Examination of Witnesses (Questions 53-59)
CAROLINE ABRAHAMS,
CHRIS HEAUME,
COUNCILLOR LES
LAWRENCE AND
ROB WYE
9 JULY 2008
Chairman: I welcome Caroline Abrahams,
the Programme Director for children and young people in the Local
Government Association, Councillor Les Lawrence, the Chair of
the children and young people board at the LGA, Chris Heaume,
the Chief Executive of central London Connexions, and Rob Wye,
the Director of the young people's learning and skills group at
the Learning and Skills Council. Thank you for being with us.
We understand that the chief executive of the LSC could not be
with us because it is his annual holiday. We are happy that Rob
Wye will represent him. People do deserve holidays. If he is in
charge of testing, he might have to be called back, but if he
is not he will be all right. This will be quite a fast and furious
sitting. We have a lot of questions for you. As we have a large
panel, I suggest that we go straight into questions. We have your
CVs and know that you are the right people to have before us.
I ask Douglas to start the questioning on the need for reform.
Q53 Mr. Carswell: My first question is
to Mr. Wye. Why separate the 16 to 19 and adult functions of the
Learning and Skills Council?
Rob Wye: That is not a matter
that the Learning and Skills Council had a decision in. The decision
was taken by the Government. As was said by the previous group
of witnesses, it was a natural consequence of the creation of
the two Departments—the Department for Children, Schools
and Families and the Department for Innovation, Universities and
Skills. They have their own delivery arrangements for their responsibilities.
The argument around young people has to relate to raising the
participation age. If you are giving local authorities a responsibility
to ensure that there is an opportunity for every young person
up to the age of 19, it makes sense for the services to come through
the local authorities. On the adult side, we are already moving
to a more demand-led world, which is different from the more planned
world of education up to the age of 19. The approach is therefore
already different for 16 to 19-year-olds and for over-19s. The
two could be dealt with through a single organisation such as
the LSC, but the decision was taken to deal with them through
new arrangements. We are working to put those into effect.
Q54 Mr. Carswell: So quite a lot
of it was in response to a Whitehall-driven process?
Rob Wye: Yes.
Q55 Mr. Carswell: Do local authorities
have the capacity and the ability to take on some of the responsibilities
that have been set out for them?
Rob Wye: We need to work with
them. From colleagues here, it is clear that they recognise that
there is a need to develop their capacity. This is not an area
that they have been responsible for since 1992. This move builds
on a changing world for local authorities, in which they are in
the business of commissioning a wide range of services. This is
an addition to an approach that they are familiar with. They will
need the expertise and resource that currently lies in the LSC,
which looks after the arrangements for 16 to 19-year-olds.
Q56 Mr. Carswell: Caroline, from
an LGA perspective, do you think that local authorities have the
ability to do this?
Caroline Abrahams: We certainly
have the ability. We do not currently have the capacity because
the specific skill sets for commissioning for this age group are
currently in the LSC. As Rob said, local authorities are in the
business of commissioning children's services across the piece.
From our point of view, one of the great advantages for young
people of the transfer is that it ends an anomaly whereby lead
members for children like Les and directors of children's services
are accountable for the outcomes of all young people up to the
age of 18 in their area, but do not have the commissioning responsibility
for this age group. It brings more strongly into alignment the
capacity for local authorities to be held to account for the outcomes
of those young people.
Q57 Mr. Carswell: I have one final
question before I hand over to someone else who might want to
ask a bit more about the need for reform. Giving local authorities
responsibilities has often been justified in terms of localism
and local accountability. Surely a better system of local accountability
than giving power to local authorities would be to allow the institutions
to be totally free-standing, totally independent and free from
both LSC and local authority control, and allow them, through
a new mechanism, to answer directly to people who might wish to
study at them? For example—people sometimes smile when I
say this, but it is a serious point—my local supermarket
does not answer to the local council. It answers to those people
who wish to buy food. That is why it is pretty good at doing that.
Surely colleges should answer to those who might want to study
at them? Local authorities are very imperfect as a mechanism of
local accountability. Some voters might happen to be parents who
might happen to have children of sixth-form age. Why not have
a more immediate form of accountability to the end user and get
local authorities and the LSC out of the picture entirely?
Rob Wye: You are absolutely right
that providers, colleges and schools, need to be responsive to
learners and their parents and learners who go directly to those
institutions. That demand-led approach is absolutely where the
LSC is moving to. I think the local authorities will endorse that
sort of approach. The difference between 16 to 19 and 19-plus
is that there will be a responsibility to meet the needs of all
young people. Somebody has to ensure that there is a place for
every young person who wants to take that place up. If you leave
it entirely to the market, it does not ensure that everybody has
that opportunity. If you leave it entirely to Tesco it does not
mean that everybody can be fed by Tesco.
Cllr Lawrence: I think that Douglas
uses an unfortunate analogy. Most people go to the supermarket
on a weekly basis just to meet their immediate needs. We are talking
about the needs of young people in relation to their future direction
in life in employment terms and in terms of the skills framework
within local communities. Depending on the nature of those skills,
they become the generators of the economic activity within a locality.
We are not talking about something on a week by week basis. A
youngster going to college to study may initially do a one or
two-year course. That leads to other courses and, as Rob quite
rightly said, we are talking about a demand-led process based
on need. That need is governed by a series of factors that are
not on the basis of a short-term requirement to meet the needs
of the locality in which those young people live. The food analogy
is inappropriate because if you go to Tesco you have a series
of different qualitative products. People choose them on the basis
of their own economic ability to do so. That is not how a young
person should choose a college course. The analogy is that a college
says, "That course costs £50, that one costs £40
and that costs £30. They have a different level of qualitative
component." This is about ensuring that there is a level
playing field in terms of the quality of the outcomes and access
based on need. When you get into what I call the really specific
support needs of the vulnerable groups and those who are NEET
or at risk of becoming NEET, those who have learning difficulties,
those who have physical disabilities and those with special educational
needs, you need a framework so that those youngsters, who often
come from the most vulnerable and challenged circumstances, can
be supported and have exactly the same opportunities as all other
youngsters who do not face those challenges.
Q58 Mr. Carswell: Just one final
point: would you not argue, as a good Conservative councillor,
that one of the factors in the failure of the inclusion policy
for children and young people with special educational needs is
precisely the fact that they do not have any consumer choice as
to where they are sent? They are forced into taking the sort of
education that their local education authority decides to provide
for them. If only they had that sort of consumer choice, which
you deride, they might not face some of the problems that they
face now.
Chairman: I do not think that Councillor
Lawrence was deriding anything.
Cllr Lawrence: I am going to be
very parochial, if I may. In the city of Birmingham, the premier
city in the land, we have just undertaken the most significant
piece of work in relation to all youngsters with special educational
needs, which has involved very detailed consultation with parents
and the youngsters themselves, as well as all the providers, so
that we are able to provide a strategic framework for special
educational needs provision within the city that actually meets
the needs of those you would call the consumers. It has been done
on a collective basis—on a very inclusive basis—and
when you listen, especially to the young people themselves, talking
about the nature of the facilities, the access and the funding
to support that provision, you begin to see that you cannot do
it on a pick-and-mix basis that is left to a free-for-all. It
has to have an element of planning, but what you do within that
is allow the degree of access that best meets the needs of those
youngsters, together with their parents, in the localities that
they live in. That, I think, is the best way of doing it. Yes,
you must have a degree of freedom, but at the same time you must
have a structure that allows everyone the same opportunity to
access the provision that is available.
Chairman: Chris Heaume, you wanted to
come in.
Chris Heaume: I think that young
people currently do have choice. They choose from a wide range
of institutions. The danger of the proposals that we are looking
at is that such localisation might start to limit that choice.
Currently young people, especially in urban areas, are very mobile
in the way they seek learning post-16—and pre-16. We have
in London 45% mobility from their borough of residence to where
they are studying. That is incredible mobility. If we move down
to very localised planning, we are likely to lose that range of
choice. If we are to have a skills economy that has got young
people skilled to the levels they need and excited by how they
are trying to drive things forward for themselves and where they
are working, we need them to have that type of challenge to the
way they look at their options, and encouragement to take them
up. So I think choice is certainly available. I support the London
arrangement that as a response to these proposals the local authorities
want to work together and not individually in an isolated way,
so that they can jointly commission that offer for London, rather
than singly.
Q59 Mr. Stuart: When commissioning
provision in rural areas, how will local authorities ensure that
young students do not have to travel too far?
Caroline Abrahams: A reasonableness
test will be applied. For example, if a young person in London
wants to do agricultural training, there may be one or two places
in the country to do that. It will be tremendously expensive,
and who knows whether that will be affordable. But, by and large,
at the moment all the arrangements are being developed on the
basis of travel-to-learn patterns; it is a terrible bit of jargon,
but basically there are patterns whereby young people travel from
one area to another for their education. That is actually becoming
the determining factor for the clusters of local authorities coming
together to plan and commission this kind of provision. So I think
the answer is that there is absolutely no guarantee, but everyone
will have to do their best within the provision that is available,
which may also of course in future get us into issues of both
decommissioning and recommissioning: both getting rid of some
places when they are not needed, particularly because of demographics
in the shorter term, and having to recommission in response to
the demands of young people but also the local labour market.
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