Examination of Witnesses (Questions 80-99)
MICK FLETCHER,
PROFESSOR ALISON
FULLER, PROFESSOR
ALISON WOLF
AND PROFESSOR
LORNA UNWIN
4 JUNE 2008
Q80 Chairman: That is right, is it
not? Leitch has made it clear that it wants a demand-led system
with employers at the centre of it; employers will decide what
skills they will need; and colleges have either got to provide
those skills in a responsive 24/7 mode or they will go elsewhere?
That is right, is it not?
Mr Fletcher: I have no problems
with that and I suspect none of the colleges around the country
have problems with that. The difficulty is that in the name of
an employer-driven system, employers can choose what they want
as long as it helps meet Treasury targets and as long as it allies
with what a sector skills council has agreed, and as long as it
fits in no doubt down-stream with some regionally based plan that
comes from an RDA or a regional employment partnership. It is
a heavily constrained choice.
Q81 Ian Stewart: That is interesting
because that leads me nicely on to what I had in my mind, which
is: should the state plan and fund post-level 2 training?
Mr Fletcher: I think the state
should make clear what its priorities are. At the strategic level
it is very difficult to fault what Government is doing. It is
saying that we need to place more emphasis on people who do not
have their foot on the ladder rather than people who are already
part-way up. I cannot fault that at all. What is difficult is
that if you try to drive this thing from the centre, it simply
does not work, as we found out in eastern Europe over the latter
part of the 20th century. Central direction is not a very efficient
way of managing complex systems.
Q82 Mr Marsden: Alison Fuller, can
I come back to you? What you were saying is very interesting about
your research and what people think about the impact on their
jobs. I wanted to ask you this, and possibly Mick might want briefly
to comment on it as well. We have had a lot of evidence and there
is a lot of talk out there about soft skills, enabling skills,
call it what you like. There is also a lot of talk about on-the-job
training. Government gives a lot of support to the idea of on-the-job
training and a more modular approach to constructing things like
apprenticeships, et cetera. Do the frameworks that Leitch proposes
in terms of demand-led give enough space for building and constructing
those sorts of variations?
Professor Fuller: I think they
give space but they do not actually provide support and capacity-building
mechanisms to enable them to happen.
Q83 Mr Marsden: Or cash?
Professor Fuller: Yes, or cash
and the resources are weak and need developing in a variety of
ways. Many employers that Lorna Unwin and I went to in our Learning
as Work project had either no training department or a very small
one and in the past had had larger ones. Various aspects of the
way businesses have evolved and the way functions have been contracted
out mean that that capacity is extremely fragmented and ageing.
Q84 Mr Marsden: And presumably worse
in SMEs?
Professor Fuller: Yes, by and
large.
Mr Fletcher: I think the problem
is particularly acute in SMEs. I can give an example from an area
I have been working in closely in the last few months around the
delivery of Skills for Life through Train to Gain. The evidence
suggests that you need about 180 hours of study to get from one
level to another under Skills for Life Literacy or Numeracy. That
is not all teaching but if you assume it is 90 hours teaching
and 90 hours private study, it is three hours a week for 30 weeks.
If you go into an SME and you only have one employee, the Train
to Gain funding allows you to give about seven or eight hours
support, that is all. If you can group people into groups of 10,
then that is fine; you can get up to 70 or 80 hours. If you are
trying to do this on an individualised basis in an SME, the money
is simply not there. I honestly cannot see how it could ever be
there on that model.
Professor Wolf: You could give
the individual the opportunity to go and spend the money where
they wanted to, which they do not have at the moment.
Q85 Mr Marsden: Such as a voucher
system?
Professor Wolf: Yes, or something
like that. The word voucher always immediately has these dreadful
connotations.
Q86 Mr Marsden: That is because of
what has happened to it in the past.
Professor Wolf: Can I just point
out that in effect that is exactly what we operate within higher
education. The individual 18-year-old or 21-year-old, or whoever,
effectively, if they come and apply to one of our institutions
and we accept them, we then receive money for them.
Professor Unwin: The huge difference,
Alison, is that the 18 or 19-year-old applying to university will
have had all the guidance, will know that their qualifications
are going to be accepted. The universities provide lots of information,
et cetera. If we are talking about vouchers for adults, either
in work or out of work, we will need a pretty good system. Many
adults and young people out there do not know where to go because
it is a complex system and in many cases their employers will
not be encouraging to them to seek qualifications.
Q87 Chairman: The solution here is
that in the autumn in the Queen's Speech there will be a Bill
which will give employees the right to request training, and that
will resolve the matter, will it not?
Professor Unwin: You are saying
that with a very twinkly look in your eye!
Professor Wolf: Can I come in
here? I very rarely disagree strongly with Lorna but on this occasion
I do. I get very angry with this assumption that adults who do
not have degrees are not capable of knowing what they want or
finding it. That is essentially the implication, that Government
policy is that 18-year-olds are able to make informed decisions
and adults are not. Let me finish.
Professor Unwin: The 18-year-olds
are supported. That is my point. We do not support adults in the
way we support 18-year-olds who have A levels. We do not support
young people who do not have A levels in the way we support the
ones with A levels.
Q88 Dr Turner: You have torn Leitch
apart fairly effectively, but the fact is that the Government
swallowed Leitch. Has it made any difference on the ground yet?
Professor Wolf: To what—to
the way that the system works? Yes, it is now gearing up to deliver
the Leitch target.
Q89 Dr Turner: In terms of giving
people skills?
Professor Wolf: Not obviously,
no.
Mr Fletcher: There are so many
changes on the ground you can see in terms of processes. As I
mentioned before, colleges of further education are making very
radical changes to their plans, more or less willingly, to deliver
programmes in the way in which Leitch has said. I think we will
also see increases in the number of people who gain qualifications
of particular types. That then takes us back to whether or not
that will do them any good. I have difficulty in seeing how simply
labelling people who are skilled but not qualified is going to
help them a very great deal.
Q90 Dr Turner: Of course education
and skills is not the only area which the Government has sought
to manage and government management tends to be a succession of
reforms, initiatives, et cetera, some of which conflict. Do you
think that there has been too much upheaval and not enough action
to go; in other words, as in the health service where they have
hardly finished trying to suggest one reform and the next one
is coming down the tracks? Do you think that it has been over-complicated?
Professor Wolf: I certainly think
it has been over-complicated. It is one of the great puzzles of
British history; perhaps you can say it proves that skills do
not matter all that much, although I think they do. We have had
a major inquiry into skills every few years since 1860 literally
and we constantly reform; we constantly change it. In the process,
we have ended up with a situation where employers are spending
far less within further education on skills training than they
were before all of this started. We do not seem to be making any
huge progress in terms of productivity; we are undermining our
institutions. Having said that, I think what we have now is not
satisfactory, I can hardly say that therefore we should nonetheless
leave it all alone in order to have stability. Yes, we dig it
up all the time.
Mr Fletcher: I think it is an
important distinction to make, though, in that the ferment of
reform is not everywhere; it is only in certain places. If you
look at the funding consultations that came out around January
2007, the Government published one that said: in respect of higher
education, the stability of institutional finances is a major
priority. It said exactly the same for schools, that stability
of institutional budgets is a priority. In respect of further
education, it said: We recognise that these changes like Train
to Gain will bring about instability, et cetera, but this is a
price worth paying. I think that tells you something. There is
a carelessness in government policy with regard to provision for,
let us say, the lower 50% of the population.
Q91 Dr Turner: Do you not feel that
in fact if you left it to institutions and professions to evolve
themselves in response to changing demands, they might do better
than being re-managed and re-badged from the top down?
Professor Fuller: I think that
may well be true. There is still an ambiguity of purpose at the
heart of this, which has probably been well represented by the
confusion about apprenticeships. Apprenticeships at the moment
are positioned, if you like, as the third alternative, the third
route, after A levels and the new diplomas which have been promoted
very heavily to young people. Apprenticeships are in a sense at
the heart of skill formation and have been since skills were needed
historically. If apprenticeships are not clearly positioned as
desirable and well-resourced with lots of information and capacity
around providing training and so on, then it gives the lie to
the purpose of these things. If I were a young person trying to
make choices at 15 and 16, the likelihood is that I would know
nothing about apprenticeship, other than it was perhaps something
for people who are not going to go very far in the world. You
see that through the way that the equivalencies are mapped out
in terms of the value that is ascribed to the types of qualifications
people get in apprenticeship. If you complete an advanced apprenticeship,
which is presented as a level 3, it will not get you into a bachelor's
degree, for example.
Professor Fuller: The "what
it is for" question I think is still not clear.
Q92 Dr Turner: It will get you a
job as a junior technician perhaps.
Professor Unwin: I think your
point about leaving it to the professionals is an important one.
What we need to have much more of is trust in the professionals
and the institutions, many of whom, particularly the further education
colleges, have outlived initiative after initiative and have seen
agencies come and go. Certainly the best ones have always worked
locally with employers, with the communities. I think the focus
should be much more on the capacity within those institutions
to work out how best at local and regional level to organise the
provision of education and training.
Q93 Chairman: But employers know
best, not colleges.
Professor Unwin: Employers at
local level will work with their colleges and employers who know
best that they need the professionals to work with them.
Mr Fletcher: I do not think any
of us are saying this should be completely hands off and the government
should walk away and it will all be marvellous. It is clearly
right for the Government to have priorities. At the strategic
level it is very difficult to argue with the priorities the Government
has chosen. The problem is in the nature of the dialogue and the
nature of the control that it seeks to exercise. The system in
higher education is one where the Government makes its priorities
clear but when it sets its policy statement out to HEFCE it is
considered with the institutions. There is a dialogue and a debate
whereas within the further education sector, in the world of training
providers, it is simply command from the centre: you shall do
this. It is very instructive to read the two grant letters from
the Secretary of State, the one that he sends to HEFCE and the
one that he sends to the LSC, The language will simply describe
the essence of the difference.
Q94 Dr Turner: Is there an element
of, if you like, social distinction here? The Government recognises
the seniority of the status of universities so it will kow-tow
and recognise them, but FE colleges, oh well, they will do as
they are told? Is this what you think is happening?
Mr Fletcher: I think there is
a very large element of that. If you read the HEFCE letter, it
says: we invite you to consider this proposal. With the LSC grant
letter—they do not talk to institutions, they talk to the
LSC—the LSC must, the LSC must. I think I counted 29 "musts"
in four pages, and that was not counting the euphemisms.
Chairman: We have got that point.
Q95 Dr Turner: Coming to my next
point, what do you think is the best kind of regional level for
delivery of progress? Is that at regional or sub-regional level?
How do you think the infrastructure should be delivered on the
ground? Have we got it right anywhere?
Professor Wolf: I think that the
FE college is an important institution and it is the level at
which decisions should be made. I do not think you need all these
structures above it. Going back to the point that came up before
about how local colleges can talk to employers and indeed to local
unions, they can and they do still when they are able to and they
used to a great deal more than they do now. I do not know whether
you have anybody coming in front of the committee who was, for
example, an FE principal 10 or 20 years ago. I hope you have because
if you can talk to them about it, they will be able to describe
to you the differences. I really do not think we need a regional
level. That is just another layer of bureaucracy which is not
helpful. What you want to do is get down to the level where individuals
are responding to the local market and making their own decisions
within the context of where they live and where they are operating.
I think the FE college is an important and fundamentally necessary
institution for all the reasons that Mick has put up. You have
got to have institutional continuity in this area.
Q96 Dr Turner: You do not, for instance,
really see a role for the LSC?
Professor Wolf: No, I do not actually,
except in the same sense as HEFCE. By the way, I do not think
the universities are left alone quite as much as Mick implies
but the difference is very clear. You do need a funding agency
and you need a funding agency partly when Government has a major
priority and it wants to change the system but you do not need
the level of micro-management, which is not management by the
LSC in an independent sense; the LSC is an arm of Whitehall and
it does this. I do not think you need it.
Q97 Chairman: Do you all agree with
that statement that Professor Wolf has made?
Professor Unwin: I think I do
generally agree with it. I think you could do a lot more, though.
I agree that you do not want a whole lot of layers above the local
institutional level. You could do a lot more, though, at local
and possibly even regional level to invest in and support employer
associations, group training associations, so that it is not just
the FE college as an institution but there are other institutional
parts of the fabric.
Q98 Dr Turner: Ad hoc networks?
Professor Unwin: Yes, and those
could be invested in to enable them to work in the partnership
way we were talking about earlier.
Q99 Dr Turner: Do you see any role
in there for RDAs?
Professor Unwin: No,
Professor Wolf: No.
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