 House of Commons |
Session 2008 - 09 Publications on the internet General Committee Debates Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill |
The Committee consisted of the following Members:Chris Shaw, James Davies,
Committee Clerks † attended
the
Committee WitnessesJim
Knight, Minister for Schools and Learners, Department for Children,
Schools and Families Sarah McCarthy-Fry,
Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Children, Schools and
Families, Department for Children, Schools and
Families Mr. Siôn
Simon, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Innovation,
Universities and Skills, Department for Innovation,
Universities and Skills Public Bill CommitteeTuesday 10 March 2009(Morning)[Mrs. Joan Humble in the Chair]Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill10.30
am
The
Chairman: I welcome the Ministers and members of
the Committee to our final evidence session. There is much detail to be
discussed and many questions that hon. Members might wish to put to
Ministers. For my convenience, and that of those who will read the
report, it might be useful to adopt a thematic approach so that Members
can come in on those, rather than trying to hop, skip and jump around
the Bill’s many provisions. I am, of course, in the hands of
Members.
Q
340340Mr.
John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con): I
welcome you to the Chair, Mrs. Humble, and we look forward
to your firm but fair leadership—that mix of sagacity and
benevolence for which you are
famous. In
contrast, I will now turn to the Ministers. The Bill was described in
one of our evidence sessions last week as a “bureaucratic
muddle” and a “mixed bag” by employer
representatives, and I am sure that those words are still ringing in
the ears of Ministers. Professor Alan Tuckett from the National
Institute of Adult Continuing Education described it as “a
missed opportunity.” At a time when employers and education
providers must be deregulated in order to respond effectively to the
economic crisis, does not the Bill simply tie their hands? When people
are coming out with such robust and clear criticisms, do Ministers
ignore them or take stock of them and respond? Does replacing the
Learning and Skills Council with three bodies really improve the
capacity of employers and employees to survive the economic
downturn? Jim
Knight: I would like to take the opportunity to
welcome you to the Chair, Mrs. Humble, and look forward to
serving under your chairmanship over the next few
weeks. In
response to John’s question, what is ringing in my ears is the
endorsement of the vast majority of witnesses for the measures we are
taking in the Bill. It is possible to pick out one or two isolated
quotes about specific elements of the Bill that people might not agree
with, but that would be an unfair reflection of the substance of what
witnesses told us last week about this set of measures, and there are
many of them.
On the
question of whether we should be doing this at this point in the
economic cycle and with the recession, I am sure that Siôn will
want to comment on the aspects relating to skills. As far as the
14-to-19 phase is concerned, we passed the Education and Skills Act
2008 in order to raise the participation age, and if we are to make
that a reality for 17-year-olds by 2013, as the legislation sets
out, we have to act now to build the capacity of local authorities to do
so. Therefore, those who oppose the Bill on the grounds that the timing
is wrong essentially oppose the change that was agreed by Parliament
last year.
With regard
to the timetable for doing this, the Committee will know that there are
currently shadow arrangements between local authorities and learning
and skills council staff, that the academic year starting this
September is a transition year and that in April 2010 the legal
responsibility will go over to local authorities. They will then be
able to commission the services at the same time as running Connexions,
which will be transferred by the Bill, as John knows. They will then
have the tools at their disposal to commission the sort of learning
that will engage every young person in their area so that that policy
is a success. Having moved from the break in education from 16 to 19,
it makes sense to have an infrastructure that reflects that. You need
something that brokers the arrangements for local authorities so that
further education colleges in particular are not having multiple
conversations because the vast majority of them are commissioned from
several local authority areas. That is why the Young People’s
Learning Agency is necessary, as well as for the transfer of academy
functions. In order to drive the growth in apprenticeship places
forward, and to have a discrete agency focusing on adult skills, there
is great merit in setting up the Skills Funding Agency.
Mr.
Simon: It is a great pleasure it is to serve under
you, Mrs Humble; I echo the comments about your sagacity and all your
other qualities.
Is now the
right time to move towards a more flexible, responsive and
employer-responsive skill system? The answer is yes, obviously. A lot
of what we and the Learning and Skills Council have managed to do in
the last six months or so in response to the recession is precisely the
kind of thing that the Skills Funding Agency will do more and more of,
and be better and better at. It will be slimmer, more streamlined,
faster and more responsive to things such as introducing
£350 million-worth of flexibilities into Train to
Gain, the integration of employment and skills, and the discrete work
that we have been doing with, for example, car manufacturers in the
north-east.
Far from
being against the grain of the reforms, all of those are entirely in
line with the direction of travel of the SFA. The Learning and Skills
Council has done an outstandingly good job, but a different job is
needed next. The job of the LSC was to drive up participation and
success in a skills system which was sadly lacking. It has achieved
that with a great increase in success rates and at levels 2 and 3 in
respect of the skills system.
What we need
to do next is to make the skills system more specifically and directly
responsive to employers and learners. The SFA will do that through its
customer-facing outward-looking gateways: Train to Gain, the National
Apprenticeship Service, the adult advancement and careers service,
skills accounts and the National Employer Service. It is about making
the system respond more directly and quickly to the needs of individual
learners and businesses. I commend it to
everybody.
Q
341Mr.
Hayes: I want to be helpful to Ministers, because that is
the right thing to do. Perhaps I can give them a bit of guidance on why
people feel that this is a
bureaucratic muddle. The relationship between the NAS and the SFA is
unclear. The NAS cannot specify standards. As you know, that is the job
of the SFA; clauses 21 to 30 detail that, despite the fact that the NAS
will be dealing with everything else on apprenticeships. The NAS
reports to both Government Departments and must develop
apprenticeships, as the Minister suggested, in conjunction with local
education authorities, which will decide the type and amount. There is
very little on an explicit role for employers or providers, and the
entitlement to apprenticeships is not matched by any major plans for
implementation.
It is not
surprising that in the Committee evidence sessions, the transition from
the LSC was described as being likely to be “messy and
complicated”. While I acknowledge that Ministers have had
discussions with countless employers, I wonder whether they appreciate
that the CBI was, at best, lukewarm and the British Chambers of
Commerce was hostile. Does that not cause immense concerns? What about
those relationships and lines of accountability? They are all over the
place and so immensely unclear. We can barely understand them; what
chance has anybody else
got? Mr.
Simon: To start with the relationship between the SFA
and the NAS, it may be the case that it has not yet been widely
understood. It was only relatively recently promulgated in any detail,
and that is perhaps one of the reasons for that, but it is not
complicated or
ambiguous. Let
me explain. The chief executive of Skills Funding is the accounting
officer and is, in statutory terms, responsible for apprenticeships and
the NAS. In practice, the chief executive of Skills Funding will
delegate all practical functions relating to apprentices to the chief
executive of the NAS, who will have a statutory accounting reporting
responsibility to the chief executive of Skills Funding, but will also
have management reporting responsibilities to the two Secretaries of
State of the two Departments. I do not think that that is terribly
complicated or at all
ambiguous. What
was the next thing that you
asked?
Q
342Mr.
Hayes: I talked about a series of bureaucratic
elements, but let us deal with the one that you raise, Siôn.
Perhaps I can ask my third question on sector skills councils on the
back of that, because you make much mention of them in the
Bill’s explanatory
notes. The
real issue is that by, in your words, having a line of accountability
to two Departments, there is an implicit lack of clarity. What if the
Departments have different perspectives or take different policy
positions? That is immensely confused, is it not? I find it very hard
to be tough on the Minister as he is such a charming chap, but Keith
Marshall from the Alliance of Sector Skills Councils—the
Minister was here and heard his evidence just as clearly as I
did—complained that there is not enough detail in the Bill on
the role of sector skills councils in statutory terms. There is very
little legislative mention of their role. Indeed, Keith Marshall argued
that the involvement of LEAs actually weakens the role of sector skills
councils—the voice of employers—in the system. It seems
to me that, contrary to the Government’s intentions, which I am
prepared to accept are noble and virtuous, the Bill will result in
confusion, lack of clarity, potentially conflicting reporting lines and
a diminished role for sector skills councils.
Mr.
Simon: If I can just respond to those two points, and
I think that Jim would then like to answer some of John’s points
in his opening question. I do not think that the dual reporting of the
NAS chief executive to the two Secretaries of State is inherently
impossible or dreadfully convoluted. The apprenticeship system
comprises two components, one of which falls under the remit of, and is
funded by, the Department for Children, Schools and Families, while the
other component falls under the remit of, and is funded by, the
Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills. The components are
obviously split by age and have separate concerns, which is why they
are covered by separate Departments. Apprenticeships are extremely
important and form a central plank of what both Departments are trying
to achieve. As such, we think the dual reporting function to be right
and perfectly
coherent. On
sector skills councils, it is true that they are not writ large on the
face of the Bill, but that should not leave anybody in any doubt that
they remain at the heart of the system. Part of the Bill refers to the
specification of apprenticeship standards for England, to which sector
skills councils are central. The councils will be responsible for
producing apprenticeship frameworks. That is not in any doubt. It is,
and will remain, the case. As I say, they may not be writ large on the
face of the Bill, because we did not feel that they needed to be, but
nobody should be in any doubt that they are central to the
system. Jim
Knight: To follow on from that last point, I refer
the Committee to paragraphs 48 and 49 of the explanatory notes, which
explain how the frameworks will work. The Bill sets out the frameworks
and, in describing how they will operate, paragraph 48
says: “These
clauses set out the procedures for the issue of apprenticeship
frameworks, which will be developed by employers, Standard Setting
Bodies and Sector Skills Councils according to the specification of
apprenticeship standards in England and
Wales.” Paragraph
49
says: “Subsection
(2) provides that there is to be only one person authorised to
issue frameworks for a particular apprenticeship sector. The intention
is that, in England, frameworks will be issued by Sector Skills
Councils working in partnership with Standard Setting
Bodies.” We
could not be any clearer about the pivotal role that sector skills
councils will play in England without unnecessarily fettering them with
legislation. I do not think that they would welcome it hugely if we
started to legislate about how they should
be. I
will make two other points. On there being lines of reporting to two
Secretaries of State, that is simply a function of the 16-to-19
apprenticeships and the adult apprenticeships. The slight majority of
the NAS budget will come from the DCSF. It is right that the chief
executive of the NAS should report to the Secretary of State for
Children, Schools and Families in exchange for that
money. Finally,
the reason why it is right for the NAS to be nested inside the Skills
Funding Agency is that they are both employer-facing bodies. It is
critical that they develop relationships with employers across that
function. They must be able to broker apprenticeship places with
employers at national, regional and local levels. They must also
respond to the skills needs of
employers. It
is entirely coherent to me that there should be an employer-focused
body in the form of the SFA, working under DIUS, that responds to
skills needs and the
demands of adult learners, with that discrete adult focus, and an
apprenticeship body that straddles the two
Departments.
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| ©Parliamentary copyright 2009 | Prepared 11 March 2009 |