 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
WitnessesProfessor
Alison Wolf, King’s College
London
Professor Lorna Unwin, Institute
of Education
Graham Hoyle, Chief
Executive, Association of Learning
Providers
Trish Hartley, Chief
Executive, Campaign for Learning
John
Bangs, Assistant Secretary, Education/Equal Opportunities, National
Union of Teachers
Chris Brown,
Parliamentary Officer, National Union of
Teachers
Mick Brookes, General
Secretary, National Association of Head
Teachers
Kathryn
James, Senior Assistant Secretary, Politics, Policy and Education,
National Association of Head Teachers
Public Bill CommitteeThursday 24 January 2008(Afternoon)[Hugh Bayley in the Chair]Education and Skills Bill1.2
pm
The
Chairman:
Let me tell colleagues that the Opposition Front
Benchers have suggested that we re-time the slots this afternoon. You
will see on the document that has been circulated that we were to hear
evidence from the two professors for 40 minutes, followed by the
Association of Learning Providers and the Campaign for Learning for one
hour, and the National Union of Teachers and the National Association
of Head Teachers for an hour and twenty minutes. The Opposition Front
Benchers have proposed that we go for three one-hour slots. If we
change the times, we can move on to the next witnesses ahead of time,
but not after time. It would give us more
flexibility.
Ordered,
That the Order of the
Committee of 22nd January 2008 be amended as
follows:
In the
Table-
(a) leave out the third
entry relating to Thursday 24th January and
insert—
b)
leave out the fourth entry relating to that day and
insert—
—
[Mr.
Michael
Foster.]
1.4
pm
The
Committee deliberated in private.
1.7
pm
On
resuming—
The
Chairman:
I should tell our first two
witnesses—I do not know whether this is good news or bad
news—that the Committee has decided to extend the questioning
session from 40 minutes, which I think is what you were expecting, to a
maximum of an hour. I do not know whether any of the witnesses who will
give evidence later this afternoon are present, but we have decided to
allocate a one-hour slot, starting on the hour ,to each of the three
sets of witnesses.
May I introduce Professor
Alison Wolf from King’s College London and Professor Lorna Unwin
from the Institute of Education?
Q
261261
Mr.
John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings)
(Con): Lorna, with Alison Fuller, you gave evidence to the
House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee inquiry into apprenticeships,
as you will remember. You told that inquiry that there were barriers to
employer engagement in the apprenticeships. Indeed you
said,
“For
quite a lot of employers there is a lack of knowledge about how to gain
access to the
system.”
What are the
main barriers to employer engagement in your
view?
Professor
Lorna Unwin:
There are a number, which partly stems
from the fact that for too long employers have not been properly
involved. That might sound a strange thing to say
when we think about apprenticeship, but I think it is because the key
apprenticeship organisations are the training providers, which contract
with the Learning and Skills Council to organise and manage
apprenticeship places in particular
localities.
We know
from Government estimates that only 5 per cent. of employers contract
directly with the LSC for apprenticeships. The rest have managed
contracts through training providers. In a sense, there is a barrier
between employers and young people, but there is an intermediary
organisation. Talking to employers, some have good relationships with
training providers in localities. Often, if the main
apprenticeship training providers are local colleges, those colleges
have long-standing relationships with employers and ongoing dialogue
about apprenticeship. However, that is not always the case, and
employers struggle to discover whom they need to talk to, not just to
recruit young people, but to establish what sort of apprenticeship they
might be able to provide.
Q
262
Mr.
Hayes:
Perhaps the group training
associations could play a bigger role in engaging small and
medium-sized businesses, but have you been able to elicit what
proportion of employers involved in apprenticeships have training as
their main business? I have tried to do that through parliamentary
questions, but I was unable to find the information. What I am implying
is that a significant number of those employers may actually be
training providers rather than employers in the sense that the very
best apprenticeship providers such as Rolls-Royce, Honda and Toyota
are.
Professor
Lorna Unwin:
You are quite right: we do not have
robust information on that. Part of the problem is that the Learning
and Skills Council does not keep records of the employers involved. It
keeps records of training providers, and it regards it as the business
of training providers to keeps records of employers. From a research
point of view, if we want access to apprenticeship employers, in the
main we have to go through training providers, which often say,
“That is commercial information.” What we need is a
proper register of employers who have apprentices with them in the
traditional sense—they have employment contracts and the
business of the apprenticeship, to answer your question, is proper
training and not just a work
placement.
Q
263
Mr.
Hayes:
May I ask you a final question on the subject of
completion rates, hoping that in relation to your earlier answer we
might be able to get that information during our scrutiny of the Bill?
You link
the change in completion rates to the decision to drop technical
certificates as a mandatory requirement. You said in your submission to
the House of Lords inquiry:
“What
is not clear is how many apprentices have achieved a technical
certificate. Current completion rates will include sectors where there
is no longer a TC requirement at
all.”
So is the
completion rate figure something of an illusion in terms of assessing
the teaching and testing of real
competences?
Professor
Lorna Unwin:
I would not say it is an illusion.
Completion can mean many things, because apprenticeship frameworks
differ considerably from one another. The only requirement is for a
national vocational qualification plus key skills. The technical
certificate requirement was dropped last year, and from inquiries I
have made, the number of sectors that have dropped the technical
certificate seems to swing between four and six. Again, we do not have
real information on how many apprenticeships still include the
technical certificate. If you do not include it, and if completion is
based entirely on the NVQ and the key skills, we are down to—in
some sectors and in some apprenticeships, particularly at level
two—the assessment of the NVQ on the job, which can often be
done in quite short periods of time. The notion of completion varies in
terms of what is being completed and the length of time that it
takes.
Q
264
Mr.
Hayes:
You made a point that seems to be very
significant. What you are suggesting is that there may be a lack of
equivalence between different apprenticeships within the frameworks,
even at the same level. That supports other work that you have done on
the difference between the BTEC, the ordinary level and NVQ level 3. If
there is such a lack of equivalence, are we short-changing learners in
terms of their ability to progress to higher study? Some will be able
to do so, and some will
not.
Professor
Lorna Unwin:
This is a complicated issue. I want to
stress first of all that apprenticeships clearly need to be fit for
purpose. We need to ensure that we have apprenticeships that have the
support of employers, reflect the needs of sectors and so on. At the
same time, where we are investing public money in apprenticeships we
want, as a society, to ensure that the young people and adults going
through them should be exposed to an experience that gives them
qualifications that have currency in the labour market and can also
help them to progress. The problem that we have with the NVQ is that it
is a totally different animal, according to the sector. Some level 2
NVQs contain very little underpinning knowledge, and are very easy to
acquire through assessment on the job. Other NVQs are much more
substantial, and the difference across level 2 and level 3 is quite
remarkable. There is also a problem that some level 2 NVQs do not even
give a proper platform for NVQ level 3. So there are big problems with
the qualification itself.
Q
265
The
Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and
Skills (Mr. David Lammy):
What were the
completion rates for apprenticeships 10 years ago?
Professor Lorna
Unwin:
It varied across sectors, but it hovered at
around an average of 30 per cent.—well below 50 per cent. It has
improved.
Professor
Lorna Unwin:
It hovers at around 50 per cent.
according to some figures; approaching 60 per cent. according to other
figures, with variation across the sectors. Some sectors, such as
health and social care and retailing, are still struggling to improve,
but there have been improvements in completion—sorry in
achievement. You were asking about completion. There are completion
figures and attainment figures. One of the problems that we have when
looking back 10 years is that you have to be careful about what is
being counted in achievement figures, because the non-NVQ
qualifications were not counted.
Q
267
Mr.
Lammy:
Are you aware also that in the recent past there
has been an attempt to drive low-quality providers and employers out of
the
system?
Professor
Lorna Unwin:
Yes.
Professor
Lorna Unwin:
Yes.
Professor Lorna
Unwin:
Employers always complain about
bureaucracy.
Q
269
Mr.
Lammy:
Do some of those employers indicate that although
they are sympathetic to apprenticeships, the business of training and
apprenticeships is not the mainstay of their business; the mainstay is
the product or whatever they produce?
Professor Lorna
Unwin:
Indeed,
yes.
Q
270
Mr.
Lammy:
Is that the reason why many employers want the
contract to lie with the training provider, rather than with them as a
small or medium-sized employer?
Professor
Lorna Unwin:
Employers do not
necessarily look at the issue in that way. You ask whether they
complain about bureaucracy; they certainly do not want lots of
additions to the paperwork that they already have to complete. The
problem is that if the contract lies only with the training provider,
at level 2 and level 3, but particularly at level 2, the employer does
not really play any role in the actual training for a number of
apprenticeships. What is happening—this links again to the
concept of the competence-based NVQ—the training provider goes
into the employer’s premises and assesses the young person
against the competences and the key skills, and perhaps even having the
apprenticeships for their off-the-job training in the training
provider’s premises. I meet many employers whose role is
entirely that of employer, in the sense that the young person is there
to do a job of work. The best quality apprenticeships are those in
which the employer engages with the training and does not merely allow
the training provider to undertake assessment.
We must think about what an
apprenticeships means in the workplace. It should mean that the
employer is closely engaged with the training, because employers should
have an input in it. The training should be closely linked to the
business need, and where it works, it works very well. The employers
who are high-quality apprenticeship employers are closely involved, and
they will tell you that they have apprentices because that links to
their bottom line and their company’s sustainability. We must
get away from too many instances in which the employer sees the
apprentice as an extra pair of hands, and hands over all responsibility
for training to the training provider. It must be a true
partnership.
Q
271
Mr.
Lammy:
It is right to say that there is a choice for the
employer on where the contract lies. It can be with the training
provider or with the employer, dependent on the nature of the
business.
Professor Lorna
Unwin:
Do you mean that it is right in technical
terms, or that that should be the case?
Mr.
Lammy:
Yes, that is technically right. For the record, I
did not want you to give the impression that the contract can only ever
be with the training provider.
Professor
Lorna Unwin:
No, I do not think that I said that. The
employer has a choice, although I am not sure how many truly understand
that.
Q
272
Mr.
David Laws (Yeovil) (LD): Alison, may I bring you into
this, too? You recently published a paper on the Bill, which it would
be fair to describe as not wholly applauding the Bill’s
potential effects. Leaving aside the philosophical debate about
compulsion and criminalisation, and focusing solely on the economics,
will you summarise your concerns about the potential impact of the
Bill?
Professor
Alison Wolf:
Yes, I can summarise it in two
statements. The predictions of the economics benefits that will arise
from people obtaining additional qualifications under the Bill are
enormously exaggerated, because it is overwhelmingly likely that most
people who gain additional qualifications under it will gain
qualifications that have little or no economic benefit.
I also think that the negative
impact that the Bill will have, by effectively destroying the labour
market for 16 and 17-year-olds, is enormously underestimated. That
might be justified if one were confident that they were going to be
doing something that was extremely valuable. Since one is not, and
since we know that on-the-job experience is demonstrably extremely
valuable to people, I think we have to take the impact on the job
market extremely seriously. I think the effect will be very serious and
almost totally
negative.
Q
273
Mr.
Laws:
Are the youngsters you are
concerned about this group of, I think, around 65,000 people who are in
work but not in accredited training? Is that the right sort of figure?
Through which mechanisms do you think they could end up out of the
labour market, rather than in the labour market in a positive
way?
Professor
Alison Wolf:
Yes, I think one of the problems
is—and I am sorry to get slightly technical—that the
Government has been extremely optimistic in its interpretation of the
labour market statistics, because it sees people as being in training
simply if they
are listed in the labour force survey as having received some training
in the previous 13 weeks. Of course, a large number of people in the
labour market are in that situation, but are not in jobs where it would
be in the least easy for their employer to give them this very rigid
requirement of 280 guided learning
hours.
The people who
are likely to be the largest losers from this are the notional
equivalent of today’s young people—many of whom have left
school with perfectly good GCSEs, I would say; they are not the sort of
group that everybody is so hung up about, the hoodies on the
corner—who have made a decision at 16 to leave school, who are
in jobs, who are getting a great deal of valuable on-the-job training
often and who may be getting formal training as far as the labour force
survey data is concerned, but who are not in jobs where their small and
medium-sized employers can, with any ease, move to releasing them for a
day, or entering into an extremely complex apprenticeship contract and
so on. We actually know this from other countries and from our own
history: that when you face small and medium-sized employers with this
increased rigidity—with these sorts of demands—their
understandable response is to simply say, “Oh well, blow this, I
will not employ a 16 or 17-year-old.”
Now, as I said, if we were
confident that those young people were going to do something that was
extremely valuable and useful to them, and made sense, and was more
important than what they were doing, then yes, you can leave aside the
philosophy. But I have been unable to find anything that convinces me
that that is the case—indeed, quite the
opposite.
Q
274
Mr.
Laws:
May I ask you a final double-barrelled question, in
case the Chairman cuts me off? First, following from your last
question, are we clear about what proportion of the existing bunch of
16 and 17-year-olds in work—those that are not getting the
existing accredited training—will actually be affected by the
Government’s proposals?
Secondly, it intuitively
sounds as though what the Government are trying to do might make
sense—they are saying, “You have these youngsters in
employment, so why not give them some certification of what they are
achieving and some on-the-job training, so that they can go on into
other jobs later?” Why would it be so difficult for the
employers that are likely to be employing these youngsters without the
accredited training to deliver valuable accredited training in the
workplace?
Professor
Alison Wolf:
That is quite a long question and I
might give a slightly long answer. Whether we know the precise
percentage affected depends on whether you accept the
Government’s own projections that by the time this legislation
comes in, 90 per cent of the cohort will be in education or training
anyway. I do not think that there is any reason to accept that
projection, because we have actually been sitting very steadily at 80
per cent for 17-year-olds for 15 years now, and I cannot see why it
would have changed. If it has changed, which is the premise of the
Bill, we are indeed only talking about 5 per cent. If it has not
changed, then we are probably talking about 15 per cent of the cohort,
which is very major difference in terms of both impact and
costs.
Professor
Alison Wolf:
Well, it will be 15 per cent who are
either in employment with training under LFS definitions but not
necessarily leading to qualifications, or actually in employment but
not with any form of formal training.
The answer to your question
whether or not this is a problem for employers really depends on
whether you actually take this 280 guided learning hours seriously or
not. If you simply mean that people can come in and accredit what they
are doing—the local training provider can come in and tick them
off for an NVQ—well, yes, I guess you can do that. I do not know
why you would want to. In fact, I can think of one reason why you would
not want to. The reason why you might not feel that it is a
particularly important use of Government money is that many of those
young people will already have level 2 GCSEs. Even those who do not may
well be in occupations in which the NVQ, accredited in that way, in
unlikely to have a major impact on their earnings. There will obviously
always be a few for whom it is good, but the data show overwhelmingly
that low-level NVQs of that type are not having an impact on
people’s
earnings.
Yes, of
course you could say, “Let’s send in the local training
provider. He’ll stand there and tick it off, get some portfolios
to show that they have done it and give them a qualification.”
There are two reasons why you might not want to do that. First, it adds
nothing to their earning power. Secondly, it will mean that if they
then want to go to the local college or whatever and take another
qualification, they will be told that they have already had their full
level 2s, so they have to pay for anything in the future. Under the
current regime, in which we have an extraordinarily complex set of
rules about what you can get for free and what you cannot, if I were a
17-year-old and understood the bureaucracy, and somebody came and said
to me or my boss, “I can just accredit you,” I might well
want to say, “No,
thanks.”
The
Chairman:
I am sure that the Minister of State will also
want to ask some questions of Alison. It might make sense for him to do
that
now.
Q
276
The
Minister for Schools and Learners (Jim Knight):
I am
grateful to you, Mr. Bayley, and to the Committee for its
indulgence. I am also grateful to you, Professor Wolf, for the clarity
of your statements that the economic benefits have been exaggerated and
that we have underestimated the effect on the youth labour market. That
was certainly my reading of your document on those two central planks.
May I delve into that a little? Have you had a chance to have a look at
the research commissioned by my Department but carried out
independently by the centre for the economics of education, which is
part of the London School of Economics? It agreed with you about the
negligible effects on average wage returns of NVQs at levels 1 to 3,
but stated clearly
that
“wage returns are
around 13 per cent. for a BTEC First or General Diploma, 5 to 7 per
cent. for a City and Guilds Craft qualification and 17 per cent. for
RSA Diploma for women”.
How do you respond to that in the context
of your claim that there is no wage return from vocational
qualifications?
Professor
Alison Wolf:
In the paper, I say quite clearly that I
am not saying there are no wage returns to any vocational
qualifications. I am extremely clear on precisely that
point—there is an appendix. It is indeed the case that we see
returns, particularly on old-style City and Guilds craft qualifications
and BTEC diplomas, which are mostly taken full-time in further
education colleges. I absolutely do not say, either in the paper or
here, that there are no returns to vocational qualifications. What I do
say—the LSE researchers would agree—is that having wrung
the data dry, we must accept that for low-level NVQs, the results are
extremely discouraging. We are probably not in
disagreement.
Q
277
Jim
Knight:
Which highlights the importance of good
information, advice and guidance for those 16 and 17-year-olds about
whom we are all concerned. I was fairly clear from reading the paper to
refresh my memory today that you were not optimistic
about diplomas. Given that they have been allocated by the Universities
and Colleges Admissions Service equivalency to three and a half
A-levels at level 3 and seven GCSEs, and have been designed by
employers so that there are good routes out from them into higher
education or employment, it is fundamental to our assumptions that they
are somewhere between those traditional vocational qualifications and
GCSE and A-level qualifications in terms of wage
return.
Professor
Alison Wolf:
I do not think that diplomas are central
to this particular argument because, as your Secretary of State has
said, most of the people who are expected to be swept up by the
legislation will not be studying diplomas full-time. That seems quite
clear from most of the
discussion.
I hope
that diplomas will succeed—of course I do. I guess that
everybody in this room does. I am not optimistic that, by 2013, there
will have been a huge change in the options perceived by young people
that will mean that the diplomas have transformed the whole education
and training scene. That is, after all, not very far away. One of the
great failures of this country has been the repeated redesign,
redevelopment and, if you like, inability to get correct the full-time
alternatives to A-levels. I hope that this time it will be
better.
I would also
like to put on record that we should be extremely grateful for the
existence of BTEC diplomas because they have gone on and on, continuing
to deliver results, while other things have been designed around
them—generally with a great deal less success. If they are still
available in 2013, it is very likely that we will continue to have
substantial take-up of those qualifications. I hope that diplomas will
be beginning to prove themselves; if they are, people will want to do
them.
The point I
would like to make—and which I hope we are also agreed
on—is that if young people perceive something to be worth doing,
they will want to do it. If you are a Rolls-Royce, JCB or British
Telecom apprenticeship giver, you have hundreds of applicants for your
apprenticeship places. If something is worth doing, young people will
do it. If the diplomas work
then yes, that will increase participation, but I really think you
should not legislate on hope; you should legislate on probabilities and
think about the worst, as well as the best-case
scenarios.
Finally, I would like to move
on to the employer burden. I was struck by the cataclysmic effect that
you think this measure will have on the youth labour market. I believe
the burden on employers of having an initial conversation with a new
starter around how they would achieve their 280 hours’ training
is extremely modest. I disagree with you about the rigid
requirement—there is flexibility That 280 hours could be
delivered, for example, with a 40-hour, one-week training course and
then five hours a week in the evenings or at weekends. Given that
flexibility, why would it be worth the employer—if they were
paying minimum wage—paying £1.20 an hour more to take on
an
18-year-old?
Professor
Alison Wolf:
Why so cataclysmic? There are two
reasons. The first is that I know France rather well--I do not know if
that is an answer. Looking at what has happened to the youth labour
market there because of the rigidities has definitely affected my
perception of how labour markets respond to a large number of rigid
requirements. Those requirements are different in France but they have,
in effect, completely destroyed the youth labour market. It was one of
those road to Damascus experiences for
me.
Professor
Alison Wolf:
I am a big advocate of flexible labour
markets with lots of opportunities for young people to have entitlement
to education and training. As you will have gathered, I believe that
the most useful thing for a large proportion of young people and adults
is to get work experience, and your Government’s research
evidence bears that out. So, yes, I am a big advocate. Moreover, if you
are a small, or medium sized, employer you are mostly rather insecure.
I speak as someone who, in my non-day job, is a small employer. You
worry terribly about whether or not you can get things covered, about
getting into trouble, and you are always convinced that you are bound
to be breaking some regulation or other. This is one of the reasons why
it is so hard to get small and medium-sized employers involved in
anything of this sort.
Of course, it is not just a
preliminary conversation; it is also the case that you can be served an
enforcement notice, or a penalty notice. If the young person suddenly
turns up and says, “Actually, they have changed my course and
therefore I can’t be here this week, when you thought you were
going to have me”, you cannot sack them—that is
absolutely grounds for unfair dismissal in the Bill. Employers are not
all paying the minimum wage anyway—a large number of young
people in employment are getting a good deal more than the minimum
wage. I think this is a very real danger now. It will probably not be
as cataclysmic as my most extreme estimates, but I also gave a
range.
I believe that
David Willetts made a speech on the issue. That might just be
typecasting, but I have a feeling he had hauled out some evidence about
what
happened when local authorities experimented with this. If it was not
David Willetts, he came to mind because I think he was the most likely
person to make such a speech. We have some evidence that when people
were allowed to try this out at local authority level, it had a bad
effect. If you could hire a kid from Edgware who was not liable for it,
you would do so instead of hiring someone from Islington who was liable
for it. I hope that the effects would not be as cataclysmic as my most
pessimistic projections, but I would be prepared to put a great deal of
my own money on the provision having a significant effect among small
and medium
employers.
The
Chairman:
It is just as well we extended this session. I
guess I should go to the Conservative Front Bench, but I want to leave
some time for Back
Benchers.
Q
280
Mr.
Hayes:
Thank you, Mr. Bayley. I have only two
questions, because I want to give other people a chance.
Most people’s vision of
an apprenticeship is of an eager young learner at the side of an
experienced craftsman, learning a valued competence that has a
relationship with economic need. Your most interesting paper paints a
different picture. You say that many apprenticeships have almost no
connection with employers. In fact, your words are that they have
“little or nothing to do with employers”.
Why do you think that
is?
Professor
Alison Wolf:
I think it is partly because we have
extended the term, “apprenticeship”, to cover a whole
range of things which are not what most people think of as
apprenticeships. There is a whole other debate about whether that was
wise or not. At one stage, it was as if central Government—and I
have to say this was not under Labour—really wanted to sweep
apprenticeships away. Belatedly, both parties have recognised how
critically important they are. We now have clearly applied a good label
to all sorts of things which are really not apprenticeships.
I think it is for two reasons.
It is partly what Lorna has talked about: because of the extremely
bureaucratic structure we have created in this country, it is very much
more difficult for employers to get involved than in, for example,
Ireland, where I was a couple of weeks ago and where they have had an
apprenticeship revival, partly because they have made it extremely easy
for employers to sign up. It is also because we have among the numbers
a large number of young people who live in areas where apprenticeships
are not available. Also, young people who have enormous problems are
not going to be people to whom an employer is readily going to want to
dedicate their own time and investment. It is important to understand
that, because it helps to explain why for many of these young people
what they are in is not the sort of programme that leads to the
significant gains we were talking about in relation to old-style City
and Guilds qualifications.
I should add that in every
country in the developed world, there is a group of young people for
whom everybody is trying to work out an appropriate way to help. We
have put a lot of those young people into a large and very diverse
category called apprenticeship, but we have not solved the problem by
doing so.
Q
281
Mr.
Hayes:
This is my second and final question. You will know
that academic research by yourself, Professor Robin Millar, and
Alison Fuller suggests that the economic returns for apprenticeships
are immensely variable. The best apprenticeships provide a return for
the learner equivalent to two A-levels. For women, there is a
particular problem. On average, women who undertake apprenticeships
receive no gain in their wages as a result of training. Is it the case
that some vocational qualifications may have no or even a negative
economic return? Is that particularly true in certain sectors of the
economy, and is it a particular problem for women learners and
workers?
Professor
Alison Wolf:
The negative return is worth explaining
a little. The reason for negative returns is that those people would be
better off doing something else. It is not because being in that
apprenticeship suddenly turns you into a zombie. It is because there
were other things you could have done, and might well have done. Most
plausibly, in most of the analyses you could have been at work for a
couple of years, which would have had more positive effect on your
later-in-life chances. There is some evidence that being on something
with a negative connotation because it is a Government training scheme
may not be a great experience. I think the most important thing is that
you would be better off in the work force, getting the experience that
employers
reward.
Lorna might
want to come in here, but I think there are two reasons that it looks
worse for women in what are, obviously, averages. First, it is partly
that the girls in this group go into different occupations.
Secondly—and this is worth emphasising—males and females
generally have very different patterns in what they do post-16. So,
more girls go to university, while boys in an equivalent position until
then in an achievement profile are more likely to take work-related and
apprenticeship routes. That is another possible reason for that
finding. When you look at universities, girls are participating a lot
more, so when you start making comparisons among people going via a
vocational route you are not necessarily comparing like with like if
you compare boys with girls, or young men with young women. It is a
combination of those
things.
Professor
Lorna Unwin:
I have a quick point to add. You find
that young women tend to be in level 2 apprenticeships. Advanced
apprenticeship is heavily populated by young men, because of the skew
that predominantly male sectors like engineering are still big-volume
sectors for advanced apprenticeship. Young women in level 2
apprenticeships are in the low-paid sectors of the economy. Some of
them are doing jobs where the apprenticeship does not necessarily add
value, if they are accredited at level 2 for skills that they would be
developing anyway in those jobs. The fact that they are on an
apprenticeship does not necessarily help them to progress beyond the
normal work experience.
Q
282
Mr.
Gordon Marsden (Blackpool, South) (Lab):
Alison, when you began your remarks, you criticised the broad-brush or
over-optimistic view of the benefits of participation, but when the
Minister tasked you with being apocalyptic about the effects, you fell
back on your French example. Is there any independent modelling that
bears out that semi-apocalyptic view, other than
that we might all behave like the French? I say that, because we have
been down this route before with predictions of the impact of the
minimum wage on employment, and we know what happened there.
Professor
Alison Wolf:
There a number of things to unpack
regarding the over-ambitious and optimistic projections of wage
benefits. I am relying on a large volume of quantitative and empirical
research, a small part of which I was involved with directly, but a
large part of which was carried out by the Institute for Fiscal
Studies, the London School of Economics and so on. I was simply going
on different ways of modelling which qualifications people would get
and what the probable wage benefits would be. It was clear that, in
that part, I drew on a large volume of quite specific
modelling.
One
reason why I criticised some estimates attached to the Bill was that
they were based on a model assuming that a significant number of the
additional young people staying on would do A-levels. That is not what
Government Ministers predict in their speeches, and I think the
Government are quite right on that. That was very specific modelling.
As for whether we have any direct modelling of other effects on the
labour market, local authorities pulled back from demanding such
provision for young people when we ran an experiment in this country.
Young people in the local authorities that demanded it were losing out
to those in local authorities which did not. As for whether we have any
other reason to suppose that that will happen, that is obviously hard
to know. In some places that have tried to do it, nothing has
happened—the participation rate has not gone up and neither has
the unemployment rate—so it could be said that we will both turn
out to be wrong.
Professor
Alison Wolf:
It is a bit of a hunch, but so is yours,
to be honest. The answer is that we know that in countries that have
these demands and have very rigid labour markets, the young people are
the biggest losers. We do know, for example, that in the last few
years—although I absolutely agree with you about the minimum
wage not having the predicted effect when it was first brought
in—we have had a real youth unemployment problem. We still have,
in spite of the huge increase in the number of jobs and a huge influx
of people, a considerable number of young people, right up to 25, whom
we would desperately like to get into the labour market, but we are not
doing so. So, the answer is yes, it is a hunch: in the sense that we
can’t model it—or we could model it, but if we did we
would be modelling it on different people’s assumptions and
hunches. All I can say is that my hunches are ones I would be prepared
to put my own money
on.
Q
284
Mr.
Marsden:
You think it is a gold-plated hunch. May I just
press you on an issue I know you are very concerned about: small and
medium-sized employers and how they will be able to deliver. It rather
seemed to me that you were ignoring the potential flexibility of
work-based training. Let me posit a brief example. In my constituency,
where there are large numbers of small and medium-sized enterprises in
leisure and tourism—an area where we all agree it is critical to
get more training—I have been pleasantly
surprised by the flexibility with which hoteliers and others have been
able to fit this in, because, of course, much of the work in that area
is seasonal. Are you not underestimating—I know SMEs tear their
hair out every day over every Government regulation—the
flexibility in the
system?
Professor
Alison Wolf:
Perhaps. I say in the paper that this is
something we really have to think about, and I give a number of
estimates. My relative pessimism is related to work that I am doing at
the moment looking at Skills for Life availability in the workplace. It
is proving extremely difficult to carry that forward with SMEs,
particularly the minute it requires anything in terms of giving up work
time. There are a lot of employers who would very much like to help
their young people to get training and of course, with the right
mechanisms, of course they can do so.
There are a couple of things
that concern me in the Bill. Partly, in terms of what I have already
said, it reads very punitively if you are an employer. You say 280
hours is quite flexible, but it is not that flexible, and you might
find there was something somebody wanted to do that hadn’t been
ticked off by QCA as requiring 280 hours. One should not exaggerate the
demands, but I hope you are
right.
Q
285
Mr.
Marsden:
A final quick point, because I
know the Chairman wants to move on. You are concerned about
apprenticeships, and about completions. Would it help if the structure
of apprenticeships and their delivery was made more flexible, and
shaped more to the employer’s needs as well as to the
employee’s
aspirations?
Professor
Alison Wolf:
Yes.
Q
286
Mr.
Oliver Heald (North-East Hertfordshire) (Con): Is there a
relationship between the willingness of employers to employ particular
classes of employees, for example young employees, and the costs and
burdens that go with that
employment?
Professor
Alison Wolf:
I think there has to be, does there
not?
Q
287
Mr.
Heald:
Let me give you an example: what happened when the
wages paid to apprentices were increased in the
1960s?
Professor
Alison Wolf:
Exactly—that was unquestionably
one of the things that reduced the number of
apprenticeships.
Q
288
Mr.
Heald:
On Second Reading, David Willetts gave an example
of what happened when local authorities introduced such a scheme. The
authorities that weren’t running the scheme were the ones where
the employees came from. Can you think of any example of a programme
which increased the burdens and costs of employing young people and
which did not result in fewer young people being
employed?
Professor
Alison Wolf:
The obvious example that everybody will
give is the minimum wage at its early levels. What everybody also says
about the minimum wage is that, as long as it is at a level where
almost everybody can afford it and would be paying it anyway, it is not
a problem.
Professor
Alison Wolf:
The answer is definitional in a
way—if it did not have an impact, one assumes it was not a
problem, so you get caught in circular arguments. I
think that the benefits are also important. That goes
back to Mr. Marsden’s question about whether I
personally would be less gloomy if I could see apprenticeships becoming
much easier to accommodate. The countries that have successful
apprenticeship programmes are the ones where the burden of the
apprenticeship on the employer is small enough to outweigh the
benefits, which may include a genuine desire to do something good for
young people. Many people who are fantastic with lower-achieving kids
are often small employers. It is a balance.
Q
290
Mr.
Heald:
The apprenticeships that you mentioned are the ones
that recruit fantastic kids—kids with wonderful ability and
qualifications who get a lot out of it and make a lot of money as a
result. We are talking about youngsters who can barely read and write.
Is that not a very different ball
game?
Professor
Alison Wolf:
We are not just talking about youngsters
who can barely read and write. There is a very particular group with
whom, as I said, nobody knows how to deal. I think that I should pass
over to Lorna on this. We also know that—and we can look at
other countries—there are plenty of examples of young people in
apprenticeships who are not potential entrants for Rolls-Royce, JCB or
BT, but who are acquiring really valuable skills and bringing something
worth while to the business. I have mentioned Ireland. Should I mention
Jersey,
Lorna?
Professor
Lorna Unwin:
We have to be careful, because
successful apprenticeships in other countries are not
easy on any of the parties concerned. Switzerland would not have a
debate about whether we make things easier for employers, young people
or training providers. In countries like that, all the parties sign up
to a high-quality programme, and the flexibility comes when the parties
decide how to adapt a core model of learning to the needs of different
sectors. That has to happen over time and it has to be dynamic, because
the sectors are changing. What they hang on to is a core set of
principles about what the apprenticeship should deliver for the
employer and for the young person. We want a core set of principles at
the heart of apprenticeships that will deliver benefits for both: at
the moment, we swing between the two. We have not properly settled on
what the purpose of apprenticeships is, and we need to do that. I think
that a lot more employers would get involved, if they could see that
they could adapt a core model to their
business.
Q
291
Mr.
Laws:
Alison, I would like to ask you a question to
clarify your advice to Ministers. What is your basic
message to the Government about the youngsters who
are in employment, but not in the type of accredited training that the
Government want to see? Is it not to worry too much, because they are
doing fine in work, they are learning useful disciplines and are
probably better educated than some of us think they are? Or is your
message that we should worry about them, because they are going to need
accreditation to go further later in life, and that the proposals are
wrong?
Professor Alison
Wolf:
It is partly the first point. This is not a
group to get so worried about that you need risk what I think could be
a very harmful backwash from the Bill. It is also something else. These
young people are citizens; they should have exactly the same
entitlements as their more academic peers who stay in school full-time
to do A-levels and go on to higher education. They should have exactly
the same entitlement to education and training later, but they should
be able to take that when they want, in the courses that they want and
at a period in their careers that makes sense.
At the moment, the choices,
the bureaucracy and the restrictions leave the 50 to 60 per cent. who
do not go on to higher education seriously disadvantaged in many ways
compared with their favoured A-level-taking, and sometimes BTEC
national-taking, peers. The message is not that 16-year-olds who leave
school should never even think about doing any education or training.
Quite the opposite: we cannot second-guess when that education or
training should take place, so they should have that the chance to take
up that entitlement when they need it. There is no particular reason to
suppose, in many of those cases, that 17 is the age at which they most
need it. That is what I would like to see
happen.
The
Chairman:
I have to draw a line there. This is not like a
Select Committee, I am afraid—our rule is to stop on the dot.
Professor Wolf and Professor Unwin, thank you for coming to give
evidence to us. I invite Graham Hoyle and Trish Hartley to come to the
table.
Welcome
to the Education and Skills Bill Committee. I hope
you have been told that we have both delayed and extended your
session—it is going to run from 2 pm until 3 pm. I would like to
introduce to the Committee Graham Hoyle, the chief executive of the
Association of Learning Providers, and Trish Hartley, the chief
executive of Campaign for Learning, and to invite John Hayes to start
the
questioning.
Mr.
Hoyle, your organisation is on record as saying, and I quote,
that
“demand—led
provision is key to raising our gain on
skills”
I think that was
said at your annual conference. Is the current system of vocational
learning sufficiently responsive to the needs of both employers and
learners?
Graham
Hoyle:
We are getting there. I am an optimist and we
are moving in the right direction. Clearly, we have to accept that
“demand-led” refers to employers and individuals; that is
not always fully understood. I think the moves over the last couple of
years to more actively involve and access employers through sector
skills councils is a real move in the right direction. I would say that
probably we are not all there yet, but I think in terms of actually
understanding what employers’ needs are, that is a good
route.
I also think
to respond to young people’s demands sounds very attractive, but
that demand has to be properly informed. One of my biggest reservations
is in the area of information, advice and guidance and the way that we
are actually addressing the needs of young
people and informing them of what is available. That still needs more
work. Indeed, there are some helpful suggestions within the
Bill.
So, I think we
are moving in the right direction there. The other thing I would say at
this stage, from a positive point of view—but it is not really
fully grasped and understood—is that if you are talking about
demand-led working and trying to bring together employers’ and
individuals’ and young peoples’ requirements, the best
example of where that works is the apprenticeship programme, which is
very much at the core of our developing skills strategy in the country,
mainly because apprenticeships are jobs. They are not training
programmes. They have massive quality training at their core, but they
are jobs. They are employment: there are employers, there is a wage, it
is real work, and, as such, it reflects the labour market needs. There
is an employer who has decided, “I am prepared to take on an
employee.” I am not sure we have fully grasped that picture that
the apprenticeship programme is the most accurate assessment of linking
skill training with the needs of industry and employers. Those are just
a few comments; I hope they
help.
Q
293
Mr.
Hayes:
Yes. On your point about advice and guidance,
perhaps we should have an all-age careers service to go alongside
Connexions. But in respect of the apprenticeship programme, given your
support for the concept of apprenticeships, why do you think the level
3 apprenticeship numbers have fallen so much for so long, and why do
you think that, according to the latest figures, level 2 numbers are
also
down?
Graham
Hoyle:
If we knew the answer to that, we would be
happier, but I am not sure that we do know the answer. Both those
points are, in part, linked to my comments about information, advice
and guidance. Taking it back to demand again, we are still not
stimulating the right kind of informed demand from youngsters at level
2 or, indeed, level 3 to move into an occupational, a vocational and a
skill route. I do not believe we have got the balance right in the
country on where our youngsters go at 16, 18 or, indeed, post-18. I
support the emphasis of pushing towards higher education, but the
balance over the past decade and beyond has got of sync with the need
for skill development. Our society now sees A-levels and degrees as the
answer. They are a major, important answer, but they are not the only
answer, and we are getting too many youngsters at 16, 18 and, indeed,
21 who are not realising that the vocational skills route is the right
one for them now and for the rest of their occupational and work
career. So, one element there is getting the balance right, between the
different routes.
Trish
Hartley:
Can I add something in there? The Campaign
for Learning works extensively with employers through initiatives like
National Learning at Work Day. We have 14,000 employers on our
database, and when we are working with employers, the thing that we
keep coming across is the old chestnut of, “I can’t
afford to invest in training, I can’t afford to take on
apprentices, if I train them they’ll leave,” and so on.
We still have not managed to get those messages across.
We did some work for
the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills on
employers’ awareness of the impact of numeracy in the workplace,
and we found that a shocking 70-something per cent. of
employers were not aware that they could access free numeracy training.
That was a couple of years ago; we would like to follow that up now and
see whether, through the Train to Gain promotion, we have moved on. But
we have still got a lot to do in demonstrating to employers how they
will improve their productivity, how they will make savings on
recruitment by being able to promote from within, and so on. We are not
getting that message across as well as we could
be.
Q
294
Mr.
Hayes:
Training associations might play a role in that.
You will be as worried as I am to hear that, according to the
Government, work-based learning has declined by more than half in the
past 20 years. Moving on to my question, I believe Train to Gain has
problems with both the brokerage service and the dead-weight cost. What
is your view on that?
Graham
Hoyle:
In terms of brokerage, there has been
considerable confusion during the first full year of the operation of
Train to Gain and, indeed, the brokerage system with regard to what it
is there for. If we see brokerage—this links back, in a sense,
to the previous conversation—as an impartial information, advice
and guidance service to employers across the board, advising them on
how best to develop their work force development strategies, then
brokerage is moving quite strongly and moving well, and we have made
real progress over many years. If we see brokerage as the main sales
force to sell the Government-funded elements of Train to
Gain—the level 2 qualifications and basic skills—it has
not been a success. It is interesting and we have to realise that there
is a dual purpose.
I
see brokerage developing into an advisory service for employers on how
to develop the skills of their work force, present and future. I do not
think that we have quite worked it out yet. The main sales force for
the particularly Government-funded elements of Train to Gain—the
programme element—is not something that I would entrust to
brokerage, although it will add some value, some bonus leads, around
the edge. Quite frankly, the experience has been that those leads are
found primarily by providers who have a relationship with employers.
That is very much where the vast bulk of Train to Gain programme work
has happened in the past year. We have to be quite clear about the two
different positions of the brokerage service.
Trish
Hartley:
I support Graham’s view on the
improvement that is happening, but we have some concerns about the
training of brokers and the need to make sure that skilling up those
people carries on. From our point of view as an organisation that is
concerned with social inclusion through learning, we put a strong
emphasis on skills for life provision, and the brokers’
awareness of the importance of skills for life as part of that
continuum is patchy.
At its best it is excellent.
We have seen, through the employer training pilots in places such as
Manchester where they really put an emphasis on skills for life
training for their brokers from day one, that they did not have many of
the problems that other areas had. We feel very strongly that that has
got to be built in as an element of the training. If brokers are aware
of that—if they can see how that contributes to the work that
they are doing on training needs analysis with employers—they
will offer the right sort of support.
Graham
Hoyle:
That is a tricky issue and I think you have to
get a clear view and put it within the context of the purpose of Train
to Gain. There are different opinions.
If Train to Gain is primarily
seen as a training programme, there is a real debate about the degree
to which certainly the larger blue-chip companies have already
effectively looked after training their workers and, therefore, the
question is whether they should now be given access to Government
support for something they would do anyway. There is a question there.
At the same time, if we see Train to Gain in part or in whole as an
assessment programme to ascertain the levels of existing skills in
order to encourage employers and individuals, perhaps at their own
cost, to develop those skills further, there is a stronger case for
Government moneys to raise the level of knowledge, understanding and
motivation.
There
are different elements. While we are using qualifications as the
proxy—as the measure used by Government to determine the
effectiveness of their investment—one is going to be pushing
towards qualifications and an assessment-based system and getting
people through to that level. There are quite few almost shadowy areas
which perhaps we are not fully clear
about.
Q
296
Mr.
Lammy:
On that last point, you are aware that the
Government have instructed providers and brokers in pursuing new
employers under the Train to Gain system to go after the hard to reach.
That is the main criterion. Would you agree that that deals with the
dead-weight problem, which in a sense is an old
problem?
Graham
Hoyle:
It certainly addresses the issue that I raise,
that is for sure. If you are going by definition to the hard to reach
you have to be careful. By definition, the hard to reach are those who
have, in part, not been availing themselves of Government funding and
have not
engaged.
Graham
Hoyle:
If it is not engaged in training, then I agree
with your proposition that clearly there is no dead weight to offset it
against. I think in the interpretation of it, however, there is an
element where you are looking at engaging those who have not been
engaged with Government funding. There is a case for doing that as well
but that is where a dead-weight issue has to be checked
out.
Trish
Hartley:
Speaking as a small employer, I pay tribute
to Train to Gain brokers for their persistence because I get calls from
them virtually every week. I am filling the forms even as we speak for
three of my employees who are doing training under Train to
Gain.
Q
297
Mr.
Lammy:
Wonderful. Graham, you gave what I thought was a
very clear and powerful explanation of what an apprenticeship is all
about. In terms of apprenticeships that you have seen in the last short
period, would you recognise the picture that people sometimes give when
they say that most apprentices are nowhere near an employer?
Graham
Hoyle:
No, absolutely not. That is
just wrong. Apprentices are employed. There is a small proportion who
are not and there are one or two areas and certain sectors—care,
for example—where there are some age-related restrictions. You
have to be 18 to do something. There has always been—I am going
back to the launch of modern apprenticeships in 1994 and I was around
and involved at that stage—a thin line of non-employed
apprentices, often for regulatory reasons. If you come across or trip
over them you can get that picture, but that does not represent
apprenticeships. A high percentage—90-something per
cent.—are employed. They have real work with real employers with
a wage.
We must be careful. We have
programme-led pathways, which were introduced three or four years ago.
The Association of Learning Providers supports those, but is clear
about the need to be careful. Programme-led pathways are looking at
training some part of an apprenticeship that can be done in advance and
off the job, but the value of that comes when someone is moved into an
employer-led apprenticeship at the earliest opportunity. We need to get
that balance and progression clearly in view.
Professor
Alison Wolf:
Absolutely,
yes.
Trish
Hartley:
As you know, David, we run policy briefings
with 20-odd people round our boardroom table every week, and the kind
of feedback that we are getting on apprenticeships is, “They are
a strong brand; let’s do more of them, but let’s not
water things down around the edges.” We should be quite clear on
what is an apprenticeships and what is not.
Q
298
Jim
Knight:
I want to move on to part 1 of the Bill, on the
raising of the participation age. On Second Reading, the Secretary of
State said that the enforcement measures that concern some Members of
the Committee would very much be a last resort. What forms of support
do you think the Government should be providing and what provision
should we be building up between now and its coming into effect in 2013
and 2015? Are you happy with the qualification strategy around the
expansion of apprenticeships—the foundation learning
tier—and optimistic about the success of diplomas?
Trish
Hartley:
Shall I start on that and you come in later,
Graham?
Graham
Hoyle:
There were about five in there, but we will
try.
Trish
Hartley:
On support arrangements, picking up on what
Graham has said, there should be good-quality universal information,
advice and guidance, so that a young person and their parents can make
an informed choice, The opportunity should be used for the two
Departments to work together, so that we get messages across to adults,
as potential adult learners, as parents, or as employers, about the
value of learning through life. You should use the opportunity to pull
all of that together.
We are very supportive of
raising the learning leaving age, given its potential to develop a
culture of learning and to raise aspirations. We have some
concerns about the whole compulsion business, since we see it as an
entitlement and want young people to see it that way. Therefore, there
needs to be stuff happening in schools and in other provision to make
sure that young people, in the main, perceive it positively and as an
opportunity. We mourn the loss of the increased flexibility programme,
because that kind of thing has the potential to draw back in many of
the young people we lose, and who we may be in danger of losing under a
new system unless we can build more flexible arrangements around a
range of provision.
We are also concerned about
employers, who may vote with their feet and decide that they want
nothing to do with young people under 18 because of
the training requirements. I am perfectly sure that Professor Wolf has
entertained you at length about that one, so I will not go on about it,
but it is a worry. But if we have wage subsidy under Train to Gain,
should we be looking at wage subsidy for small employers under this
proposal so that we do not discourage young people from getting
experience of work in SMEs, which are ultimately the main employers in
the country?
We would
say that there is much work to do in embedding that culture and getting
people to see it as an opportunity. We hugely welcome part 3, because
that demonstrates the Government’s commitment to entitlement to
a lifelong learning culture, but we need to work with schools in that
area.
Trish
Hartley:
I am less confident on that; Graham will
know a great deal more about it.
Graham
Hoyle:
Generally speaking, the compulsion element is
a difficulty. I am still not quite clear on what is really proposed
there. The message clearly embodied in raising the participation age to
18 is that it is in every young person’s interest to be on a
quality route with quality training. Clearly, that is the right
message, and inasmuch as it states that positively, it is worthy of
total support.
The
policing will be more difficult. It will have to be done by ensuring
that there is a comprehensive range of offers between 16 and
18—more comprehensive than there is now, I suggest. Diplomas
will obviously be important, but I am still concerned about the extent
to which they seem to be moving toward vocational knowledge as opposed
to skill development. That balance is probably still not quite right.
The youngsters who are unlikely to attain or do not wish to choose the
academic route—it is not just those who are unlikely to attain,
but those who will attain without any trouble at all, which comes back
to my point about degrees and A-levels—are better off moving
straight into a work-based route and learning on the job. The diploma
revolution, on which I am optimistic, has to recognise that you are
therefore developing the skills of people early as well as the academic
knowledge. I am not sure we are getting that quite right just
yet.
I am concerned
that a weakness in the current situation, which has to be put right for
now and certainly has to be put right as we go through the next five to
seven years, is the pre-level 2 training—the foundation learning
tier that has been developed, entry to employment. I do not believe
there is a total strategy
and—let me use the term carefully—a pre-apprenticeship
mode, which might well look for those youngsters with real problems
whom we need to engage and excite and get ready, and go right the way
through to able youngsters who still are not quite ready to go for a
full level 2 or level 3, but can do it. I do not think we have got that
package
right.
If
I can change the subject, if we do not get it right now, you will not
get the 400,000 apprentices we want in three years’ time. So it
is not just the issue that you raised, there is another very big,
totally supported Government policy. My members are delivering well
over half—perhaps three quarters—of apprentices. We are
delighted to see a projected increase in the funding for 400,000 and we
will play our part. We are concerned that engaging enough employers is
an issue, but we are also concerned about making sure we can turn
youngsters who have the potential to be apprentices and get them
through a route whereby they are taken onto an apprenticeship with
confidence. We have learned: we do not want and we do not take on to
apprenticeships people who are not going to completely succeed. There
is a degree of wariness—to get them ready we need to have
something strong in place, and I do not think we are quite there
yet.
Q
300
Stephen
Williams (Bristol, West) (LD): May I ask both Graham and
Trish about their attitude toward compulsion? You mentioned it in
passing and said you had reservations, could you state whether you
actually favour compulsion, compulsory participation until 18? We all
believe that it would be a good thing, but do you think youngsters
should be compelled to stay in education or
training?
Graham
Hoyle:
I really am undecided on this one. It is not
very often I am undecided—I have normally got a view on most
things, and not necessarily the correct view—but on this one, I
really can see all the arguments. I have already said that the picture
painted by having a statutory compulsory route to 18 and the reason for
that is very strong and I support it and it has to be a great message,
so clearly I like that bit of it. In some respects, if you have not got
compulsion, do you actually mean the message—is the message
real? That is a question that has to be
addressed.
However,
when you start looking at behaviour and what is actually going to make
all of a cohort—all of a population—motivated to learn,
compulsion is probably one of the weaker areas. So on that side it
seems to me that for a minority—certainly I hope they are a
minority—of youngsters, compulsion will not have the desired
effect and you will accentuate a problem we have now. We have a problem
with the NEET group—you know what it stands for—and it
seems to me that at the extreme end compulsion might make it worse
rather than better.
That is not a very helpful
answer, I am afraid. We need to back up a strong message, but
compulsion may not be effective means for the most vulnerable and most
difficult group that we are struggling with at the
moment.
Graham
Hoyle:
You are putting words in my mouth. As I am
undecided, perhaps I deserve that. I think I could probably just about
go along with that, but as I
say, if you have a strong message and you believe in it, and I certainly
do, you have to have some kind of strength to show that you mean what
you say. So, sorry, I am a bit on the fence
here.
Trish
Hartley:
I take a slightly different view. Broadly we
support compulsion and this is quite a step forward for us because we
tend not to support draconian measures, as they might be seen. However,
we have heard discussion around the need for something that galvanises
the system. I do not believe the system needs galvanising, because all
the people out there in the system that I work with have had enough
shocks and do not need any more. On the other hand, we do agree that
there needs to be a step change in terms of culture and
aspiration.
If every
young person who is 11 now has an expectation that they are going to
stay in learning until they are 18, and their parents and employers
know that, we think that will be effective in making a difference to
the way people think, but only if it is accompanied by work in schools
to make the curriculum relevant, innovative, exciting, engaging and the
kind of thing that young people want to do; work with work-based
learning providers; and a range of much more flexible arrangements
between schools, colleges and employers in local partnerships. We have
seen exceptionally good practice on that in some areas, but not by any
means in all. If we can get that sort of thing right, then hopefully we
can get the majority of young people wanting to stay. We are still
going to have a percentage of people who do not want to stay—we
have that now and we will have that in the future.
We need to take a more
joined-up approach. Research like the Cabinet Office “Families
at Risk” study is really helpful because it will say that we
have a small percentage of people who, for whatever reason, do not fit
our expectations. Is that because of us and our expectations, or is it
that because of them? Is there something fundamentally wrong with them,
or are we starting from the wrong place? I think that more attention,
and more research needs to be done into the needs of people who are
really outside the system. We need to look in more detail at how we
address their needs to try to draw them in and offer
opportunities.
In
terms of a joined-up approach, we would be very keen to see such an
approach to budgets, because if you get a young person into the system
and you keep them there and they have good potential for work, it
contributes to citizenship, to the reduction of costs in the criminal
justice system, the health system, and all the way along the line. We
would be delighted to see Departments working more closely on this and
look at investment now to save later.
Stephen
Williams:
Mr. Bayley, thank you for calling me
to ask my first question. Can I now ask my second and third, for which
I hope I will get briefer
answers?
Q
302
Stephen
Williams:
Thank you. Information, advice and guidance has
been touched on briefly in earlier answers. Do you think the provisions
in the Bill go far enough in terms of giving youngsters
independent advice? They are going to face a very complex series of
options by the time we get to 2013 and
2015.
Graham
Hoyle:
I have a good news-bad news answer. One of the
areas of Government policy during the past decade—one of the
comparatively few—that my association is not happy with is the
whole approach to information, advice and guidance. We have been
incredibly happy with the whole skills approach and demand-led system,
and we talked about the apprenticeships in Train to Gain; overall we
are very comfortable with much of what has gone on. The one area we
have always been at odds with is the direction of information, advice
and guidance. Quite frankly, to have it moved back into a schools-local
authority children’s trust area is the wrong answer. We believe
the employer influence is under threat. Although information, advice
and guidance will point people to learning routes in the short term,
the end product for virtually everyone going through their teens is
going to be work, in some shape or form. We believe that that balance
is probably not right. We are not very comfortable with the general
direction.
Q
303
Stephen
Williams:
So you are sceptical about it being generally
independent if it is delivered in a school
setting?
Graham
Hoyle:
Yes, it comes back to your earlier point. I
bemoaned the fact that we have not got the balance right about those
who are staying on through 18, A-levels and university. They have acted
on the back of whatever information, advice and guidance they have got
from wherever. We know that parents are powerful as are schools and the
messages from the teachers and their own, if I may say so, vested
interest, even if it is unintentional. That has contributed to what I
believe is an imbalance in choice of routes from 16 and 18 onwards. I
am concerned about that. Having said that, we are where we are, and
that is not going to change overnight.
The provision in the Bill that
schools are going to be accountable and will be checked by Ofsted is
something that we have long been calling for. There has been a
requirement for schools to attempt to give impartial advice, we have
argued that if you are going to do that, you have got to make sure that
Ofsted—or someone, and Ofsted is the obvious choice—can
check it out to make sure that they are honouring the expectation. So
we fully support, if you like, that element—if you are going to
put careers guidance as a responsibility primarily of schools and local
authorities, then for goodness’ sake can we make sure they do it
properly and impartially. I think it is a tall order.
Trish
Hartley:
I think we support that broad approach, but
what we are very keen on is to see a range of access points for
information, advice and guidance for young people, parents and
employers. We want to see face-to-face services; telephone helplines;
something in your local community centre, or local job centre or
whatever, that you can access via a pod; something on Facebook.
Wherever young people congregate, there should be something that they
can access if they are interested. Having a whole range of channels
through which that can come, but it being quality-assured, as Graham
said.
The
Chairman:
I am sorry to interrupt, but you have had three
questions, Stephen, and we must have time for Back
Benchers.
Q
304
Mr.
Heald:
Looking at the choices facing
employers about whether to provide apprenticeships or not, is it not
the case that, now that we have a job market that includes the whole of
the continent of Europe, in effect, the choices for employers are
broader than they used to be? Do you think one of the reasons that
there has been a decline since 2000 in the number of advanced
apprenticeships on offer is that, since 2000, a lot more people who are
skilled and well-trained in engineering and other skills have become
available through the European Union
changes?
Graham
Hoyle:
I think the cause and effect are difficult to
unpick. I certainly do not have the data to do that. Clearly we have
experienced skill shortages in recent years. Plumbers are always
mentioned, so let us just stick with that for now, but it is not the
only area. Five or six years ago, we all read about the £50,000
plumbers and so on, and my members trained them and produced them.
Clearly, some skill shortages have been met, in part, by skilled
immigrant labour, and thank goodness for that. So I think that has
probably been a plus and not a minus. However, we have to make sure is
that future demand is understood by employers not just as that, but to
make sure they are investing in training up the next generation of
plumbers and whatever, and not simply relying on what might a
short-term availability of immigrant
skills.
Q
305
Mr.
Heald:
But is it not right that, if our education system
is turning out people to go into the workplace—and get trained
there—who cannot read, write or add-up properly, employers are
more likely to choose the European
option?
Trish
Hartley:
With respect, we have always had an
education system that has turned out a proportion of people
who—
Mr.
Heald:
I know, but it is more important now as the
competition from Europe and elsewhere is highly
trained.
Trish
Hartley:
Yes, but I think there has been a huge step
forward in what we have achieved on that over the last few
years.
Mr.
Heald:
How can you say that, when 11 per cent of children
are persistently truanting in year 11? That is what the statistics
released in March 2007
show.
Trish
Hartley:
But how does that relate
to people who do not have basic skills? I am sorry, I do not
quite
see.
Trish
Hartley:
Well, yes, but you can learn in a variety of
ways, and in a variety of contexts. I think one of the things that we
are pushing on this is that we need a degree of flexibility.
We cannot expect everybody to slot into the same sausage
machine.
Q
306
Mr.
Heald:
How many NEETs do we have, and what is wrong with
them? A lot of them cannot read, write or add up, can
they?
Trish
Hartley:
I think that is a gross
stereotype.
Mr.
Heald:
But it is true, is it not? I have actually met
them. I have been out to social exclusion projects and met them,
desperately learning to do their health and safety certificate. They
cannot read, write or add-up, so they have to learn how in order to
work in the building trade. Anyway, I must not give evidence
myself.
Trish
Hartley:
I think that the issue is enormously more
complicated than that and that is why I referred earlier to the work of
the Cabinet Office social exclusion taskforce. I think that we have an
awful lot more factors operating than the ones you have
identified.
Trish
Hartley:
It certainly is, which is why I have worked
in skills for life for 25
years.
Q
307
Nia
Griffith (Llanelli) (Lab): I would like to get back to
what Graham Hoyle said, that compulsion does not serve the most
vulnerable necessarily. Now, it is the most vulnerable who tend to fall
below the radar, and the ones that we do not see. The idea of
compulsion would be that there was a statutory duty to follow up those
young people. Now, if we do not have that statutory duty to follow up
those young people, how are we going to ensure that those most
vulnerable do get followed
up?
Graham
Hoyle:
We have to differentiate the compulsion to
follow up, which is eminently sensible—absolutely
essential—and the sanctions that may or may not be imposed at
the end of a certain period. My concerns are at the sanctions end. I
really do not know where that should be positioned.
In terms of compulsion. If we
are saying, as Trish did, that people should see it as a right or
entitlement to stay on in a quality learning opportunity until 18, if
that entitlement has statutory backing, and if people with problems are
followed up and helped—that comes back to my comments about the
foundation learning tier and entry to employment and so on—if
that infrastructure is in place, then presumably the need for sanctions
will be reduced. I would build a very strong positive infrastructure to
make sure there is a route for everybody. So I would differentiate
sanctions and compulsion to follow up, which I would
support.
Q
308
Angela
Watkinson (Upminster) (Con): Most
employers would claim that they have always given
training to new young employees on what to do, perhaps by putting them
under the wing of a more experienced employee. However, it might not be
recognised as training as envisaged in this new legislation and
certainly might not lead to accreditation.
Where small employers are
concerned, do you foresee a resistance to going the extra mile and
beefing up what they have always done, or would they avoid employing 16
and 17-year-olds at all?
Trish
Hartley:
We have a worry that they might avoid
employing 16 and 17-year-olds because I think that we have not got some
of those messages across to employers as well as we should have done,
but we have the opportunity between now and when the Bill comes into
force to do something about that. You are right that most responsible
employers have already done a lot informally, and we welcome the
increased flexibility around the qualifications and curriculum
framework that will allow for a more unitised approach so that somebody
can get credit for what they have done rather than having to look at a
monolithic qualification.
It is a question of how we
sell it to employers. We are back to the issue that Graham raised
around brokerage and people who are face to face with employers. How
are they going to get that message across to say, “Actually, you
are already doing most of this. All you have to do now is that, and
that will help you to be quite clear about what you have got with the
young person. It will give the young person a qualification that they
can then carry on through
life.”?
Graham
Hoyle:
Your question sets out the classic
threat-opportunity. The danger is, if we get it wrong, that employers
will turn their backs on 16, 17 and 18-year-olds. That is a real threat
and we must make sure that does not happen. We talked about brokerage.
Having re-established the apprenticeship brand over the last 10, 12 or
15 years, it is now a real quality offering. We know that from the
performance. If we come back to apprenticeships, certainly level 2
apprenticeships, the time is ripe to flex up the framework for
apprenticeships, certainly on a sector-by-sector basis, and to start to
recognise the high-quality, on-the job, work-based informal training
that is going on and that that is at the core—and always has
been—of apprenticeships, however they have been positioned. We
should look for ways of recognising that and pulling it into the
framework so that we are going to employers, large and small, and
saying that the formal framework is not a million miles from what you
are doing anyway. Yes, we need a little more discipline and a little
more formality. It is not going to be impossible. The gap between what
you do and what is recognised is much smaller than you think. That is
how we have to do that and we have to do it with a bit more flexibility
without jeopardising the standard and quality. If we can crack that, we
can avoid the problem of employers turning their backs on 16 to
17-year-olds and having all that they are doing now
disregarded.
Trish
Hartley:
May I pick up on your point about the
traditional way of putting somebody under the wing of a more
experienced employee? That is a really good point that has not come
through in what I have read around this. We could possibly build more
into the sort of recommendations that we are making to employers by
saying a lot of this goes on anyway and why do we not make this a
standard approach because it is beneficial from the young
person’s point of view, and for the more experienced employee
who is consolidating their own skills.
Q
309
Mr.
Charles Walker (Broxbourne) (Con): I
have a very good college in my constituency, Hertford regional college,
which has a huge warehouse where young people are building virtual
houses and wiring up
virtual offices. With the Olympics coming, all that is very exciting,
yet how can we make a case for employers to hire 16 and
17-year-olds?
In
premier league football, the apprenticeship system is completely dead;
the clubs go overseas and are not interested in bringing young talent
through. I do not want to make only football analogies, but that is the
case; they go overseas and get the finished article. How can we
persuade employers that giving these youngsters a chance is sort of
good for their business and that they have some kind of duty as members
of society? Does that make sense?
Graham
Hoyle:
Using the argument, “You have a duty on
behalf of society and the youngsters,” is something that we
would like to do within a mix—I am not suggesting that you are
using just that rationale. Yet, if we go down that track, we are not,
with the greatest respect, going to persuade the bulk of business
people that that is a good enough reason.
We simply have to demonstrate
that it is happening—it is not as if it is not
happening—and put this message over: the skill base of any
employer’s work force is absolutely key to their prosperity.
Frankly, if they are going to go and buy it direct from the
marketplace, that is sometimes a good answer, but normally quite an
expensive one. That is true of a whole range of industry sectors, not
just for training. It is far better, as we know from our own domestic
situations, to develop and do it yourself. It is cheaper to cook a meal
yourself than to go down to the restaurant on the corner.
Fundamentally, we have to get
people to understand that skill development—of themselves and of
their staff—is absolutely critical. The most inexpensive,
long-term way to do it is to train them up yourself. You are also then
exercising a fair amount of control over the exact framework that you
train them in. Now, that is not such an obvious answer that it works
every time, or else your question would not arise, but we have to go
down that track.
Q
310
Mr.
Walker:
There is lots of concern about people from
overseas and the skill sets that they bring to the employment market
over here. Do they make our own youngsters less desirable to
employ?
If I was an
employer with a big building firm, I would be hugely attracted, as a
business man, to the idea of these bright Polish workers coming over,
already skilled up and being willing to work for less than their UK
counterparts. I would think to myself, “Well, I could go down
the training route, but quite a lot of hassle and regulatory burden
comes with that. I will just take those very able Polish workers
on.” I am not saying whether that is right or wrong, but it is a
factor influencing the decision makers and business people in this
country. It will be hard to persuade them that it is in their interests
to take on youngsters coming through the college process, so this
really is a difficult question.
Trish
Hartley:
Graham is right that you need a range of
messages going to employers. You also need to be looking at the social
responsibility angle—“How would you feel if it was your
kids?”—but that will not work on its own. We have to make
the business case for investing in a young person.
From research and experience,
we know that a lot of an employee’s loyalty to their employer
comes from the amount that they feel invested in. That is a more
important factor in their loyalty than pay. Overall, they are more
interested in asking things like, “How much does the employer
value what I am doing? Are they putting money into my training?”
We need to look at that, at the development of soft skills, and at a
whole range of issues—possibly something the previous questioner
said about putting someone under somebody’s wing. Within that
range of things, there are the teamwork benefits of training up a young
person and all the other intangible benefits that come from
that.
We have
statistics saying how much it costs to recruit someone. It is a lot,
but if you invest in a young person now, you can keep them with you and
move them up through the structure. They will be bright, loyal,
and so on.
Q
311
Mr.
Walker:
Could you send me that business case? I would like
to help in your campaign to promote that, certainly in
Broxbourne.
Trish
Hartley:
Certainly.
Graham
Hoyle:
We have to be careful here. I do not think
this is an either/or. Should training up our youngsters be the route,
or should employing skilled people from Poland and eastern Europe be
the route? The answer is no to both of them; it is a balance. It will
be the case at different times that, based on the demand of the economy
and skills, the mixture will suit us quite rightly. I think that the
attitudes are quite dangerous. When we were simply training up our own,
we finished up with a skills shortage and imported people. Clearly,
that is not the long-term answer either, because there are other
countries, especially if we go further east, whose economies and
standards of living will start to go up, and there will be a return
route at some stage. We have invested in them as our skills base and
not trained up our own. We are going to catch a big cold further on.
The question is: where do we put the balance between those two? It must
not be an either/or.
Q
312
Mr.
Hayes:
I have just two quick questions. The first is to
you, Graham, and it is very blunt. You said that you had a problem with
the advice and guidance stage available to young people. Do you think
that you have it wrong at the moment with Connexions, and do you favour
an all-age careers service that acts in parallel with it—yes or
no?
Graham
Hoyle:
I have supported the concept of an all-age
guidance service for many decades. I can back that by saying that an
all-age service has to be comprehensive and an information service that
is available to everyone, even if you are going to split it by age. We
have moved away in recent years—certainly with young
people—from what I would consider to be a universal service to a
focused service. It has been focused on those with greatest need, and
you have got to support that. I am very happy to focus on those in
greatest need, but not by putting in a full stop of exclusivity. I
think that we have missed the boat for some time now. We need to have
really high-quality information available to the whole cohort, wherever
they are and whatever problems they have. We have the
balance wrong, and as industry and jobs change and redundancies come up,
that logic works in the adult community as well. So, yes, we need an
all-age guidance service so that information is available throughout
life to make the key decisions that we increasingly have to
make.
Q
313
Mr.
Hayes:
And to Trish. To be absolutely
clear for the record, are you in favour of
criminalising—as the Bill does—those young people who,
under the Bill, would be obliged to attend training, college or
work-based learning, but did not?
Trish
Hartley:
We are in favour of the raising of a leaving
age for an entitlement to learning. If you want to say it is
criminalising young people, at the end of the day, the answer is yes.
However, we would expect it to go alongside a range of other work,
which we hope would mean that the young people who did not participate
would be a very small minority, and a great deal of intensive work
would be done with them. We would not expect to get to a stage where
there was a need for prosecutions to take
place.
Trish
Hartley:
We would favour—actually, I do not
know, but we would want to see a great deal of work going on between
now and then.
There
is an interesting parallel with what is happening in adult learning
with employers and the whole issue of the skills pledge, and whether we
are waiting for employers to do it voluntarily or we are going to do it
to them. I would like to see work going on that would make it less
likely that we would have to go with compulsion, but if that is what it
takes to embed a culture, we would go with
that.
Q
315
Stephen
Williams:
The third question that I was going to ask
Graham earlier was about whether, from his perspective as a learning
provider, there were enough resources in place to deliver the extra
learning that will undoubtedly be required. Given the big regional
variations in the number of NEETs—for instance, there are
relatively few in the south-east, because of the nature of the job
market, compared with the north-east—do you think that there are
sufficient learning providers to absorb all the NEETs that will have to
be in education and training in every part of the
country?
Graham
Hoyle:
That is a difficult question. In resource
terms, overall—I shall get the easy stuff out of the way and
then come back to the difficult area of the NEETs—the evidence
demonstrates that there probably are sufficient resources for
apprenticeships and adult training, in as much as we have huge targets
and the money to go with them, and, currently, we are underspending.
That has to be addressed. At the moment, there are massive resources
available, and welcome resources for apprenticeships, Train to Gain and
adult learning. I am very comfortable with that. I think that it is a
challenge to make full use of the resources alongside employer
contributions, which is another debate and has to be a big part of the
equation. So, I am reasonably relaxed.
Graham
Hoyle:
I am sorry. You were talking about the
infrastructure.
The
infrastructure needs development, certainly with
reference to my membership, which includes 50 or 60
colleges of further education, and not just independent providers. We
dip into the public sector market alongside the Association of
Colleges. The infrastructure potential exists to undertake the tasks
under discussion, but we must be careful that the capacity building is
based on quality. We have had a big clear out of providers over the
past five or six years, and rightly so, because we got rid of the
rubbish, including ex-ALP members. I was glad to see them go, and I
effectively told them so. I was very comfortable about that, but where
we have quality providers who are able to deliver across the spectrum,
irrespective of the provider, they must be given the maximum
opportunity to expand and develop on the back of their skills. We have
been slow to reach that open market, and there have been too many
protective walls around certain types of provider. The protections have
been eased, but we must do
more.
On the growth
targets for apprenticeships, Train to Gain, and the 1 million
non-employed claimants that we need to get into the labour market over
the next few years, mainly under the auspices of the Department for
Work and Pensions, there are some big volume challenges. We cannot
afford to hold back any provider, of any sort, who has the capacity and
potential to deliver in that market. Currently, although the potential
exists, the realisation does not fully.
Trish
Hartley:
Can I emphasise the importance of localness
in the issue, particularly with young people who may be inclined to
drop out of education and training? One of my organisation’s
concerns is that as we develop an agenda around specialism,
particularly in FE, we have a cheerful assumption that a young person
will get on a bus or train and go to the other side of the county
because that is where the grade 1 provision is. Young people like your
kids and mine might, but many young people who are at the margins will
not. I have worked with young people in an urban setting who will not
cross a certain street because it is a no-go area of the town, so we
must ensure that there are many good routes in for young people in
their local communities and in accessible locations, but without
compromising quality. We cannot expect the entire aeronautical
engineering facility to be down the road, but we must create a route
that the young person acknowledges will lead to that facility, and we
must offer them good-quality provision on their doorstep, as far as we
economically
can.
The
Chairman:
If there are no further questions, it remains
for me to thank Trish Hartley and Graham Hoyle for giving evidence, and
to invite the National Union of Teachers and the National Association
of Head Teachers to take the stand.
Good afternoon. Thank you for
coming to give evidence to the Committee. Let me introduce John Bangs,
the assistant secretary for education and equal opportunities of the
NUT, who is accompanied by Chris Brown, the parliamentary officer of
the NUT. I also introduce Mick Brookes, the general secretary for the
National Association of Head Teachers and his colleague.
Kathryn
James:
I am senior assistant secretary for policy,
politics and education within the
NAHT.
Q
316
Mr.
Nick Gibb (Bognor Regis and Littlehampton)
(Con): I put this question first to Mick. Your written
submission to the House of Commons Library talks about the issue of
compulsion which, because of the negative impact that it will have on
both the younger generation and on schools, you suggest is emphatically
not the route to choose in terms of raising the age of participation.
Can you expand the NAHT’s view about the issues of compulsion
and raising the participation age as set out in the Bill?
Mick
Brookes:
Yes, we do think that is the case.
Compulsion is a risky route to go down because it presumes that the
curriculum changes that are in place, which we think
are a very good idea in terms of the diplomas, are going to be
successful. We want that to happen and I want to make our position
clear from the start: it is essential that we get young people staying
on in education or training in the same way as our colleagues in other
countries do. The idea is absolutely right, but, if the opportunities
open to young people at that age are not attractive, we will have a
real problem in schools about policing that compulsion. It is a risk
because we must ensure that the diploma agenda works, so that the young
people who leave school as soon as they can—and I think that the
Leitch report puts that at about 24 per cent.—do not choose to
stay on because they have to, but rather because they want
to.
Therefore, we
need to ensure that we have a curriculum that is meaningful to them,
and that when they have finished their course of study, they will leave
with something rather than not a lot. That is how it should go.
Compulsion is quite a risk, and the policing—perhaps even
literally—involved in keeping young people in education or
training beyond 16 will be extremely difficult, unless we get it
right.
Q
317
Mr.
Gibb:
Thank you. This question is to John Bangs. You
suggested in your briefing to us that personalised support and
incentives, rather than punitive measures, would be more productive. Do
you agree with the criminal sanctions? Can you set out your position on
compulsion, which I expect is slightly different from that of the NAHT,
and could you include in that your view about the criminal sanctions
provisions in the
Bill?
John
Bangs:
The NAHT and the NUT agree on lots of things.
We have a gentle, personable disagreement on the nature of compulsion,
but we are not that far apart. However, we are convinced. Today I read
Alison Wolf’s paper. It is a good paper, but she says that the
Government are obsessed by position on OECD league tables. That is not
what we read into the OECD data at all. What we read is that in the UK,
young people who do not have a good upper-secondary qualification or a
higher education qualification gain half as much in terms of financial
premium over adult life, than those who do have those qualifications.
The evidence from the OECD is that unless those qualifications are
attained, a person can lose out for the rest of their lives. That is
the key issue.
The
ambitions of the 1918 Act to secure involvement in education to 18, is
something that may then have been grounded in altruism, but is now
grounded in very hard data. It is the right ambition if we want to have
a
highly-skilled work force for the 21st century. That said, there is a
lot of work to be done to get to the position where it is entirely
reasonable for the 10.3 per cent. of those not in education, employment
or training to be in a form of high-quality education skills training.
There is a lot of auditing to be done, and a lot of thinking outside
the box in terms of the curriculum. There is a lot of work to be done
to establish partnerships between voluntary organisations, schools, FE
colleges and industry in order to start looking at that curriculum.
That can be done, but a lot of ducks need to be in a row before it can
be done. We believe that training should be compulsory until 18, but it
is important that the offer is reasonable, and the penalties can come
in after that.
On
criminalisation, I looked at the time line in the Bill and the stages
that lead to penalties. Once someone has reached 18, anything that is
on their criminal record should come off; for example, if they have
been fined. But the point is that if this is going to be compulsory,
there has to be some kind of consequence. As I said before, the most
important thing is that all the ducks are in a row in terms of
provision before the penalties cut
in.
Q
318
Mr.
Gibb:
That is very helpful. This is our second day of
taking evidence from witnesses. On Tuesday, my colleague Oliver Heald
highlighted the great concern about the literacy levels of young people
in this category. Given that you are both from teacher unions, may I
ask each of the unions how effective the introduction of synthetic
phonics has been since it became a statutory requirement in September
last year? How effectively has it been implemented in the schools that
your head teachers run and that your teachers teach
in?
The
Chairman:
Nick, I think you need to rephrase your question
to draw a relevance or a connection with the
Bill.
Q
319
Mr.
Gibb:
Fine. The Bill talks about basic skills. There is a
whole part on basic skills. To what extent will we need the provisions,
and to what extent are your members tackling the problem at the school
level?
Mick
Brookes:
The misconception is that phonics have been
out fashion. I cannot quite think who said that. I was in school for
well over 30 years, and a head teacher for 27 years, before I took this
job. I have never, ever been in any school or spoken to any of my
colleagues who have not used a form of phonics as part of teaching
children to read. It is embedded practice, as are tables and spelling.
All those things that some of the press like to say do not exist in our
schools any more are there, and they are working
well.
Synthetic
phonics is another form of teaching, and it works very well. We now
know a little more about how the brain works and about preferred
learning styles. Synthetic phonics works very well for children who
have a tendency for oral learning, but children who have a visual
learning style will learn just as well from looking at patterns of
words. To say that look and say is not a tactic to be used in schools
defies the knowledge that we have about how children learn.
Basically, we are saying, yes, of course we want children to have high
standards of literacy and numeracy and a delight in being in school,
and there are technical ways of making that
work.
I have been in
the business long enough to know that people from outside the system
have always said, “This is the only way.” I remember
distinctly the initial teaching alphabet system, which ruined spelling
for a generation of children. My view from my long experience of
working in schools is that there are good ways of teaching children to
learn, but one size does not fit
all.
The
Chairman:
I should say both to the witnesses and to other
questioners that we should not pursue this line of questioning. I am
required to ensure that the debate follows the proposals in the Bill,
and I think that this is a bit wide of those
proposals.
Q
320
Jim
Knight:
To fulfil the duties set out in part 1 of the Bill
for various people, it is clearly important to ensure that
participation up to 16 is maximised, to make the job easier post-16.
Clearly, there are some who confuse truancy with unauthorised absence.
What experience can we draw on, in terms of reducing the full range of
unauthorised absence pre-16, to keep them going
post-16?
John
Bangs:
I actually think that the Qualifications and
Curriculum Authority conducted a fairly exemplary review of the
secondary curriculum. It involved all the stakeholders; we felt
involved, we felt that we were able to contribute to the curriculum.
Our only concern is that the freedoms inside the curriculum are
actually passed down to schools, and that a mechanistic and routine
approach to the new curriculum is not taken. I say that because all the
evidence shows that young people from years 7 to 9 want a practical and
engaging curriculum, not something that is ground down in a heavy,
systematic approach involving detailed texts and so on—there
should be variety and innovation in there.
In moving towards children
staying on at 18 and being involved in either education or training, we
need to think about how the secondary curriculum at key stage 3 links
into key stage 4, and then on from 16 onwards. There is a continuum
there and I think that there are some really imaginative projects,
which I have seen in one or two schools, to build on that. That means,
for the most alienated and disaffected young people, following through
on an area of interest in which they are very much engaged and which
they can explore in depth by doing a particular project, for example.
Some of the influences for that project can come from outside, for
instance from industry or a voluntary organisation, and you can do that
in partnership. That is where the enthusiasm for staying on can be
fostered and engendered.
I cannot resist coming back to
what Mick said, because I agree with a lot of what he said. I do think
that the changes to the literacy strategy in primary have been
disturbing and disrupting to a certain extent—although I am
always amazed at schools’ capacity to accommodate
change—but unnecessary as well. I think that over the last 10
years, the strategies have provided a good basis for going forward.
There is always more to do, particularly in terms of oracy and what we
know about the hard-to-reach young people who simply
cannot grapple with recognising words, but it is an issue of building on
it and I hope that we do not get another seismic change like the one
that we have had with the literacy strategy recently.
Mick
Brookes:
May I add to that
briefly?
The
Chairman:
Before you do, I should explain the distinction.
It is perfectly right and proper, as Mr. Heald has done, to
question whether people will be quick to do apprenticeships if they
cannot read or write because this is a Bill looking at, among other
things, the 16-18 provision. The point at which I draw a line is
whether in this Committee we should be debating the different
strategies or learning methods used at earlier stages of education to
make children and young people literate and numerate. That is not
something that is covered by the
Bill.
John
Bangs:
I apologise for that.
Mick
Brookes:
I think we need a proper definition of
unauthorised absence. The unauthorised absence that we should be most
concerned about is the old word: truancy, and not so much, for
instance, parents taking children away during term time. I know that my
colleagues in schools are being much tougher now about recording that
as unauthorised absence, which is why the figures may appear to have
risen; it is because there is a tougher stance. There is no doubt that
one leads to another. When parents condone absence, that gives a
message to children and young people—“If it is all right
for my mum to say I can go off school, I will take the time off
school.” It is truancy that we really need to concentrate
on.
I go back to what
I was saying in my first answer. We have to have a curriculum that
engages young people—we call it a really useful curriculum. I
believe that elements of the diplomas will engage young people, who
will leave with a qualification. Some of the curriculum that we are
asking young people to engage in these days seems irrelevant to them,
and probably is. The much-maligned media studies is not a soft option,
it is an extremely tough course, but because it appeals to young
people’s everyday, real world, they are interested and engaged
in it, and therefore do well. That is an example of how we might move
forward the curriculum for the
future.
Q
321
Jim
Knight:
Thank you. Mindful of what Mr. Bayley
has said, I shall try to relate my questions much more directly to the
Bill.
This one is a
question for John and Chris. In your submission you suggest what I
would describe as a dawn clause, as opposed to a sunset clause, whereby
some provisions would not come into effect until certain requirements
have been met. Do you think that it is important that we change the
culture of education so that people going into year 7 in September
expect to stay on until 18? Do we stand the best chance of shifting the
culture if we do not have the certainty of a time
deadline?
John
Bangs:
I think you need a provisional time
deadline—2013 has been floated. You need it because you need a
target for local authorities and schools to aim for. It would perhaps
be useful for an audit to be conducted annually prior to that date, to
find out exactly how prepared schools are.
We need to put the matter in
context a bit: I understand that those not in education, employment or
training comprise about 10.3 per cent. of the
population. A further 11 or 12 per cent. of young people are actually
in work post-16, so that makes about 22 per cent. In a sense, we are
considering the core of young people who cannot be touched and are
unemployed, which is a small number—about 10 per
cent.—who really need some focus. That is why it is important
that an audit is conducted at local authority level of the provision
available, and that a discussion takes place between schools, FE,
partners in industry and local authorities about the innovative
provision that needs to be put in place. At national level, there needs
to be a discussion about whether the diploma lines will cover every
aspect of interest to those not in education, employment or training.
We have some doubt that they are all covered by the current diploma
lines.
It should not
be assumed that young people who drop out at 16 are
on the lower achievement levels. They may be very high achievers but
incredibly alienated. There may be bits of the curriculum, such as art,
that they are really keen on. A local offer that could be put together
by a local voluntary organisation—we work closely with
Barnardo’s, for example—and teachers, focusing on the
needs of young people and constructed from the bottom up, could be
really attractive to those young people. We do not want to be bound by
the requirements of accreditation all the way down the line, either.
Accreditation should follow the innovative nature of a
course.
You described
it as a sunrise clause, Jim. I think that there is a strong argument
for Parliament to follow and audit the preparation of the requirement
until 2013, so that Parliament is satisfied that you have got there.
Then you introduce the penalty aspects of it, if you are satisfied that
it is entirely reasonable that all young people are required to stay
on.
The only other
thing I would say is this. I think people were amazed at the impact of
the smoking ban. Most people voluntarily do not smoke inside public
buildings or public houses. The impact of saying, “This is now
our expectation”, will move everything forward. The penalty is a
minor issue.
Q
322
Jim
Knight:
Lastly, a question to Mick, which builds on the
point made by John. Do you agree that we need that sort of cultural
shift, which means that the expectation of parents, teachers, peers and
all who influence young people, is that what will be the first cohort,
the current year 6, will be carrying on in some form of educational
training until 18 as necessary; and, if so, how do we achieve it if we
do not have the compulsion elements that we propose in the
Bill?
Mick
Brookes:
Expectation is perfectly okay. I go back to
my previous answer. We need to have a curriculum that young people
engage with. Actually, 14 to 19 is much too late, because there is
disengagement at the end of key stage 2. We will not go into the
assessment system at the moment, but we believe that that is part of
the reason. We need to have a curriculum that engages young people, and
we need ways to assess that curriculum that do not alienate the 20 per
cent. or so of young people. It is interesting to note that that is
similar to the number of people who leave as soon as they
can.
Kathryn
James:
It is worth saying that what concerns us is
that compulsion is going to be looking at the disaffected, and I
do not think that you change a culture of
disaffection by compulsion. What John says about expectation is one
thing, but moving to a compulsory requirement too quickly will be more
damaging than positive. In terms of actually engaging the youngsters
that you need to engage, you want to ensure that all the provisions are
in place before you even get there. To say to a child who is going to
secondary school now, “You will be expected to stay,” is
one thing. Say, “You will have to carry on into
training,” and you are going to lose them possibly even
earlier.
I am
talking of a very small percentage, but those are the ones we want to
capture. For quite a large majority, there is an expectation that they
are going to stay on or go to training anyway. It is attracting those
people, that small percentage, those known as the NEETs, and it has to
be done carefully and sensitively
Q
323
Stephen
Williams:
I return to compulsion. The question is for both
unions. I start by quoting from paragraph 9 of the written evidence
submitted by the NUT. In justification for its support for raising the
age to 18 and the compulsion aspects of that, it says that
“The premium enjoyed in
later life for those who have good offer secondary and higher education
qualifications is far greater than those who leave school without
qualifications.”
That is
fairly obviously the case, given that we already have compulsion to age
16, yet a majority of young people who leave school or college at 16 do
not achieve those good level qualifications that lead to a
“premium” in later life. Compulsion at the moment is not
achieving the premium in earnings that you say will follow if we
introduce compulsion at 18. Would you comment on
that?
John
Bangs:
There are a couple of things. The last thing
we would want is youngsters who have failed at 16 at GCSE, or have not
got very good GCSE results, doing repeats when they are 17. All the
international evidence is the repeat years are on a hiding to nothing
in terms of motivation and achievement.
John
Bangs:
No. What would be
better—it is vital—is that you have an approach to the 14
to 19 continuum that builds from the age of 14, and conceptually the
diplomas do that, only you move up two levels as you move towards 19.
Actually, the offer and the mix within that diploma is really
attractive. That is why a time line moving towards 18 is integrally
linked with the development of the diplomas, and whether there are
other qualifications, or lines that could be developed within diplomas,
that could be attractive to that core bunch of young people who are
alienated from the system.
In a sense, the future of the
diplomas and the future of the success of staying on until 18 are
integrally linked. We want the diplomas to work—we had a strong
view about Tomlinson and believe that it was an opportunity missed.
2013 is beginning to become like 2008—one of those big, crunch
years—because there will be a review of the success of the
introduction of the diplomas and whether we need to have another look
at other forms of qualification or to do an audit.
However, actually, the evidence I was drawing on, and that on which the
union drew for its submission, is that the OECD makes it clear that it
is talking about upper secondary
qualifications.
Q
325
Stephen
Williams:
But were you citing that in support of raising
the participation age? At the moment, compulsion does not deliver those
higher level qualifications, so what faith can you have that increasing
the age of compulsion will have that step change at 16, 17 and
18?
John
Bangs:
As I said, I do not think that if we maintain
the current qualification system and if we did not
have—
John
Bangs:
The improvement of the qualifications
framework goes hand in hand with enthusing and engaging young people to
stay to 18—it is integral. In fact, the Government and
Parliament need to audit the progress of moving together and the
success of moving toward the introduction of the diplomas, and the
addition of the lines, alongside whether provision is in place at local
authority level. Those things are
integral.
Mick
Brookes:
We may be going on to this subject, in which
case I shall take it later. We have focused so far on the role of
schools and further education colleges, but we must also look at
in-work training. The role of industry is key. We know from all sorts
of research that industry in this country does not have a very good
track record of being involved meaningfully in training and
apprenticeships and those kinds of things. The involvement of industry
is very important. We want a connected curriculum in schools, but we
also need meaningful work placements and training from industry. That
is a part of the jigsaw that we have not yet looked
at.
Q
327
Stephen
Williams:
I favour, and the former Education and Skills
Committee, of which I was a member, recommended, that all schools
should have a school council in place so that young people could
participate in the framing of their learning. If we are going to have
collaboration between lots of different education providers in a local
authority area that deliver education and training to 16 and
17-year-olds, would you favour a youth forum that is able to
participate and to comment on the quality of provision of education and
training that is offered to them in their
area?
Mick
Brookes:
Yes, absolutely, it is wider than school
councils—it is about student voice. We are missing a huge
breadth of knowledge and understanding. Young people, or at least some
young people, understand themselves better than we do. We need to use
student voice through its various means, including schools
councils.
John
Bangs:
The NUT does not see student voice as a
threat, we obviously see it as a major contribution to teaching and
learning—it is integral. We support Schools Councils UK and
participated in the launch of its latest publication at Forest Gate
community school back in September.
I am glad you asked that
question, actually, because one of the most important things in
developing an appropriate offer for some of the most alienated young
people is hearing what they have to say about what they want. Actually,
one important precondition is intensive and focused study of
alternatives for young people and of what would engage them in
education, and building an offer informed by the results of that
study.
Q
328
Stephen
Williams:
The Bill will place a duty on local authorities
to promote participation for 16, 17 and 18-year-olds. However, in
paragraph 15 of its evidence, the NUT states
that
“an additional duty
needs to be placed on local authorities to identify the individual
needs of young
people.”
Could John
Bangs or Chris expand on
that?
John
Bangs:
Over the past three or four years, we have
done a lot of policy work—for instance, our document, “A
Good Local School for Every Child and for Every Community”,
which we just published, and our “Bringing down the
Barriers” statement. One thing that we are absolutely clear
about is that local authorities are probably in a bad position if they
are imposing extended services on schools, but in a good position if
they are enabling the bottom-up development of services with schools
and helping them along. In that context, we have argued strongly that
local authorities should be required to establish children’s
services forums where a discussion could take place about how the needs
of particularly vulnerable young people can be met by a range of
services. However, parents and their representatives, providers, such
as teachers and support staff, and local industry can be involved in
that discussion. We believe very much that placing a duty on a local
authority to promote effective participation is also integral to the
idea that you provide a forum in which to have that discussion. We are
seeking an amendment to the Bill, therefore, which would require
authorities to promote effective participation and to establish
children’s services forums for that kind of
discussion.
Q
329
Mr.
Marsden:
Mr. Bangs, I was interested in and
rather heartened by what you said about the need to think very
creatively within schools about how to hit that potential and crucial
NEET group. It reminded me of some years ago when I was in the United
States and the way in which children who clearly did not have an
academic bent were identified very early, after which intensive work
was done almost within a skills—I was going to say
“academy”, but that is a loaded term now. I think that
you know what I mean though: a school within a school that had that
sort of focus. Leaving aside the compulsion aspects for the moment, if
we are to encourage people to stay on beyond 16 and 17, do we need to
do far more at an earlier stage in secondary education to focus that
creative approach on those sorts of children? What are the implications
for that, pre-14, on observing the national
curriculum?
John
Bangs:
That is a very good question. Truancy, which
came up earlier, or rather the majority of references to it, are
couched in secondary, not primary terms. We need to ask why truancy
becomes a big issue at secondary level. The NUT has always taken the
position that secondary schools have been hamstrung by a curriculum
about 40 or 50 years out of date with
segmented subjects and young people coming from
primary school at various stages of personal and physical development.
They are all anxious about going to secondary school, and yet those
schools, constrained as they are by the rigid subject-based curriculum,
have not been able to respond.
I think that a couple of
things are really important that need to be in the
background: first, primary-secondary liaison has to be improved
massively. We cannot allow a situation—this is the case with how
key stages are constructed at the moment—in which secondary
schools feel that they have to retest and reteach children who have
reached good levels of achievement in primary school. The fracture
between primary and secondary is still stark in very many cases. A
situation in which you have been in primary school, with teachers and
friends who you know very well, and then suddenly you are lugging your
bag on your back around several classes in year 7 is a classic recipe
for alienation, particularly for anxious and vulnerable youngsters.
That goes right the way through key stage
3.
We
are putting a lot of hope and emphasis—I hope we can really
bolster this—on the review of the secondary curriculum, because
it should mean, and we are very enthusiastic about it, starting to
think out of the box when it comes to tailoring curricula for children
who have been identified as vulnerable, and being much more focused on
that, without the anxiety and worry that an Ofsted inspector will come
in and say that x, y and z aspects of the curriculum are not being
covered. It seems to me that that relationship with accountability and
being innovative about meeting the most vulnerable children’s
needs must take place, as you imply, at year 7. It needs to build on
some of the good things at
primary.
Mick
Brookes:
Again, it goes back to the way we assess
children. If children are given the impression at 7, 11, 14 and 16 that
they are failures in the curriculum that they are engaged in, is it any
surprise that they want to leave as soon as they
can?
Q
330
Mr.
Marsden:
I am glad you said that, but you might
not be entirely happy with my using it as a preamble
to my question. We have been talking this afternoon about expectations
loaded on to children by the curriculum and by outside society, but is
it still not the case, despite many improvements, that there is not
enough understanding of the value of the vocational route within
schools among head teachers? Yesterday, I was at the launch of a report
where we were discussing attitudes towards further and higher
education. The point was made in the room that in too many schools head
teachers still regard students who are not going to go down an academic
route as not necessarily role models. It is the people going to
university or doing other things whom they regard otherwise. What
responsibility do the teaching profession and unions like yours have to
change that attitude among your own
members?
Mick
Brookes:
That is an extremely good question. It is
one that we need to look at very carefully. If we are not careful with
the diploma initiative, we will be thrown back to the 1950s: if you
were academic then you would get all the good lessons, and if you were
not, you would be out in the greenhouse, or with the PE teacher, or
wherever. We have to be very careful about how we frame all this, as it
is important.
I got into trouble in our 2006
conference for saying that in primary school we need to start preparing
children for diplomas. When asked for an example, I said that perhaps
bicycle maintenance would be a good idea, but that did not seem to go
down terribly well with the Daily Mail. I think that it is
important that we have what we call a really useful curriculum, which
will equip children and young people with the skills that they need for
life. I agree entirely with John: I am not sure the current curriculum
does that. Yes, I agree that with you: I think that we should focus far
more on those vocational, practical skills in schools. But if, at the
end of the day, schools are judged and my colleagues lose their jobs
because do not meet certain standards and Ofsted come in and berate
them, you cannot blame them for focusing on keeping their
jobs.
Mr.
Marsden:
As all good politicians say, I would say that it
is not a question of either/or; it is a bit of
both.
Q
331
Angela
Watkinson:
The additional numbers that the system is going
to have to provide for will necessarily come from groups that are
under-represented. They will possibly have difficult social
circumstances and they might have learning difficulties—children
with special needs are included in the provision of the new
legislation. Would you give me your assessment of the physical capacity
to absorb the extra numbers, in terms of teaching areas and staff? What
are the funding implications for taking on lots of new—high
maintenance, if you
like—students?
Mick
Brookes:
In short, this is extremely worrying, and
the funding implications could be huge, at a time when
we are looking at shrinking school budgets—in
some places only 2.1 per cent. I know this is not just the
schools’ responsibility, but if you are tagging two years on for
20 or 22 per cent. of young people, there are clearly costs attached to
that. We need to make sure that, through SFIG—the school funding
implementation group—and other means, that provision of
resources is readily available. Otherwise, it will simply draw
resources from elsewhere in the school to the detriment of the
education of all the rest of the
children.
Mick
Brookes:
Certainly
not.
John
Bangs:
I agree that obviously there has to be the
funding and resources to meet those needs, but there are very important
regional issues. The north-east has the highest number of young people
not in education, employment or training and the south-east has the
smallest number, so there are major implications. I am talking about
dedicated and specified funding for those not in education, employment
or training and grants having to be focused on a regional basis. It is
clear that there are two options in the north-east, where there is a
declining student population. We could take into account the need for
additional resources and not make cuts to school budgets follow the
school numbers; money needs to be retained to prepare for that.
Yorkshire and Humberside are pretty well up there for large numbers,
and a strategy is needed. Were we on SFIG, we would probably be saying
this,
Mick.
Q
333
Mrs.
Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab): I heard some very
positive statements from the panel about diplomas. Mr.
Bangs, your statement that “We
want them to work” was extremely positive and good to hear. We
have also heard Professor Alison Wolf’s evidence. I do not know
whether you have read it. Can I have some views from you about whether
diplomas will work? What things need to be put in place to ensure that
they
work?
John
Bangs:
The mistake was made and I think it is being
corrected—I hope it is being corrected—in the second five
lines. There was, rightly, enormous enthusiasm for involving employers
in the construction of diplomas, but there was a problem with that. I
have to hand it to the engineering diploma development partnership,
because it did a good job of involving the teacher organisations, and
has done so consistently. I wish that all the partnerships followed the
engineering DDP in involving us, and involved not just teacher
organisations but those who had a major stake in the past, including
universities, in the construction of specifications for the diplomas. I
hope that the situation will change as the diplomas roll
out.
We will survey
our members in schools and FE—in fact, we have just sent the
survey out—to find out their views about the introduction of
diplomas and their likely success. The information we are beginning to
get is that those involved in the diplomas know about them, see their
importance and relevance, and are enthusiastic, but there is not yet a
wider group of teachers with that same understanding and knowledge who
are directly involved. There is still, as they say in the trade, a lot
of embeddedness to
happen.
As for
whether the individual lines will be successful, it is quite obvious
that the Russell group is very interested in the engineering diploma.
We want the other diploma lines to have that
attractiveness to universities as well, and not in a tiered fashion; we
do not want the Russell group cherry-picking one diploma against
another. There is a lot of work to be done with university admissions
procedures, tutors and everyone else on the importance of the diplomas.
It depends on a number of things. We must get the assessment right for
teachers. If a massive weight of assessment is attached to the diploma
lines, teachers will start going off them and they will not be the best
proponents of diplomas, so that has to be got right. At the moment, it
is on a cusp. The enthusiasm of people who proposed the engineering
diploma is infectious. It is going forward. We want it to be a success,
because there is a hell of a lot of investment and if young people fail
in it, that is their chance gone. We think that there is a slightly
brighter prospect for diplomas than there was a year and a bit ago. We
are now beginning to go forward on
this.
Mick
Brookes:
There is certainly a framework for success,
but we need to make sure that we have the logistics right. If, as I
understand it, a large number of schools is queuing up to get through a
very narrow gateway for the diplomas pilot project, that is quite
encouraging. In a sense, it is not a question of “Do we want it
to work?” or “Will it work?”. It has to work
because this is the only game in town for making sure that we have a
skilled work force for the rest of the century. If we do not, we are
sunk, all of
us.
Q
334
Mrs.
Moon:
I was concerned, Mrs. James, when you
made your statement about how you would lose people if you said to
them, “You have to stay on”,
and that compulsion was one of the things that would alienate young
people coming into secondary schools. I wonder sometimes whether in
fact the message of the Bill has been misconstrued. That message is
not, as I interpret it, “You have to stay on”, but
rather, “We will commit to working with you and supporting you
to achieve to the best of your ability, by ensuring that courses are
attuned to your needs and will support and assist you to reach your
potential”. That is the message that I think is in the Bill. I
am concerned that you think there is another one. What is the
message?
Kathryn
James:
I agree with you wholeheartedly.
That is the position it should start from. That is why we are very keen
to see the entitlement, and we would want to see that put into sharp
focus. There is a difficulty: having four children of my own, I am
conscious of the fact that we say, “Look what we can do for you.
Here you are”, and they say, “You’re trying to
make me do something”. It is an attitudinal
thing.
We talked
about the need to change the culture—that is where I was coming
from. If you want to change a culture—and we do need to change
it, I wholeheartedly agree—I am not sure that we will achieve
that change by saying, “Look what we have got on offer and you
will be there to stay. We will guarantee that it will be there”.
The young people will see that as, “You say I’ve got to
do it, but I don’t want to”. It is adolescence—you
automatically rebel. That is what concerns me. If everything is put in
place so that the cultural change starts before we get to this punitive
notion, I think that we are in with a fighting chance. Can I also
comment on the diplomas. I think that it is important to say that the
association would agree with the NUT position that Tomlinson was an
opportunity that was missed, but we have to see the diplomas
work.
John
Bangs:
Clause 2 poses everything in terms of a duty.
We seek an amendment that talks about entitlement rather than duty.
That is about culture shift; you can retain the requirements, you can
retain the compulsion, you can have, as Jim Knight said, the sunrise
clause in terms of penalties. However, for the mood music of the Bill,
it is better to describe it as an entitlement rather than a duty. That
is where I think the shift could take
place.
Local
authorities have a massive responsibility in this area, and I argued
earlier for authorities to set up children’s services forums. I
find it an oddity that local authorities are not required to promote
community cohesion. I think that that is what this is about. Community
cohesion is not simply deemed in terms of how you address ethnic
segregation or social segregation; it is how you address the kind of
segregation that is brought about by alienation and social deprivation.
It would be good to see an additional amendment to the Bill requiring
local authorities to promote community
cohesion.
Q
335
Mrs.
Moon:
In relation to compulsion, on Tuesday, we heard
evidence from Barnardo’s, the Prince’s Trust and the
Association of Directors of Social Services. One thing that they all
said, interestingly, was that having compulsion often meant that you
did not need to use it. Having that power there, and people knowing
that it was there, meant that often you did not need to bring it into
play, but there was a clear demonstration of the seriousness of your
commitment. Do you agree with that?
Kathryn
James:
I come at it from a different perspective. You
have to remember, as I said before, that we really have to get to the
small element of the disaffected. That is why the notion of compulsion
concerns me. What John said about how the Bill is phrased—I
loved his phrase about the mood music of the Bill—was absolutely
right. He was right about entitlement and making—I was going to
say we should make it a privilege—people feel that they want it
rather than that they were forced into
it.
John
Bangs:
The fact that it is a requirement to stay
until 18 triggers a culture shift on its own. I have
explained the NUT’s reservations about the premature
introduction of penalties and the notion of criminalisation post-18.
One of the best things that we did was to work with Barnardo’s
all the way through the party conferences. We went to its public
meetings, spoke at meetings and all the rest of it, which meant that we
worked closely with a voluntary organisation that deals with some of
the most disaffected young people. Some of its projects are very
innovative and
exciting.
There is no
difference between Barnardo’s and ourselves on compulsion. The
really big issue is how to get the innovative projects and programmes
in place and use all the resources available at school level. I wish
that we could lower the radar on compulsion. We have given our view on
the impact and importance of young people not being alienated by a lack
of training or education. The evidence is that if they are alienated,
they drift away from jobs and are often unemployed for the rest of
their lives. How do we get to those young people? Compulsion is about
building a framework to do something about
them.
Q
336
Mr.
Heald:
At the moment, the number of children persistently
absent from year 11 is 67,660, or 11.6 per cent.; and 3.5 per cent., or
20,140, have been absenting themselves since year 7—that is the
period of compulsory, statutory education. How are we going to bring
them back to participate up to 18? We have heard a lot of opinions from
all sorts of groups, and I think that you share them to an extent, that
it will not be at all easy. Whatever the penalties are, do you feel
that that group of 10 per cent. or more will come into education? If
not, what is the answer for the
NEETs?
Mick
Brookes:
If there is to be compulsion, we have five
years to change the culture, so that those young people would sooner be
in school than out of it. That is the crucial thing. If we cannot do
that, even if they are in school, they will not be learning anything
and it will just be more of the same. We really must shift that
culture, starting now, to stand a chance of not having all sorts of
problem in
2013.
Q
337
Mr.
Heald:
I am sure that you all agree with that.
May I add a further question that some of you may
wish to comment on? I met quite a lot of NEETs last year, and some of
them were trying to get back into work by learning to read and write.
It is obvious that there is a significant group, particularly if they
have absented themselves for that length of time, who cannot read,
write and add up properly. Is compulsion, whereby we say,
“You’ve got to go to an FE college, work-based training
or some other school-based option,” the answer, or is the
voluntary approach, which Barnardo’s, Rainer and others
currently take, the answer? Surely, if it comes from the student, it is
better than trying to force them to stay on.
John
Bangs:
It is, but the right conditions must be in
place, and schools cannot do it on
their own, which is why we argued for a cross-service approach that
also links with local firms and industry, and, to be honest, why we
called for a children’s services forum. Schools cannot do it on
their own, but if families or the young person’s parents do not
care at all about school, and school is utterly irrelevant to that
child, there must be a lot more concentration from a lot of other
people on those families. That is why diplomas, a proper, integrated
children’s services agenda, an education maintenance grant that
is attractive enough and a curriculum are all parts of the answer. What
you cannot do is say, “It is either this or that.” It is
about having—I hate to use the word, but it is the only one I
can think of at the moment—a 360° approach to the needs
of that small minority of young people. If they do not stay on until 18
and get on the education ladder, the impact of their social alienation
will be felt by literally thousands and thousands of other
people.
Mick
Brookes:
You have two groups of people who are
outside, and we must ask what is happening to them if, at the end of
key stage 2, about 80 per cent. of young people have gained good skills
in reading, writing and arithmetic. The two groups are the can’t
group and the won’t group. In the can’t group, there are
two subdivisions: people who have told themselves that they
can’t pick up the skills, so they will not focus on it, because
it makes them feel bad when they fail; and people who really
can’t—people who have severe special educational needs.
That is the difference. I come across to the NUT position on the
won’t group—the “I’m not going to do
it” individuals; the belligerent and the disengaged. Perhaps
there needs to be compulsion in that situation, but I do not think that
it is the driving force.
Mick
Brookes:
How long have we
got?
Mick
Brookes:
There are several things. There are
certainly those practical skills that young people need to
survive—the mathematical skills of reading a bank account, for
instance, if they have one and if there is some money in it. So, there
are the domestic skills, if you like. There are also artisanal skills,
which, again, we in this country have an unfortunate history of
downplaying. I would love to be able to plaster a wall as my plasterer
can. What is important is making sure that those skills are better
appreciated. The other element—the really useful
curriculum—is about an engagement and delight in learning,
whatever that means. All young children should be able to leave school
with positive experiences that light them up, so, for example, there is
a lead into musical appreciation and, indeed, musical skills. All those
things are important skills and a curriculum that young people should
be able to access.
Q
339
Mr.
Walker:
Following up on that, do you think
that schools do enough to attract youngsters to the
idea of business and success? Some of the successful
secondary schools in my constituency run business courses, they have
business lunches and business people come in to talk to them. That
really engages youngsters; they like it. Is there space to do more of
that?
Mick
Brookes:
I think that is a really good idea. Quality
careers guidance is absolutely essential—unlike my careers
guidance. When I was 16, the head teacher said to me, “What do
you want to do when you leave school, Brookes?” I said I would
quite like to go to university and be a teacher, and he said
“You’re aiming a bit high, aren’t you?”
That was not terribly helpful to me. Quality careers guidance and
advice is essential, and the way you have described it sounds like an
extremely good idea
indeed.
Q
340
Mr.
Hayes:
I have two terribly quick questions. The first one
follows from your very interesting remarks on diplomas. I am an
enthusiast for diplomas. I welcomed them from the Front Bench when they
were introduced. You implied, however, that there might be some
inconsistency in rigour. How critical is it that diplomas are
consistently strong, so that the brand remains valued by learners and
employers?
John
Bangs:
I do not know whether they are inconsistent in
terms of rigour. That is the problem. The
DPPs’ relationship with the teacher organisations has been
erratic, so I do not know what the situation is and what happened with
the specifications. I have no reason to think that they are
inconsistent, but the teaching profession’s relationship with
their development has been erratic, as I said, and dependent upon the
chairs of the DPPs. I am arguing for us to be open and up front. I say
that because there is a well attested, tried and tested mechanism for
evaluation and comments on specifications for GCSEs and A-levels
through the examination boards. We have not had that same process for
the diplomas.
Q
341
Mr.
Hayes:
We need a golden route for
vocational education to elevate the practical, as Mr.
Marsden said. Even given an amended curriculum that will inspire young
people who may have been put off schooling previously, I guess that a
proportion will still truant.
Notwithstanding the changes we all believe in, is it likely that that
proportion will be greater between the ages of 16 and 18 than before
the age of
16?
John
Bangs:
This is why 5 years—or a decent lead-in
time—is quite important. A lot of the work has to be done when
young people come into secondary school. Enthusiasm for staying on and
learning has to be engendered when they are in year 7, and the
structures of the school have to be tailored to that. I hope that has
answered your
question.
Q
342
Mr.
Hayes:
There is an argument about criminal sanctions. You
do not deny that some people will truant between the ages of 16 and 18,
and will be
criminalised.
John
Bangs:
I think the issue is how you drive down the
percentage of NEETs, and how you see the percentages go down over time.
They have really got to start going down. It would be alarming if,
after the legislation is introduced, they suddenly started going up.
The raising of the school leaving age in 1972 was a disaster, because
it simply mandated that children would stay on. There was no
preparation for it. It simply happened, and teachers had to deal with
the ROSLA year group. The reason we are in favour of the mandate,
instead of the aspiration, is that once you make a requirement, it has
to carry resources into schools. That is the important
thing.
Mick
Brookes:
I agree with John—he is absolutely
right. I will say again: we have five years to get this right. I think
human nature is such that we will probably never see the end of people
taking the occasional day off, as people do in the workplace. We cannot
be so idealistic as to make an impossible target for ourselves.
Certainly, as John says, driving the percentage of truants down is what
we need to
do.
Further
consideration adjourned.—[Mr. Michael
Foster.]
Adjourned
accordingly at one minute to Four o’clock till Tuesday 29
January at half-past Ten
o’clock.
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| ©Parliamentary copyright 2008 | Prepared 25 January 2008 |
