Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-39)
DEPARTMENT FOR
CHILDREN, SCHOOLS
AND FAMILIES
5 MARCH 2008
Q20 Mr Touhig: How do you know that
because we see on page 8—and the Chairman has referred to
it—engagement with employers is the least developed aspect
of your Diploma route?
Mr Bell: We are certainly not
giving them skills that employers do not want because the 5,000
employers that have been involved in the development of these
Diplomas have been there precisely to influence the content.
Q21 Mr Touhig: With respect, how
do you know because it tells us on page 8—and the Chairman
has referred to it—that 45% of the consortia have not yet
involved employers in developing an approach to 14-19 education?
That is key to the skills you have got to be educating young people
to attain and you have not engaged employers; how do you know
that you are giving them skills the employers actually want?
Mr Bell: I do not think you could
go to one of the first round of consortia or any of the consortia
that are going to deliver the Diplomas and find that they are
not engaging employers at all. The concern was have we got them
fully engaged to be able to offer all the work training, work
experience opportunities—
Q22 Mr Touhig: It is a fine aspiration
but you have not fully engaged them by any means, have you?
Mr Bell: I think we have made
huge progress in this regard in all sorts of ways. Employers are
involved in the design of the qualifications, employers are involved
in the partnership to deliver work experience places, employers
are involved in the identification of future skills needs in their
region, they are involved there. We do need to keep pressing hard
because our view is that every employer will benefit from a more
highly skilled workforce, but it would be wrong to say that the
employer perspective has not informed the creation of the programme.
Q23 Mr Touhig: It is limited because
45% of employers have not been engaged with these consortia, they
have not got it off the ground, and, as the Chairman said, a number
do not even know this project exists.
Mr Coles: It may be just worth
clarifying within each Diploma there are the functional skills
in English, Maths and IT. We designed those with help from the
CBI. The CBI wrote us a report on the skills that employers wanted.
That influenced the design of the functional skills. We designed
this framework of personal learning and thinking skills and employability
skills with the involvement of employers. That is within every
single Diploma. The design of each Diploma is led by a consortia
of employers, in total 5,000 employers were involved in the design
of every Diploma, and in the 146 consortia delivering in September
2008 without exception, there is employer involvement in those
consortia. I think what the Report rightly highlights is that
to get that degree of employer involvement into the future in
the consortia which are not delivering this September but which
are into the future remains an important challenge for us, and
that is the area that we certainly agree that we need to do more
work on.
Q24 Mr Touhig: The Irish with Objective
1 actually gave their people the skills and then brought the jobs
in but they focused on what they believed the new skilled jobs
would be. On page 3 we see a list of skills training to be offered.
How many jobs are there going to be in each of those categories
in the next ten, 15 or 25 years? Have you done any research on
that?
Mr Bell: I cannot answer the question
exactly how many jobs there will be.
Q25 Mr Touhig: But that is what you
are offering the training in.
Mr Bell: Precisely and we have
offered those because in the analysis that was done we reckoned,
not least in the context of the skills challenge that Leitch set,
that these are areas that are going to continue to grow in the
future. I cannot sit here and predict—
Q26 Mr Touhig: How do you know that,
Mr Bell, without research?
Mr Bell: Jon will tell you about
the analysis that we did that underpinned this and actually underpinned
the previous report in 2005.
Mr Coles: The ambition of the
14 is essentially to cover every sector of the economy, so what
we have tried to do within each sector of the economy is to make
sure that these are broad qualifications which buy in and involve
employers from each of those sectors who are themselves saying
what the skills needs are for tomorrow. In other words, we are
not trying to second-guess what employers are saying to us. We
are putting employers in the lead and making sure that we have
got coverage of every sector of the economy. It is inherently
difficult to predict the labour market of the future as any labour
market economist would say, and indeed has said to us, so what
we are trying to do here is build in those skills that we believe
are needed for the future to cope with change.
Q27 Mr Touhig: The big challenge
that Britain as part of the European economic bloc faces will
come from China, from India and they will compete and overtake
us, and the United States. In 2004 the Chinese enrolled 15 million
students in tertiary education. How are we going to compete with
that when we are offering skills in hair and beauty studies?
Mr Bell: That is to assume that
we are only offering skills in that area.
Q28 Mr Touhig: I give that as an
example.
Mr Bell: If you take the Chinese/Indian
example, it is a very good one because if you look at the Diploma
Development Partnership for IT, it was chaired by the Chairman
of a major IT company in this country. It has involved people
from Microsoft, Cisco and Accenture, all the big IT industries,
who are saying, "This is our analysis of the kinds of skills
that we need, so we need you to be devising a Diploma that will
cover those. We will never compete with China and India in volume
terms, of course we will not, but if we can ensure the kinds of
skills that we think can add value—
Q29 Mr Touhig: It is only by adding
value that we will compete.
Mr Bell: Absolutely, and I would
say that you touched on a specific area about hair and beauty
but if you take that and hospitality and retail, these are areas
where we have got strength, we know that they are important in
the British economy. They are not the only part of the British
economy, but I think it is important that across that range we
are ensuring that enough young people are coming through to take
the jobs that will be there.
Q30 Mr Touhig: I know we are in a
post-industrial age but we are not going to compete and survive,
are we, if you cut my grass, I clean your house and somebody else
washes my car. We have got to produce and do things and it seems
to me it is very light on the skills offering here where people
are going to be able to get jobs where we are going to compete
hugely. You are a former teacher and I have been involved in education
as a user, as a parent, as a governor, as a minister, as an MP
and so on, and this list here seems to me the same old tired,
trotted-out list that we get from time to time saying these are
the skills that we need and it does not seem to be that imaginative
to me.
Mr Bell: Manufacturing and product
design, engineering, creative and media, where we have huge advantage,
construction, information technology they all seem to be me to
be at the heart of changes in our economy and where we need to
have highly skilled people coming forward, so I think there is
a very strong emphasis on this list on the sorts of skills where
we have had advantage and will need to continue to have advantage
in the future.
Q31 Mr Touhig: Can we look then at
what we are actually going to offer. If we look at page 3 it says:
"Diplomas (new) offering a mix of general and applied learning
available at Level 1 (broadly equivalent to five GCSEs at below
grade C)." Who wants to possess a qualification that is rated
lower than Grade C GCSE? Would you employ a person in your Department
on that basis?
Mr Coles: One of the real weaknesses
in the system is that people who do not do well at GCSE have no
good progression routes at the moment. Having done poorly at GCSE,
a large number of young people then struggle to develop and learn
and reach the next level. One of the important parts of this reform,
in our view, is that there is a better Level 1 qualification which
provides not (I think you are absolutely right) on its own a ticket
to employment and certainly not a ticket into higher education
but is a good platform for further learning and progression, so
somebody who has a Level 1 Diploma is much better equipped to
progress then into a Level 2 Diploma than somebody who does poorly
in the GCSE system.
Q32 Mr Touhig: I understand there
will be a progression but you would not take anybody on with that
qualification so why do you think British employers are going
to want to take anybody on with that qualification? Surely if
you are talking about this progression you need on-going funding
to continue their education?
Mr Coles: Absolutely, and all
of this is crucial to raising the participation age and giving
people who have got Level 1 qualifications much better progression
rates into Level 2, and keeping them in the system is really important.
Q33 Mr Touhig: There is a lot of
good work being done here but it would appear that you really
do not know what jobs will be available in the next ten, 15 or
25 years and you are not clear what skills young people are going
to need, what employers are going to need. Your understanding
of what employers are going to need seems rather vague to me and
almost half the partnerships that you have already launched have
not engaged with employers at all. Perhaps we need to review this
and go back to the drawing board.
Mr Bell: If I might say that is
a rather unfair characterisation given what you said—
Chairman: Let us stop it there. You have
made your point and you can develop that point later on through
other members. Thank you, Mr Touhig. Keith Hill?
Q34 Keith Hill: I would like to concentrate,
Mr Bell, on the nature of the qualifications because it is a very
different sort of qualification from that to which we have become
accustomed over the decades, if not the centuries, because it
contains several different strands of activity and testing, some
of them more obviously academic and some of them more obviously
vocational.
Mr Bell: It is not a route into
a specific area of employment like an apprenticeship would be,
and we are quite clear about that, but what we are trying to do
in the principal area of learning within the Diploma, ie the area
that is specific to the subject, is to give people better understanding
of what it might be like to work in engineering or in hotel and
hospitality or whatever. At the same time we do recognise quite
strongly that there is an important broad-based education that
youngsters still require to ensure they get the basic skills and
to ensure they have functional skills that enable them to work.
We think it is that kind of blended learning that has been absent
and, to be frank, a lot of employers would say even if you get
the basics right (and it is important that we must get that right
for more students) you do need to have an option for youngsters
that gives them an area of learning and education where they might
have a particular bias or interest—engineering or whatever.
You are right, it is a new type of qualification.
Q35 Keith Hill: You described it
as blended learning but at the end of the blending you come out
with a single overall mark?
Mr Bell: Yes, you will have a
Diploma that is graded, correct.
Q36 Keith Hill: How will it be graded?
Mr Bell: It is going to be graded
at three levels. As Jon mentioned, there is the Level 1 Foundation,
there is the Level 2 Higher Diploma and then there is the Level
3 Advanced Diploma, and it is that Level 3 Advanced Diploma that
has the got equivalent of 3.5 A levels as decided by UCAS in December
last year. That is a broad breakdown of how it will be.
Q37 Keith Hill: I was having a look
at the likely content of the Diploma in Engineering and the Diploma
in Creative and Media in the 2005 White Paper, and in engineering,
I see that you have got four potential examining bodies, and if
you look at creative and media, the Advanced Diploma would combine
an A Level in Art and Design, a BTEC National Certificate in Media
or an OCR (Oxford, Cambridge and RSA) National Diploma in Media,
an AS in Business studies, an ABC award in On-Line Media Production
Skills and a City & Guilds Diploma in Media Techniques. That
is six potential awarding bodies.
Mr Coles: Since the White Paper,
our thinking and the development work has moved us on quite a
long way from that, so, in fact, the principal learning in each
Diploma will be offered by just a single awarding body. There
will be a choice of awarding bodies, as there is with A levels,
so taking creative and media as an example, AQA, City & Guilds,
Edexcel and OCR will each offer the whole of principal learning
but we would expect a single student only to have to deal with
the exam papers from one awarding body.
Q38 Keith Hill: There will still
be different marking systems appropriate to each of the strands
in the blending process?
Mr Coles: There is an overall
grade for each Diploma. To take Level 3, the Advanced Diploma
for example, a combination of the principal learning and the extended
project and the generic personal learning and thinking skills
will have an overall mark A* to C but within that there will a
set of modules each of which will be individually marked. The
marking for those will be appropriate to the nature of the content
so the more practical skills will be examined by looking at somebody's
skills in doing something, and the more theoretical elements of
that will be marked through external examination.
Q39 Keith Hill: You will have to
find some equivalence between each of the strands?
Mr Coles: Exactly.
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