder
or other special educational needs, and need help to engage in
learning.
Once you get
down to small group and one-to-one support, it is just like any other
SEN provision. Those are expensive types of support. There is also a
higher pupil-teacher ratio in whatever context they are learning. If
you put them into smaller environments—in the children’s
plan, for example, there was the idea of studio schools—then
that is obviously going to cost more money because they are smaller
institutions and they are going to require accommodation and the
ensuing additional costs. There are certainly additional costs. I think
it would be very wrong and naive to assume that you could do this on
the cheap, and I do not think that would be
practical.
Q
162
Sarah
McCarthy-Fry:
To correct Mr. Walker, the
present year 6 cohort are the first children that the Bill will apply
to. In your answer you were talking about 14 to 16-year-olds. Those
young people from year 6 will know about this as the older ones go
forward, even though the 11 to 16 age group know that it is not going
to apply to them. Do you think that this will encourage a higher uptake
among those people in the period until it becomes compulsory, because
it is going to be talked about in school and is going to be the ethos
of the
school?
Brian
Lightman:
I think that is already happening. I have
seen it in my own school. I think that is why most people stay in
education, because we talk about that from the moment that we get to
know them, even when they are in primary school. I think that it is
incumbent on all of us to do that, and to show them the routes and to
ensure that we have high-quality guidance at all stages, in order to
make that accessible for them.
Martin
Ward:
And the new curriculum will help.
Brian
Lightman:
Yes.
Q
163
Mr.
Hayes:
We have heard throughout the course of today that
various changes need to be made to the system of education and
training: improvements in the careers service; refinements to the
apprenticeship system, and particular help for disadvantaged young
people and groups that are hard to get at, of the type that you have
spoken about. However, this Bill creates extra demand on an unreformed
system. You spoke a little earlier about means and ends. In your view,
would it have been better to reform the system and so stimulate greater
demand?
Brian
Lightman:
I do not think that the Bill is making
greater demands on an unreformed system, because it has to be looked at
in the context of all of the other things that are going on. Certainly,
one of the things that I never cease to be amazed by in my role this
year is that there does not seem to be any aspect of education that is
not being reformed at the moment. We have a vast agenda for change and
our members are working really hard on all of those things. So this
Bill is really just a part of a much bigger
picture.
Q
164
Mr.
Hayes:
You say that, and I respect your view. However, you
would not deny, would you, that apprenticeship numbers in the latest
figures are down at both level 2 and level 3, or that the number of
NEETs has grown very significantly, or that there are real doubts about
the careers service and Connexions? Many of the witnesses to this
Committee in their written submissions have made those types of points.
Unless those things are dealt with very promptly, if this Bill comes
into force we will indeed be creating extra demand on an unreformed
system.
Martin
Ward:
The largest part of those in the NEET category
are in employment, but it is employment without the training that we
seek. So, it seems to us that the single most important measure in the
Bill, the measure that will have the biggest effect, is to require
employers not to employ 16 and 17-year-olds unless they receive
suitable training.
I
think that Brian has something to say about
guidance.
Brian
Lightman:
The careers service is being reformed and
we are very aware that there are some places where there is very
high-quality careers advice and there are other areas where the advice
is less effective. What we need to do is to ensure that that advice
gets up to the right standard everywhere; certainly, that is very
important. However, the key thing about it is that, if you take the new
standards for individual advice and guidance—the quality
standards—they provide a really strong framework for
high-quality guidance within school. We really support what is in the
Bill. If a school or a college were to audit their provision, going
through these quality standards, and a local authority were to use the
standards as an auditing tool, the quality of careers guidance would be
very good indeed. That is very
important.
Regarding
the apprentice system, it obviously must develop and improve. We cannot
expect young people to stay in education until they are 18 unless we
make sure that we provide a range of appropriate and high-quality
opportunities that they will want to use. It is this business about
persuasion, which we have spoken about before. We need to be able to
persuade them to do these things, because they can see that there is
high-quality provision in the form of apprenticeships, other courses or
other training opportunities for
them.
Q
165
Mr.
Hayes:
And, very briefly, that is why compulsion is such
an issue, because you want to do these things, in your own words,
“so that they want to stay on”. They will look at the
opportunities available to them, regard them as attractive and likely
to add to their employability, and so compulsion is not really
desirable.
Brian
Lightman:
It comes back to this point that I made
about the mindset. If our expectation is that everybody does it, then
compulsion is the right word to use. What we have to do is couple that
not with punishment and criminalisation but with high-quality provision
and win the argument that this is the right thing to do. That takes
persuasion from all of us, working
together.
Martin
Ward:
We all want to start with persuasion, and that
persuasion already works for the great majority of young
people.
Q
166
Mr.
Gibb:
I want to bring in something about part 4 of the
Bill. In your briefing you say that the leaders of independent schools
are concerned about Ofsted taking over the registration and regulation
of their schools, and that you have received welcome reassurance from
the Government that there is no future intention for independent
schools to be inspected on a similar basis to maintained schools. Can
you expand a bit on your concern about part 4 of the
Bill?
Martin
Ward:
Some of our members are the leaders of the
leading independent schools and were concerned to find that it seemed
that Ofsted was being moved in their direction, or that they were being
moved in the direction of Ofsted, which does not necessarily have a
good reputation among schools and colleges. They therefore expressed
concern about what was in the Bill, most of which we have been
reassured on.
Inspection can have two quite
different functions and meanings. The health inspector who visits the
restaurant is saying, “You are fit to practise, you are not
going to poison people,” whereas the Michelin guide inspector is
deciding how many stars you are going to get. It is not appropriate for
Ofsted to do the latter job in the independent school sector, because
it operates in a market. It certainly is appropriate that those schools
should be regulated and required to provide a decent standard of
education, good health and safety and so forth, so that children who
are sent there are safe and generally well treated. Such a threshold
inspection is appropriate, and our members are reassured that that is
what is being talked about here, rather than their being handed over to
Ofsted in the more complete sense. I think that you know about the
reassurance that we received,
Anna.
Anna
Cole:
Yes, it was saying just
that.
Q
167
Mr.
Laws:
Presumably, the youngsters whom we really need to
worry about are those who will not want to engage in a formal education
setting and may be either unwilling to go into work or unemployable
because of other problems that they have, to which you referred
earlier. We do not really want those people simply to disappear for a
year or a year and a half until they turn 18. Is there a missing
category in the Government’s armoury of options that would not
be employment or education but might be some kind of requirement to
accept support to deal with the problems that you mentioned
earlier?
Brian
Lightman:
I think that they are a very small number
of people. We need to remember that. It is a very important duty of
children’s services departments in local authorities to identify
and keep track of those young people, because they are the ones who
disappear off all the records, get into trouble and so on. There are
some very successful schemes. For example, there is one in my area
called the youth gateway scheme, in which intensive work is done with
those groups of young people to try to get them into a position where
they can get into employment or further training. You can identify who
those small groups of people are. It does not come cheap, but it is
worth every penny of the investment because you are hitting the hardest
group to get, to ensure that they stay in training and education and
then become employable within a reasonable amount of
time.
Martin
Ward:
The Bill relies upon local authorities making
good judgments in such circumstances. The regulations and guidance that
will follow it will be of particular interest. We will certainly be
looking for them to allow local authorities to proceed in a merciful
fashion, if you like, for students and young people who are in
particular
difficulty.
One group
that concerns me is perhaps not quite the same group that you are
thinking of. We all have experience of young people who embark on a
course at 16 that they then realise is wrong for them and find
completely unsupportable in fairly short order. By about November
perhaps, they are saying, “I’ve started this, but I just
can’t bear it. I can’t go there. I’m not going
there any more”—whatever “there” is. We
will need to have means of coping with their changes of direction, so
that they do not find themselves in trouble if they have to wait until
the following September. If
they say, “Oh well, I’ve started this apprenticeship.
Actually that isn’t the right thing for me. I now realise I
should have stayed at school or gone to college and embarked on a
course of full-time education,” they will probably have to wait
until the following September to do that and we will need to be able to
keep them ticking over without getting into trouble during that waiting
period.
The
Chairman:
I am afraid I need to draw a line there. We are
coming to the end of our time. I thank the Association of School and
College Leaders and the three of you, Martin Ward, Brian Lightman and
Anna Cole, for coming and appearing before us. We are
grateful.
I ask our
final two witnesses of the afternoon, John Freeman and Councillor Les
Lawrence, to come up to the
Table.
Once again,
the two names on my piece of paper have expanded. We have John Freeman,
who represents the Association of Directors of Children’s
Services, Councillor Les Lawrence, who is chair of the children and
young people board of the Local Government Association, and Kim
Bromley-Derry.
Kim
Bromley-Derry:
I am vice-president elect of the
Association of Directors of Children’s Services in directorate
Newham.
Q
168
Mr.
Gibb:
May I start with the ADCS’s briefing to the
Committee? In the summary, you say that “the ADCS agrees the
need for sanctions for non-compliance”. However, in your
submission in relation to the Green Paper “Raising Expectations:
staying in education and training post-16”, you say: “We
remain extremely sceptical at this stage of the proposals put forward
to enforce participation. It appears to be counter-productive to take
proceedings against a young person, if the aim is to encourage them to
learn effectively, particularly if they have previously been
disaffected anyway.” Can you expand on your views on that
issue?
John
Freeman:
Hearing the debate this afternoon about
compulsion has been fascinating. Our position in terms of the present
drafting is that we support it, but in the context of the culture shift
and the change in expectations, and we have an important caveat about
custody, which I will come back to. We can start from the position of
the year 6 young people who will be the first to be affected by the
legislation. If we say to them, “You will be compelled to stay
in education or training and if you don’t, we will apply a range
of sanctions” and those sanctions include fines and criminal
sanctions of various sorts, that will clearly be
counter-productive.
We
are talking about the notion that, at the extreme margin, there will be
some young people for whom a sanction is appropriate, but it will be
very, very few. We expect that, over quite a short period and by the
time the young people who are now in year 6 get to the age of 16 or 17,
that culture shift will have been implemented, as will the diplomas and
apprenticeships, all the curriculum changes and all the improved
information, advice and guidance, such that the requirement for
coercion will become a very much less important
thing.
Q
169
Mr.
Gibb:
In paragraph 16 of your briefing, you talk about
clause 12, which deals with the duty on local authorities to make
arrangements to identify young people who are not participating. You
talk about needing to build on the existing computer systems:
ContactPoint, the Connexions database, employment databases and so on.
Will that be very costly for local authorities? Do you believe that the
computer system devised to collate and share the information will
work?
Kim
Bromley-Derry:
There has been huge investment in
terms of the information systems currently operating across this field.
Certainly that is true of the work that has gone on in Connexions as
well and, with the migration of Connexions to the local authority, we
feel that the capacity exists within both local authority and
sub-regional or regional level. Obviously, we need to look not just at
local authority level, particularly where you have conurbations of a
number of authorities, but we do not feel that there is, particularly,
an extra burden. However, we obviously need to co-ordinate and
synchronise those systems over the coming
years.
John
Freeman:
We are working pretty closely with
Department officials on things like ContactPoint, which are quite
complex systems to implement, but need to be implemented in an
effective way. I think that we have sufficient time before they need to
be fully in place, in order to ensure that they are pretty
robust.
Q
170
Mr.
Hayes:
On notional assessments and the likely cost, the
Association of Colleges has told us that the systems you described are
not fit for purpose and would need considerable improvement. Given the
new statutory responsibilities of local authorities in this regard,
both for promotion of participation and for the necessity of keeping
records of individuals, are local authorities going to come to a
notional view about likely resource
implications?
Kim
Bromley-Derry:
We feel that capacity is within the
systems as they currently exist, although they need to be developed and
synchronised. The level of tracking that goes on already is
significant. It needs to be fine-tuned and targeted, but we feel that
there is capacity within the system, without significant additional
resources.
Les
Lawrence:
One of the important aspects is not so much
the system, the hardware or the interconnectivity, but the data capture
and analysis for which the system will be put in place and how those
are used and shared. There are two elements in answering your question:
one is the capital cost of the systems, and a lot of the systems
already exist across the 14-to-19 partnerships, between authorities and
across colleges and authorities; but I come back to the fundamental
issues around data capture and how those data are utilised to
facilitate the opportunities that will be offered to young
people.
Q
171
Stephen
Williams:
I would also like to ask some questions about
the data capture duty that is going to be placed on local authorities.
To take the case of the city of Bristol, someone from my constituency
may well be going to school in any of the three neighbouring unitary
authorities: North Somerset, South Gloucestershire or Bath. People come
into
Bristol from as far away as Wiltshire to go to college. How can we be
confident that the data capturing system is going to deal with those
complexities of real life, given that, if you get it wrong, someone may
be going down a penalty
situation?
John
Freeman:
The biggest system being
implemented at the moment is ContactPoint, which is best described as
150 interconnected databases, each one at a local authority level. It
will therefore have a record of all young people at the most basic
level. That needs to tie into and be tied into other databases from
Connexions and, indeed, from school and college records in an effective
way, so that we are able to point up where individual young people are
at any given time. I suppose that it needs to be pretty robust, which
is the point that I am making. I accept that the need for that, because
what do you do if you do not have a child or young person on this
system? How do you know where they are? You need to be sufficiently
robust to know that if they are not in Bristol they might be in
Wiltshire, if they are not in Wiltshire they might be in Dorset. We
need to have across-authority systems that are
robust.
Les
Lawrence:
You can underpin that if you take other
systems that have been developed. The common system framework is one
where you agree a set of protocols between all those using the data,
and then you agree what are known as common datasets. It does not
matter about the platform or the networking arrangements in each
authority or partner, if you have a protocol and the common dataset,
the information is accessible and sharable. The underpinning part is
that it must be timely, and those are the elements that you have to get
absolutely right. If you get the protocols and common datasets, you
will be able to work in a very participative
way.
Kim
Bromley-Derry:
I would also add that we already have
high levels—almost 90 per cent.—of participation post-16.
We currently deliver it for 90 per cent., but this is an additional
number of young people who are engaging. The diversity of their
pathways has increased, but we already deal with large numbers of young
people.
Q
172
Stephen
Williams:
They were all the answers to my first question.
My second question is about the legal powers that you as local
authorities will be able to exercise if you have to enforce compulsion.
Again, to give an example from Bristol, the legal services department
has difficulty getting yellow lines removed or placed where residents
want them. Are you confident that there are enough solicitors and other
legally trained people in local authorities to cope with the large new
duty being placed on authorities?
John
Freeman:
I cannot comment on yellow lines, but
returning to our briefing at paragraph 25, the point is that we do not
want to start with solicitors and legal involvement. We will need to
start with individual counselling, mentoring for parents, parenting
support, individual support for young people, information, advice and
guidance. That is where it all starts, not at the point of
compulsion.
When the
other steps have not proved effective, there is still a decision to be
made about the appropriate route to secure the best outcome. For some
young people, however difficult and recalcitrant they are,
it
may well prove to be inappropriate or ineffective to go down the route
of legal remedy. We see custody being used rarely, if ever. The
starting point is information, advice and guidance, mentoring,
counselling, support for parents and for young people through schools
and other central services, with a view to securing their engagement
before you start considering the legal remedy. If you do consider the
legal remedy, you must come to a sensible decision about whether it
will have the desired effect.
Q
173
Stephen
Williams:
In the evidence from the Local Government
Association, there is an expression of disappointment that the Bill
does not recognise non-formal education that a youth service or
positive activities might deliver. Are there any amendments that you
would like in order to recognise the valuable service that
children’s services and departments deliver?
Les
Lawrence:
In a sense, you have answered your own
question by using that terminology. There are a number of innovative
arrangements with different authorities throughout the country, whereby
many youngsters, who had become disengaged with learning at 16, have
been drawn back into youth support and outreach. Because of that
different learning environment, they have become mentors of others who
have become disengaged, and equally, those mentors have begun to
re-engage with the educative process and, in many cases, become young
potential youth workers. It is a different route. It brings us back to
one fundamental point about this principle: it is about motivating and
finding out what engages young people not only at this age but earlier
at 11 or 14, because once you have an understanding of the innate
abilities of the young people with whom you are dealing, you can flex a
learning environment and opportunities around that young
person’s interest, which is the way you drive their
participation—not by standing behind them with a whacking great
stick. In my view, that is a sign of failure. Given that we have five
years and seven years for the local authorities to provide the
strategic leadership with their partners in order to put in place the
right frameworks within the secondary sector, I honestly believe that
the need to use the sanction in the Bill will be minimal. It will not
be the golden goose that the legal profession
imagines.
Kim
Bromley-Derry:
The whole emphasis of the
children’s plan is on personalisation and progression. The
different forms of accreditation need to be designed in a way that
personalises the package and provides an assessment for learning for
young people, and to demonstrate progression so that they can go on to
alternative, different and more valuable
accreditation.
John
Freeman:
Councillor Lawrence referred to young people
aged 16 with unfortunate experiences. We hope that the
children’s plan, and the other curriculum and cultural changes,
beginning at pre-secondary or perhaps even from middle-primary and up,
can ensure that fewer 16-year-olds are disengaged and disfranchised. We
hope that the 14 to 19 curriculum reforms will ensure that the maximum
number of young people want to remain, and see the benefit of
remaining, in education and
training.
Q
174
Jim
Knight:
I want to explore two areas. The first is the
vexed issue of enforcement. I am pleased to see that, like many others,
both the LGA and the
ADCS support the principle of raising the participation age. Local
authorities have good experience of working within systems of
enforcement. I am interested in whether we can learn any lessons from
your experience about how we could run a system of enforcement. I am
even more interested in the difference of tone between the two
organisations in the two papers. From the LGA’s side, I would be
very interested to hear from Councillor Lawrence where the LGA sits.
Does it support the duty, but not enforcement? If it supports
enforcement, as well as the duty, is that just civil enforcement, or
should we go even further to criminal enforcement? Where does the LGA
sit on the spectrum? From paragraph 19 of the ADCS submission, I take
it that in “very exceptional circumstances”—I
think that is the phrase—the ADCS supports enforcement through
the whole spectrum. Will you set out
why?
John
Freeman:
We support the whole spectrum, with the
exception, as I said before, of custody. In our view, without the end
point of the legal duties, and the compulsion through the law, the
remaining changes to culture, the NEETs strategy, and things such as
diplomas and apprenticeships, will have an effect, but there will not
be the expectation that it is genuinely and seriously the norm and that
it is the way to do things. I reiterate my point that we see
enforcement as the last option and, indeed, an indication that we have
failed somewhere. A disengaged young person is not just an indication
that they have failed, but that we have
failed.
On the
general point of enforcement, as a director of children’s
services, I have a range of powers that I never use. However, if I did
not have them, I would have different conversations with a range of
people. For example, I have powers to intervene in schools, under
certain circumstances. I have never used those powers, but without
them, my leverage on the activity would be much reduced. I believe that
the compulsion needs to be there as a last
resort.
Kim
Bromley-Derry:
We also have experience of enforcement
in other areas, which has been relatively successful in terms of
parenting orders. The concept of enforcement in other sectors seems to
have worked quite well and has actually created greater participation,
and so we feel that it has potential in this sector as
well.
Les
Lawrence:
The view from the LGA is that the sanction
is the very last resort. We do not disagree with the intent, but that
intent should be seen in the context of the overall direction in which
to go—not as one of the prime elements but as a final sanction
to be applied in
extremis.
It should
be a civil sanction. I would argue that if you criminalise around this
area, you then create tension and conflict with a whole series of other
areas of the law which rightly should involve a criminal sanction
because of the nature of the offence being committed. In that sense,
this offence—non-participation—is a civil offence, not a
criminal offence whereby one has brought about distress to another
person or damage to the property of another
person.
There is also
a slight difference in that, yes, parenting orders have been
successfully applied in cases involving children up to the age of 16,
but the legal framework is that the responsibilities of parents to a
young person between 16 and 18 and to one who is 15 years 364 days
are different. I do not think that that difference has been fully drawn
out in the nature of the sanctions being applied. I do not think that
the application of a parenting order post-16 would be seen by the
courts in the same context as a parenting order pre-16 in terms of the
responsibility being placed on the parent. That is another reason why
we think that the offence should be contained solely within the civil
arena.
The other
area was around quality assurance. We have heard concerns from some
witnesses today about the consistency of the quality of the delivery of
support services—information, advice and guidance—which
will be crucial if we are to achieve what I believe is our shared aim
of enforcement used only in exceptional circumstances. Our last witness
waved around the quality standard for information, advice and guidance,
but what reassurance can you give the Committee on consistency of
quality, and what levers do you think should be applied by central
Government to achieve that
quality?
John
Freeman:
Consistency of high-quality support is
already one of our key priorities. It has to be, because in order to
secure good outcomes for children and young people, it stands to reason
and is obvious that we need to provide them with the appropriate
support, information and guidance—and that applies now, not just
under the new legislation. It is very important that young people,
particularly those who are at risk of not engaging or who are
vulnerable in various ways, are supported to engage. As stated in our
evidence, and as somebody else said earlier this afternoon, up to the
age of 18 they are children within the meaning of the Act. Therefore,
that is part of our existing
priority.
One of the
interesting changes in the present year, 2008-09, is that the
Connexions grant will form part of the area-based grant,
non-ring-fenced and within the overall area. It is having an
interesting effect, in that people in my position are engaging in a
debate with local strategic partnerships and councils on what the money
is being used for, why it is being used in the way it is, how it can be
best used and how partners can come together to get the best possible
outcomes, rather than its being dealt with in isolation as a specific
grant that does something that somehow is outside the purview of the
children’s trust overall. So this is a high priority for us
already. It is becoming a priority across the whole of the
children’s trust and the local strategic partnership through the
mechanism that I just
described.
In terms
of central Government, clearly there will be
standards inspection, the comprehensive area assessment, and those
mechanisms which will look both at what we do, in providing
information, advice, guidance and support and the other requirements
that are set out in legislation, and at the outcomes. If the outcomes
are not good, whatever we do, if it is not in the outcomes, is less
effective.
Les
Lawrence:
John is quite right. At the end of the day,
the outcome must be beneficial for the person who has participated in
the arrangements that were deemed
appropriate for them. There is an area that perhaps needs to be looked
at with regard to the quality assurance: we have an inspectoral regime
for colleges and local authorities, but how will we be able to provide
that assurance for those opportunities provided by employers? Local
authorities do not have any jurisdiction over those who are providing
the apprenticeship or training schemes that will be part of what we
will be offering young people and engaging them
with.
Equally,
I would suggest that, within quality assurance, you must consider the
range of opportunities that are available to young people. There is the
tension between an urban and a rural environment. In a city such as my
own, Birmingham, we will have no problem in conjunction with our
neighbouring authorities being able to provide a range of different
experiences and opportunities to young people. If you go to Cornwall,
or Cumbria, or Northumberland, how you provide young people with the
access, and then the opportunity that meets their needs, skills, and
competencies, becomes a different order of question. The quality
assurance aspect in that situation is different to that which we can
provide in an urban area, where it is based on the range of
opportunities that you can provide. So, there is an extra
dimension.
Plus, as I
say, how do we provide that process of inspection without making it
overbearing, prescriptive, and restrictive on employers who, at the end
of the day, we will be asking a lot of in providing the
apprenticeships and training
opportunities?
Q
176
Angela
Watkinson:
We have heard it said with some confidence that
there is sufficient spare capacity in the system for sixth form and FE
colleges to absorb the additional demand that will come from the 16 to
18-year-olds. But they will all come from currently under-represented
groups which are, by definition, quite high-maintenance. They might be
teenage parents, children who are caring for their own parents or who
have a range of difficult domestic circumstances, or they might have
special needs or mobility problems. How do you see the effect on
funding of those additional, more expensive
students?
Kim
Bromley-Derry:
I think that the question I was asked
was about the information systems and the capacity in the system.
Inevitably, you are right. The likelihood is that we will be working
with a harder-to-reach group, who will need additional support. That
goes back to the question of the levels of support required and the
minimum entitlement of that support. Certainly, it is a key question
that the 14-to-19 partnerships operating throughout the country are
tackling at the
moment.
We may have
an entitlement, we may have a range of pathways for young people, but
how do you pull together support packages for individuals that enable
them to access, and, more importantly, stay on and achieve in those
pathways? That needs to be designed as part of that partnership; for
example, in dialogue with schools, FE colleges, and employers about
their particular needs. Of course, as we have heard, all employers will
have slightly different needs in terms of the level of support they
require, whether mentoring support for young people or logistical
support with families.
Certainly, if we take an
approach that personalises the package for young people, each of those
individuals will have a different set of needs, whether ADHD at one end
of the spectrum or involvement in criminality at the other. The local
authorities obviously have significant resources to broker into that.
They are delivering many of them already, but some of them will
possibly need to be reconfigured for a slightly different age range. We
still need to work through that. Inevitably, there could be
reprioritisation of those resources in order to enable it to happen.
So, the key issue for local authorities is how we might reprioritise if
there are no additional
resources.
Q
177
Angela
Watkinson:
Would that not inevitably increase the global
budget for children’s services with local
authorities?
Kim
Bromley-Derry:
That is true, but we must also look at
the impact of the migration of Connexions and integrated youth support,
where we are looking to integrate the offer of youth offending
services, Connexions and a range of different agencies to young people.
We still have not worked through the impact of that. Certainly, it is
something that we will need to work on over the next four or five
years, before we have to offer this.
Les
Lawrence:
One of the strands in your question was
about those with learning disabilities, those who have other
health-related and physical needs. Here is yet another opportunity for
us to consider the financial envelope, not only in the context of the
local authority but in that of the services that can be provided by the
health service and by the child and adult mental health service.
Equally, we have to consider how we can utilise things like local area
agreements and the area-based grants that are now coming on stream to
assist local authorities in targeting resources to specific indicator
requirements currently in place for local authorities and, dare I say
it, to link them back for Government to the public service agreements,
which are supposedly across Government Departments. I do not think that
the concept of integration has quite reached central Government in the
way that it has local government at the
moment.
Les
Lawrence:
It has now. In that sense, your question
goes much wider than the money for local authorities. We need to look
at what other support public sector bodies can provide, and equally how
we can then lever in appropriate support and resources from within the
private sector.
John
Freeman:
In the context of those local and national
partnerships, it is worth noting that if young people get the outcomes
at 16 or 18 they will be better able to enter into the employment
market and thus reduce social costs. It is about not just spending more
money on children’s services—to an extent it
is—but reducing costs elsewhere in the public
service.
Q
178
Mr.
Marsden:
I would like to probe further on the
implications of the transfer of Connexions to LEAs.
The recent report by Professor Watts and Allister McGowan on monitoring
what is happening at the moment suggests that there are already very
wide variations in the way in
which the new Connexions services are to be delivered to local
authorities. I wonder, Councillor Lawrence, whether this is something
that causes you concern, given what was said earlier about the need to
maintain national
standards.
Les
Lawrence:
I think it would not be inappropriate to
say that the provision of Connexions services was variable in the
extreme across the country—from very poor service provision to
exemplary provision. What tends to happen within local authorities at
the moment depends on what service had been provided prior to the
decision to take it into the local authorities’ jurisdiction. I
think that inevitably, because you are seeking to devolve the
responsibility to local authorities, it will bring about a variance in
the nature and type of provision, simply because local authorities will
gear the new arrangements to the needs and requirements of their
localities. That means that they may well continue—Warwickshire
is a good example—to use the Connexions service that was there
before. They have been commissioned. Equally, some local authorities,
like my own, because it was provided across Birmingham and Solihull,
disaggregated the original service and were providing it in a much more
localised way throughout the city, whereas in Solihull they have
literally taken it in to their new trust arrangements.
I am confident that local
authorities will look at the new service in the context of their needs
and requirements, and actually make it a more localised provision,
depending upon the nature of the localities and neighbourhoods that
they serve. So what we will see happen somewhere like Northumberland
will be of a very different nature, much more localised, than what you
see in a city like Birmingham, which will be more
area-based.
Q
179
Mr.
Marsden:
We may want to press a bit further on that when
we come to hear from the Minister, but it obviously makes enormous
sense that this is entirely in line with Government policy on
“Every Child Matters” and children’s trusts and
that it will embed those services as part of an integrated youth
service. The concern that has been expressed already is that there are
no mechanisms to ensure that that money will be spent in a way that is
coherent with that. There is no ring-fencing and even at this early
stage it is reasonable to ask what viewpoint you think that
hard-pressed local authorities will take about maintaining the
expenditure in this and coming financial
years.
Kim
Bromley-Derry:
It is important to say that the local
authorities and their partners have quite a robust performance
framework and, certainly, many of the outcomes that were expected of
the previous Connexions service before it migrated—or even
stayed in the same form in some areas—are still incumbent on
local authorities and their partners. I think that I speak
categorically for directors and local authorities when I say that we
are absolutely focused on delivering those outcomes.
However, we feel strongly that
the services need to meet the local needs, demography and dynamics, and
that was not always the case in Connexions but, as Councillor Lawrence
has said, in some areas it was very strong and quite often that service
has been maintained
where it was strong. Certainly, the performance framework gives us a
focus. We see that there is a level of efficiency in integration and
joining up, which is an opportunity for local authorities and their
partners that had not been realised when the services were separate and
worked in parallel with each other. My experience of local authorities
where that integration is going on is that some front-line services
have been increased because of that more efficient
model.
Q
180
Mr.
Marsden:
That is all very well and you may propose, but
finance directors and chief executives tend to dispose in tight local
government settlement years, and people know what happened to the
funding of FE when it was under local authority administration in the
1980s, which were tight settlement years. Is there anything that you
can do or would advise the Government to do to build on the existing
framework to ensure that that sort of problem does not arise
again?
Les
Lawrence:
One of the important changes aside from the
move of the 14 to 19 funding vis-Ã -vis the LSC to local
authorities as well as the Connexions service is that at a strategic
level local authorities can now begin to plan and commission what they
require to provide for the young people within their jurisdiction. That
is a very different context from the current one, where I would suggest
that much relates to how many bums on seats you can get in any
particular institution, and you may have a series of institutions all
providing exactly the same thing at different levels of
quality.
This
actually allows us to ensure the quality of the provision in a way that
has not happened, I would suggest, over the last decade. While I do not
disagree with your premise around the local authority FE paradigm, I
suggest that the new arrangements that we are seeking to put in place
will be much more coherent with regard to the quality of outcomes, the
opportunities for young people and the actual utilisation of the
resources in what I call the Lyons sense, not only between the other
LSC funding and Connexions and the current children’s services
grant, but also with money across other partner agencies and the
private
sector.
Kim
Bromley-Derry:
In the statutory framework there is a
duty on the director of children’s services and the lead member
to identify whether they believe there to be insufficient resources to
deliver the outcomes within their children and young people’s
plan and within the statute, and I am sure, given the commitment of
members and officers to deliver on those outcomes, that they would
raise that if they needed
to.
John
Freeman:
The performance management framework is a
fundamental shift, with regard to Ofsted, performance tables and things
of that sort and also through local area agreements and area-based
grants, which are focused on ensuring that partnerships as a whole own
the issues and the outcomes. It was not like that in the 1980s; it just
was not like that at all. The world has moved on in so far as
performance management is now much
tighter.
Q
181
Mr.
Heald:
Do you agree that there needs to be a bit of
flexibility in the system to allow for changes of plan? For example, I
was talking to someone who owned a garage and had a worker from this
age group
who was at college and was not enjoying the car mechanic course because
it used rather old-fashioned equipment and older vehicles than those he
was used to working with in the garage. In the end, the owner said,
“Why don’t I send you off to the manufacturer’s
training course?” He paid £20,000, the lad went off and
that seemed to work well. It may be that it would come within the
guided learning provision in clause 8(3), but there should be enough
flexibility in the system for it to, should there
not?
John
Freeman:
Yes.
Kim
Bromley-Derry:
Big issues facing the current system
are staying-on rates, the ability to make informed choices and early
intervention with young people. It is often no good having that
conversation with a 16-year-old; it needs to happen at primary school
and in the early years of secondary school. Certainly, it would not be
good enough to have just one course for one young person. There has to
be choice in the system and the ability for young people to change
their minds if it is not the right course or employment opportunity.
There also has to be flexibility for the providers, whether they be the
employer, training provider or school. The strengths of the system will
be having the ability to offer that choice and diversity, and having
capacity in the system for flexibility when someone has made the wrong
choice, if something is not right for them or if they find it too
difficult and need to do an alternative course.
Les
Lawrence:
You have highlighted an aspect that I think
the new arrangement could facilitate. A formal learning environment
such as a college provides the theoretical base. The employers provide
the practical base because, more often than not, they have to use
state-of-the-art or more modern processes simply because that is the
way they keep competitive. I think that the partnership between those
two elements will be very innovative and will give us an opportunity
not only to incentivise young people but to encourage employers to
participate in a way that they have not been able to in the
past.
Q
182
Nia
Griffith:
I should like to go back to what you said about
quality assurance, because it is an immensely important role in the
same way as the whole issue of compulsion, on which you have responded
very clearly. On the business of providing things in the workplace, the
representatives from the CBI were keen to point out that sometimes
there is not an appropriate college course and that they would like to
do more in the workplace. What difficulties do you see that provoking
for your services? Is there anything that you want to tell us about
that?
John
Freeman:
Councillor Lawrence referred earlier to
further provisions on the transfer of funding for 14
to 19-year-olds to local authorities on a commissioning basis. Local
authorities need to consider how post-14 and post-16 education and
training is commissioned—in a way that involves employers, meets
their needs locally on all the issues from literacy and numeracy to
high-level skills and all the soft skills of employment. It should all
be tailored to the local economic need, so that the training we provide
will enable young people to enter the employment market in an effective
way locally.
The commissioning framework
that is being developed for local authorities is not about provision,
as with what I might describe as the bad old days pre-1993 when local
authorities ran colleges, or the days before 1988 when they ran
schools. Those days are no longer here.
We do
however have a role, both in terms of economic regeneration and in
terms of children’s services, to ensure that young people have
the experiences in school and after school that enable them to enter
employment. It is one of the duties of children’s services
directors and authorities. It is one of the five outcomes. Therefore,
we need to look very coldly and calmly at the provision being made,
matching that to the needs of the economy in consultation with
employers and employers’ organisations in order to commission,
to recomission and, in some cases, to decommission provision to ensure
that what we have matches what is
needed.
Les
Lawrence:
To go back to a point I raised earlier, you
highlight one of the tensions that exists in terms of how we ensure
that young people in rural environments have the same opportunities as
those in urban environments. Take, for example, two counties in the
west midlands: Herefordshire and Shropshire. Both have single centres
of population, and there is a natural gravity in terms of the way
people see those as the focuses of the two counties. Therefore, one of
the first things you need to have in place is the transport cost. That
is not covered by the Bill, but it is an inherent cost of which I think
the Government need to take account if you are asking a young person to
travel. Often you will find that the economic base of the rural economy
is far lower than in urban areas, even taking into account economic and
social deprivation indices. That is the first factor.
Secondly, how do we persuade
employers to provide enough opportunity in those rural areas to allow
the theoretical aspect to be provided in the colleges and learning
institutions in the major towns, and the practical application of what
is being learnt to be provided in the rural areas? If representatives
of the CBI were here, I would ask them how they would encourage their
members to reach out into some of these rural areas to ensure the
continuity of those communities and, equally, to provide
opportunities.
Q
183
Mr.
Walker:
We heard from people giving evidence earlier that
there will be various tiers to this: there will be a role for primary
schools in identifying youngsters and their attitudes. Obviously, there
will be a role for secondary schools in engaging them in the learning
process and then moving some on to sixth form and some to college. I
want to be absolutely clear: are you, as local authorities, absolutely
convinced that there will be funding mechanisms in place to ensure that
that is
affordable?
Kim
Bromley-Derry:
Much of that work has already started,
in terms of our NEETs strategies that are already in place. It starts
even with pre-primary school children in terms of family attitudes to
work, especially
where there is intergenerational worklessness. We see this as a natural
extension of the work that is already going on, and feel that there is
capacity within the system to deliver most of this. We need to be
cautious in picking up that point: we have not quite seen the full
impact of migration of services such as Connexions to the local
authority, and we appreciate that children with additional needs are
becoming more prevalent, and often their needs are becoming more
complex. We do need to monitor that over the coming years, towards full
implementation, but we certainly feel that there is capacity in the
system, and that it builds on the work we are already doing. Much of
the windfall comes from a more integrated, more coherent approach
across local authorities, within local authorities, and with other
partners such as the health community and the LSC as it stands at the
moment and in the
future.
Q
184
Mr.
Walker:
When you say “capacity”, you are
talking about financial capacity and human resources capacity. I
thought local authorities were fairly hard-pressed at the moment, and I
was not aware that there was a lot of capacity around. Was I
wrong?
Kim
Bromley-Derry:
We are gaining capacity through a more
coherent, integrated approach, which is a more efficient approach to
delivering this. We would never say no to money, but the reality is
that this is developing and working well within the 14 to 19
arrangements as they are developing, and we see this as a natural
development from
that.
Les
Lawrence:
Local authorities have become very astute
at getting more out of the same, while making 3 per cent efficiencies,
year on
year.
John
Freeman:
On the funding mechanisms that were
mentioned, there are clearly technical issues to consider on making
them get the money to the right place. We are working pretty closely
with the Department on proposals for that, but those proposals are not
yet complete. We look forward to seeing them when they
are.
Q
185
Mr.
Laws:
I have two quick questions. How successfully, in
your view, is the existing duty for youngsters to be in education up to
16 being
enforced?
John
Freeman:
Pretty well, I think. There are some
exceptions, some of which cause us, as directors, significant concern,
but overall pretty well. The issues that face us from time to time are
on what I would describe as grey exclusions, when young people who are
causing difficulty at a school are advised by the school not to be
there. That is an unprofessional approach, and when we come across it
we take appropriate action. Those young people have an entitlement to
be in school. Sometimes there is collusion between parents, children
and schools in that, and it is entirely regrettable. In my view, it is
driven in part by the fact that the curriculum being offered by the
school is not meeting the young person’s
needs.
Q
186
Mr.
Laws:
Because of time, do you mind if nip on to the next
question? I would like to be able to come back on that one. I want to
explore what you understand “reasonable excuse” to mean
in relation to not being in education or employment at 16. If somebody
is a 17-year-old parent and has a drug
addiction or mental health problem at the same time, and they are
already with the relevant services such as a GP and drugs service,
would they have a reasonable excuse not to be engaged in education or
training?
Kim
Bromley-Derry:
Actually, I think that many of those
young people are engaged already. It is about making our offer more
flexible and having a broader range of pathways for them. There will
always be a small group that is left outside that, because of either a
drug addiction or their inability to engage, but we need to ensure that
we are still engaging with them, even though it may not be in an
education, training or skills environment. We must have an interface
with them so that they are still in the system. We cannot afford for
them to be out of the
system.
Q
187
Mr.
Laws:
Who, then, would fall into the category of having a
reasonable excuse? I picked quite a serious case, with multiple reasons
for being out of education, so who would have a good
case?
Kim
Bromley-Derry:
There are occasions when young
people’s needs are complex, whether they are suffering serious
emotional or mental trauma, in in-patient facilities or subject to a
high level of psychiatric or psychological support. I also think that
there are some illnesses and medical conditions that make it much more
difficult for them to engage, and there are some family circumstances
that affect their ability to engage for short periods. They may be
subject to abuse from parents, or there could be safeguarding issues
that prevent them from
engaging.
Q
188
Mr.
Gibb:
We have heard a lot of complaints today from
witnesses about literacy levels among the group that we are
targeting.
Mr.
Gibb:
No, not about us. Tom Wilson, for example, said that
a lot of people felt angry that the school system had let them down.
John Freeman, how well are your members implementing the
recommendations of the Rose review on using synthetic phonics to teach
children to read in primary schools, and enforcing the statutory duty
that now
exists?
John
Freeman:
I have two comments. First, the assessment
of local authorities through the Ofsted framework of annual performance
assessments and joint area reviews shows that school improvement and
services across the country are good on average, which is quite
reassuring. On the detail of the support for the national strategies,
it is rated as good throughout the country, and I have no particular
concerns about that issue. However, there are too many young people
leaving primary and secondary school with too low a level of literacy
and numeracy. That is not an excuse or a ducking; it is accepted
throughout the profession, by
children’s services colleagues in local authorities and in
schools. A range of different approaches is being taken to secure
improvement.
Q
189
Mr.
Hayes:
To build on your point about access and transport
in rural and urban areas, have you undertaken any further studies
throughout your authorities, factoring in rurality, by which I
particularly mean sparsity, and the local economic profile? Building on
your point, Councillor Lawrence, I believe that those rural areas with
a narrow economic base and a sparse or scattered population will be
particularly adversely affected.
Les
Lawrence:
We have sought
considerable information from our member authorities, not initially on
that issue, but on the “Youth Matters” issue and the
positive activities for young people programme. Often, such activities
could be provided only during school term times in the evenings, and
you tend to find in shire counties the duality of responsibility for
provision, with transport provided by the county and the location for
activities provided by the districts. We tried to get an idea of the
transport infrastructure in many of those counties, and one finding
that we have already is that, often, bus services stop at about 6 or 7
o’clock, so activities are difficult to provide.
If you try to provide a
transport infrastructure for the provision of the opportunities under
discussion, it becomes even more difficult, because something else that
we have discovered is that during the middle of the day, classes do not
tend to operate. The county councils network is coming to present data,
views and costs, so we will have a more substantive body of information
in the next month or two. The National Youth Agency is also examining
transport issues, because of the “Youth Matters”
paper.
Q
190
Mr.
Hayes:
Previously, you made a strong case about sparsity,
and the delivery of public services generally and education services
particularly. May I invite you to add this particular obligation to
your considerations?
Les
Lawrence:
Happy to do
that.
The
Chairman:
With that, I thank Councillor Les Lawrence and
the LGA, and John Freeman and Kim Bromley-Derry on behalf of the
Association of Directors of Children’s Services, for providing
written evidence and for coming along today to meet the Committee. To
all the witnesses, thank you very much. You are helping us to introduce
a new way of working, which we hope will lead to better legislation. To
my colleagues, this is still a new procedure for us, so if, during the
course of a Committee, any of you want to tell me what you think works
well and what does not, and if you have suggestions for how we could
tweak the procedure to make it work better, the Chairmen’s Panel
meets regularly and we are reviewing the
situation.
Further
consideration adjourned.—[Mr. Michael
Foster.]
Adjourned accordingly at
one minute to Seven o’clock till Thursday 24 January at Nine
o’clock.
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