Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
MS LIZ
WALLIS, PROFESSOR
GEOFF LAYER,
DR ROGER
BENNETT, MR
GARY WILLIAMSON,
MS LINDA
FLORANCE, MR
MARK ANDREWS,
MR TOM
SMITH AND
MS RUTH
ADAMS
14 MAY 2008
Q1 Chairman: Could I first of all say
how delighted the Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills
Sub-Committee is to be here in Leeds today and to thank very much
indeed our witnesses for joining us this afternoon. When the Government
decided that it was going to make changes to the structure of
government, it set up a department with "innovation"
in its title and we as the Select Committee shadowing that Department
felt we ought to have innovation as well, and actually getting
the Select Committee to get out of London and come all the way
on this huge journey to Leeds has been a very innovative statement.
I hope you will appreciate it is very, very important for our
region—and I say that as a Yorkshire MP—that we are
out of London and we look at how this important skills agenda
is going to impact throughout the country, particularly of course
as the Government has said that the Leitch agenda will be delivered
on a regional basis, and we want to test that this afternoon.
Can I say that one of the main emphases of this inquiry is not
in fact to question the thinking of Leitch, we very much believe
as a Committee that Lord Leitch has done a superb job in doing
an analysis of the country's skills needs between now and 2020.
We do not particularly disagree either with the targets that he
has set for each of the levels from level two to level four. We
would perhaps question whether it is realistic to achieve those
targets, and that is something that we will get on to this afternoon.
Our main concern is that given that the Government has accepted
the Leitch proposals as they stand and has now set very, very
clear not only policy objectives but also structural arrangements
to actually deliver that agenda, whether in fact we are on the
right track and whether in fact we are on course to be able to
deliver this huge skills advancement by 2020. We are delighted
this afternoon for the record to have Liz Wallis, the Managing
Director of Digital 2010 with us, and thank you very much again
for your input this morning, Liz; Professor Geoff Layer, the Pro-Vice
Chancellor of Learning and Teaching at the University of Bradford,
it is good to see somebody from Bradford here in Leeds; Dr Roger
Bennett the Principal of North Lindsey College, Mr Gary Williamson,
the Executive Director of Leeds Chamber of Trade and Commerce;
Ruth Adams, the Head of Skills at Yorkshire Forward; Linda Florance,
the Chief Executive of Skillfast-UK; Mr Mark Andrews, the Chief
Executive of NG Bailey; and last but by no means least Mr Tom
Smith, Head of Adult, Families and Extended Learning of the Barnsley
Learning Net. I wondered if, Ruth, I could begin with you to ask
first of all does the RDA agree with the Leitch analysis of the
skills needs for the Yorkshire region? Do you feel that in this
region the Government's response to Leitch will deliver by 2020
the skills the region needs? A simple question!
Ms Adams: In terms of the analysis,
yes, at every level of the labour market in the region we have
got the skills needs that Leitch outlined. We have got a considerably
high proportion of people with basic skills needs going all the
way through the range. We would strongly emphasise though, if
we want to get the economic benefits for the economy, the need
for high-level skills, and we would not want to underplay the
fact that that is of considerable importance to this economy to
really start to bring about the changes that in many ways will
drive the demand for skills by businesses because they are in
a better position, or a more productive position to want people
in the labour market and to skill them, so we would not under-estimate
higher level skills at all. Our concern is as the Leitch ambitions
translate into measurable targets and qualifications as to whether
within the economy of Yorkshire and Humber, within the labour
market, we will have sufficient demand for those qualifications.
We fare, I suppose, quite badly in terms of both business demand
for skills as an average and also individual demand for skills,
so we have quite high proportions of young people not progressing
in learning; we have quite high proportions of adults that do
not demand any skills when they enter the labour market. That
is a really big challenge for us whether we can bring about the
culture change that will enable this region to deliver on the
expectations that DIUS has of this region.
Q2 Chairman: Yours is one of the
most vibrant chambers in the country, if I might say, (second
only to Harrogate!); do you buy into this Leitch agenda? Do you
feel that the world has changed since Lord Leitch has presented
his report and the Government response and will it make a difference
to your members and how?
Mr Williamson: We buy into the
agenda. I have got a long list from my Skills Board that tells
me what they agree with—which I will not bore you with at
the moment—it is the implementation that we find does not
always live up to the rhetoric. It is the appropriateness of the
paperwork, the appropriateness of the people who come to see you,
the confusing changes where the government machinery has changed.
Since Leitch we have got numerous different departments and new
initiatives. It is a simple message that we should be giving to
employers of upskilling the workforce to improve productivity
and to make them more competitive. It is being there to help and
tell them where they should go. There are almost as many initiatives
as there are people sat round this table. Yes as a city we buy
into it and our members buy into the Leitch vision; it is just
how it is coming through slowly and in a slightly different form
to what we thought we had bought into.
Q3 Chairman: I wonder if we can pick
up on this. I am not going round the table but I really want to
get you to come in and respond. We have been talking to one of
the deliverers of skills this morning and we have heard that it
is too complicated and there is no joined-up thinking; what is
your response?
Dr Bennett: I can see where Gary
is coming from on initiatives. If I can talk about the FE sector
at the moment, I think we have suffered and are suffering with
initiative overload. My college works with 1,600 employers, from
SMEs to large employers such as Corus and we have got to de-grey
the initiatives with our employers to get them on board with what
it means to get upskilled, what it will mean to the local economy,
what it will mean to the region, indeed what it will mean to their
business. You can get the message across to the bigger employers
reasonably successfully but getting that message across to the
small- and medium-sized enterprise is more difficult, and it is
certainly more challenging because at the level two juncture,
colleges have a lot of people on level two programmes and our
employers want them skilled to level two. Level three costs employers
and then do they have the jobs for them? That is one thing and
that will vary from locality to locality, but I think it is about
what is in it for the small and medium-sized employer rather than
the bigger employer. Our experience in dealing with our 1,600
employers is that the message is more difficult to articulate
to the SMEs than it is to the larger employers.
Ms Florance: I could pick up on
a point there because the sector which I represent—fashion
and textiles—is made up of 90% of enterprises with fewer
than 10 employees, so I am typically that sector, and in terms
of the Leitch recommendations, I think my employers universally
felt that they were the right things to be doing, both socially
and economically within the country, so there is an acknowledgement
that actually recommendations were taking us in the right direction.
I would also concur with Gary in terms of the complexity of the
infrastructure which is set out there for delivery. It really
confuses our employers; they do not understand it. Wholesale reform
of that would take time but we welcome the opportunity that has
been presented currently to try and hide the wiring to provide
a simplified forefront for employers. Unless we have made more
progress with issues around qualifications reform whereby employers
can actually buy into bite-size chunks for their existing workforce
in a manner that enables individuals and employers to have the
kind of—and I am using these terms—"pick and
mix" approach to career development, the right training at
the right time for the person and for the employer, then I think
the whole issue of targets, targets, targets and qualifications,
qualifications, qualifications, which seem to be part of the implementation
plan of Leitch, will disaffect employers.
Q4 Chairman: But qualifications equals
skills and skills equals productivity and productivity equals
wealth. You are laughing, Mark!
Ms Florance: I do not think we
can debate the fact that we have not got another good proxy for
the measure of skills but that is all a qualification is; it is
a proxy for a measure, and one has to also look at what is happening
around the UK, and different governments have picked up the Leitch
messages in different ways. I might cite Scotland which has resisted
the temptation to set lots of targets at lots of levels because
actually their workforce is more qualified than the rest of the
UK, but it does not mean they are getting the productivity results
because for them their focus is on utilising the skills they have
in their workforce. I think there is a difference between having
the skill, and the measuring of qualifications being a proxy in
that, but if the qualification itself is too big a package and
the wrong package then it is not going to achieve that end result
anyway.
Q5 Chairman: I want to know why you
were laughing, Mark!
Mr Williamson: I suspect it is
the same as me, it is a qualification issue as opposed to solutions
for small businesses. We have almost run to the end of the chain
with Leitch and to outcomes. Part of Leitch was about engaging
business in education and training, the development of the curriculum,
and by changing the curriculum in schools encouraging young people
to stay on so that they are qualified and skilled for life and
also developing employer engagement in the work-based learning
programmes. That is the bit that is equally as complicated as
how you get access to funding and that is the bit where I am sure
if you can get the first part right then gradually because employers
are engaged they will recognise and understand the system because
they have been involved in it, but we find at Leeds Skills Board
that we are almost thrown huge great changes in government structures
and we have got to understand them before we can get involved,
and there is no consultation
Q6 Mr Marsden: We feel the same actually!
Mr Williamson: From the business
perspective they ask the question why, what is the rationale,
what will be different, what will it improve, and the people who
come to tell us about that—sorry, Ruth—do not always
have the answers because I suspect they are down the line on where
the decisions are made.
Q7 Chairman: You are an employer
and NG Bailey has always been at the lead in terms of skilling
its workforce. I know that as a former Leeds head teacher, so
there is a little plug for you!
Mr Andrews: I am here wearing
various different hats and I think some of the points that have
been made earlier are so important. I think there is a fundamental
difference between large employers like NG Bailey and the smaller
employers. As a general statement, the educational system, as
it was and as it is becoming, is immensely complex, and I would
certainly endorse everything that Gary says, it is just supremely
difficult for large employers like us, let alone for small employers,
to understand what is going on. I think that while there is obviously
a lot of goodwill behind the changes, they still need considerable
clarity for employers to understand them. From a personal standpoint
I have spent my discretionary time during the past four years
trying to understand the education system, from CBI committees
to the Apprenticeship Ambassadors Network to the Regional Skills
Partnership, and I am just about able to keep up with some of
the acronyms and some of the changes but for the majority of even
large employers it is virtually impossible. The other thing that
I feel very strongly about is that to me one of the fundamental
issues with the system is that the real aggregate demand picture
from employers does not seem to be available. We have wrestled
with that—
Q8 Chairman: What does that mean?
Mr Andrews: I do not want to offend
any of my learned colleagues around the table, but I certainly
have a view that in certain parts of the system we have worked
very hard to try to deliver courses that students want to study
rather than where there are jobs. The end result of that is we
see an awful lot of people coming out of universities for example,
in degrees in subjects that are, frankly, useless and they end
up flipping burgers or at Jobcentre Plus. At the same time I cannot
find engineers or quantity surveyors for love nor money. Something
says to me the system requires us by region and by sector to really
understand what the demand for skills is, and yet it seems to
be incredibly difficult to get that data.
Q9 Chairman: But you have got the
UK Commission for Employment and Skills and you have got the new
Skills Funding Agency, you have got employers in a demand-led
system. The Government cannot do more than deliver everything
employers have been asking for. Surely it is up to you now to
do it?
Mr Andrews: I am not saying that
employers do not have a responsibility; what I am saying is there
needs to be simplification to the system so we have got one data
set that is actually useful rather than 100 data sets that are
telling us different information that we are all trying to respond
to.
Q10 Mr Boswell: Is the complexity
the organisational one; is it the qualifications one; is it the
intelligence one of scoping what the need is; or is it a bit of
all of those?
Mr Andrews: I am a simple construction
guy and for me what we are talking about here is a simple three-dimensional
spreadsheet that says this is what by industry and by region we
need for the various skills, and yet I have never seen that data.
We have been trying within the Yorkshire context to get some aggregate
data on that basis but it is as if each of the different agencies—the
RDA, the LSC, the Sector Skills Councils and everybody else and
his dog—has got their own data set. Why do we need that?
Why can we not have one data set that gives us really useful information
that we can then use to drive the system?
Q11 Chairman: Let us ask Ruth why
because that is your job, is it not, at the RDA, you are Head
of Skills?
Ms Adams: Partly, yes, and working
with the Regional Skills Partnership we are trying to put that
together locally, and it is a point well made that nationally
we do not have that. What we have through the Sector Skills Councils
is very good data by sector nationally, but we have got to match
that then with the regional economy so that we can get some really
useful information out to providers of skills that says this is
what the economy demands. That is not in place yet but, yes, we
are working on it to try and put that data set together. One of
the issues, going back to Tim's question earlier about where the
problems lies, is I think there is a fundamental problem that
whilst Leitch was very clear on the skills agenda—and what
we have across the range of government papers is Innovation
Nation, we have reports from the CBI, really highlighting
STEM skills for example in the economy and the importance for
the economy—what that does not feed though to is any targeting
within the Leitch targets, so whilst innovation reports are saying
how crucial these skills are for the economy what then is delivered
at an implementation of Leitch is a very blanket "wherever
the eligibility is for qualification that is what will be funded",
so there is a fundamental mismatch between what innovation and
what economy drivers are saying and then how the response to Leitch
has been put in place by the then DfES, which is not to target
resources at those STEM skills that are claimed to be so important.
Q12 Dr Blackman-Woods: If we can
just go back a question, I wondered whether Geoff wanted to come
in and answer the question about universities and them just not
churning out the right level four skills because clearly Leitch's
agenda for level four is a very powerful one.
Professor Layer: Yes it is. You
can turn Mark's question round different ways about employers
being specific enough about their needs in the first place. I
think how we try to come across this would be that in terms of
what people want to study, in terms of what people want to do,
you have got this dilemma and dichotomy between what employers
want, the needs that are articulated within Leitch, et cetera,
and the fact that we are dealing with people; and people sometimes
come at things from different angles. What you have seen is quite
a significant increase in the number of people—and it is
interesting to follow up that particular issue about studying
STEM qualifications—coming out with STEM qualifications
from universities but you also have a context whereby people are
graduating and not necessarily going straight and directly into
an area of employment that they seem to be heading towards. For
example, 50% of lawyers do not practise law; 50% of chemistry
graduates (before recent times) went into the City and the finance
sector, et cetera, so you do not have necessarily a match
between the traditional higher education product of a degree with
a vocation, and that has been there for centuries. You just need
to look at the Oxbridge degrees and what people study there. It
is about equipping people with skills to be transferable; it is
not necessarily through a direct vocational route. What you then
see—and I think you do see it across this region, and what
you do have to remember is that universities are different from
each other, they just are, and they always have been—is
different responses from different universities at producing more
and more vocational programmes which are delivered in partnership
with employers. This is where I think I differ from the data issues
that people have raised. This may be just the level of learners
that universities work with, but where we tend to come at it from
is not the data but it is actually what the employers are telling
us. It is about working in partnership with employers. There are
examples in the region, for example Huddersfield University works
with the West Yorkshire Police Authority around particular programmes
to train and develop the staff in police forces; we work with
West Yorkshire Fire Service; other people work with the Paramedic
Service; we also work with parts of the digital industry, particular
programmes that industry have said they want or AstraZeneca has
said it wants, et cetera. Our impression to date and our experience
to date has been about partnership between employers and universities
and higher education providers in trying to deliver bespoke programmes
that can be very short and can be very bite-sized, but there are
complexities of funding that go into that.
Chairman: We are going to come back to
higher education and I am going to stop you there. Gordon?
Q13 Mr Marsden: There has been a
lot of debate and discussion about whether the region is in fact
the right level on which to be concentrating the delivery of the
Leitch agenda. I wonder, Roger Bennett, if I could ask you as
an FE Principal, what was it they said about Mexico "so far
from God, so near the United States", I wonder sometimes
whether in North Lindsey people think that about places like Leeds,
and I just wonder to what extent from your perspective in the
FE sector it makes sense to be looking at delivering Leitch on
a regional level.
Dr Bennett: First and foremost,
North Lincolnshire has to look to its local backyard. Like many
local authorities, we court inward investment from employers to
come and drop their manufacturing units in our backyard, and we
work with those. Leeds is a long way from Scunthorpe and at the
end of the day what happens in Leeds is very different because
the dynamics of this as a city are different from the dynamics
of Scunthorpe, so, by definition, the needs base of our employers
is going to be somewhat different, although there will be degrees
of commonalty. I think we have to respond and my college is quite
responsive in terms of employer engagement. Indeed, we try to
be as responsive as we can. I think the thing that Leitch is putting
forward, to me certainly, on the skills is let us work with the
employers and get a really good, solid interface with employers,
and with the help of the Sector Skills Councils it should be demand-led.
We should future-proof where we are going with skills, not just
for the local backyard, not just for the region, but for England
plc or UK plc. We should future-proof what the needs are. Going
back to Geoff's point, I think for the individual it is a matter
of choice. The qualifications are there so there is an individual
choice point of view to take into account, and that is why people
do make choices. From an employer's point of view, my college
has set up five learning centres in factories to actually take
the training out, and colleges in my sector are very good at that,
and we do that nationally. We have set up five learning centres
in companies and factories to reengage level two but also to plant
the seed for higher level skills, and we are delivering level
three and we are delivering level four through those centres,
and that is a fantastic initiative, because we get buy-in from
the employer, we can explain the complexities of the FE and HE
structures, and they will spend time with us because it is to
their advantage.
Q14 Mr Marsden: I think the average
model is very important and, funnily enough, we were talking about
this just before we came to the meeting today. Can I come back
to you, Ruth, there you are Head of Skills, Yorkshire Forward,
does it worry you that—and all RDAs vary in their sense
of coherence, and I am not going to ask you to list them in the
sense of which one is the most coherent and which one is not but,
nevertheless, it is a fact, they are varied—in delivering
the Leitch agenda you are focusing on regional structures?
Ms Adams: No, I suppose the bigger
concern that I have that worries me is that we have very little
regional flexibility to determine what an appropriate funded solution
could be.
Q15 Chairman: What does that mean?
Ms Adams: For example, it is absolutely
right that the Train to Gain offer is very straightforward because
it is a national offer, but what that means is that you have very
little flexibility then to deal with or to invest in issues that
you may need to address, so for example, to go back to my earlier
point, based on the CBI Survey, as an average, we start from a
very low base in terms of business demand for skills but we have
the same national offer that regions that have not got that issue
are starting from.
Q16 Mr Marsden: Can I just press
you on that because you are making a region-by-region comparison
but you could equally say within your region there are huge disparities.
You have got people in Leeds crying out for the need to get more
skills in level three and level four; and there are other parts
of the area where basic skills, particularly in more rural areas,
are still a key issue. Are you saying you have not got the flexibility
to do that within your own region, to vary the offer?
Ms Adams: The offer in the region
can be varied because it is demand-led so if businesses in a particular
area want basic skills, and that is their biggest need, then obviously
that offer can be targeted to basic skills, but what we can put
on the table is only the same as what is prescribed to us.
Q17 Mr Marsden: So you cannot fiddle
around with funding?
Ms Adams: We cannot fiddle around
with the funding.
Q18 Mr Boswell: It has to be a finite
qualification?
Ms Adams: Yes, and it has to be
a finite qualification.
Q19 Chairman: Can we follow that
through and that will bring us back to the regional agenda because
we are really keen and I would like to bring you and Liz in on
this. The biggest complaint we have about this agenda so far—and
I am sure we will get more in the weeks to come—is this
mismatch between a qualification-led skills agenda and what employers
appear to need in terms of improving the competitiveness of their
business through the skills of their workers. The Train to Gain
scheme is aimed at qualifications and unless employers pay the
whole cost, if you are going to download costings from the government
through Train to Gain, you have really got to aim for full qualifications.
For the IT industry and the digital industry, which applies to
virtually every sector at the moment, that is a bit of a nonsense
and indeed for so many of the employers, some of which we talked
to this morning, the need for small bite-sized chunks which are
not part of a qualification is what employers want and yet you
cannot deliver it. What is your response to that?
Ms Adams: The only way we can
deliver it for the employers you will have met this morning is
through discretionary funding, and that is being squeezed. That
part of discretionary funding is just reducing and in some ways
that is no bad thing because then the emphasis is to make qualifications
more relevant so that the bite-size bits in a modular system would
out, but we have not got a modular system of training funding
so we are a long way off that. We are squeezing the flow of money
before we have put in place the system that would make this work
better. The difference for skills—and this is the bit that
concerns me—is the NVQ approach is about accrediting the
competence of the worker as it currently is; it is not about developing
skills, so whilst it is the best measure of skill levels we have
got, it is not the best measure of developing the skills needed
to take businesses. It is about accrediting what people can do
and how they are competent in their current role, so by definition
it does not lead to progression in the way that person applies
their skills and the qualifications are not future-proof in the
way that the NVQs are set up, and that I think is going to be
the stumbling block in really getting the benefit that Leitch
wanted to see.
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