Examination of Witnesses (Questions 180-199)
CHRIS HUMPHRIES,
TERESA SAYERS,
TOM BEWICK
AND FRANK
LORD
25 JUNE 2008
Q180 Chairman: Teresa, the whole
agenda appears to be driven by achieving the Leitch targets, but
do you feel that they are owned by the employers or is that purely
a government mechanism?
Teresa Sayers: I would say that
employers take little notice of targets that are set by government.
If those targets happen to relate to what drives economic performance
in their sector then that is great. Quite often the difficulty
is that targets do not relate to what drives economic performance
and financial services. What employers are principally concerned
with in financial services is how they meet the regulatory requirements,
how they drive performance by having higher level skills in IT,
maths and mathematical analysis, those kinds of things. That is
what drives them and what concerns them. I think they actually
have little concern or regard for government targets.
Q181 Chairman: Do you think the Leitch
targets, which the government has accepted plus an additional
one for Level 3, have any relevance for the people you represent?
Frank Lord: No. If you did a survey
of the employers you would find that still the issues for employers
are around the basic skills of numeracy and literacy that they
wish their employees to have. If you look at the surveys that
are carried out, that always comes out as one of the top answers.
Also, in terms of attitudes towards work and aspiration levels
of people in businesses, it is something in surveys that always
comes out that needs to be improved. It is all very well having
these targets that we have set that are aspirational, but to engage
people in learning in the workplace you have to look at how you
can reach them to get them to begin to learn. It is difficult
to see how things like bite-size learning and the kind of support
that has been there in the past fits in with the new structures.
Employee development centres, for example, within clusters of
small enterprises could be a very good vehicle to engage adult
learning which would then be demand-led because they would take
that back into the learning place to encourage their employers.
We have got to have many approaches as to how we get a change
in culture. For a change in culture you have to take people with
you. You cannot take change and implant it on them.
Q182 Chairman: Frank, you will not
get any funding for the model you have described.
Frank Lord: I would campaign for
it because that is where change happens, at the coal face, with
real people learning more about themselves and about how to work
as a team. Just having faith in learning in general without targets
is very, very important. That is how you get cultural change.
Q183 Ian Stewart: This is very interesting
to me personally. If that cultural change that you are talking
about is to take place then surely that will need the providers,
FE and private providers, to go to the workplaces and deliver
the training more than they do now.
Frank Lord: Yes.
Q184 Ian Stewart: And that would
be welcome?
Frank Lord: Yes, and a follow-up
to it would be welcomed as well. If you are in a service industry
now you will get a text message or a phone call the next day asking
you what the service was like. Do we do that with the provision
that we provide? Do we ring learners up the next day? Do we ask
them what their experience was? Do we take that feedback on board
in that kind of real-time environment or do we wait for years
for reports to come out to assess things? We are just not flexible
enough and quick enough off the mark to help to engage the changes
that are needed, it is far too bureaucratic. If we lose the local
input, the strategic and the sub-regions, then I am very keen
to see how employment and skills boards can link in to the Commission
for Employment and Skills and how ESBs and our EBLOs can link
into that. I believe that the voice of the employer is being lost
in these new structures. You can now go to employment and skills
boards that would not even have an employer representative on
them from the private sector. To me that speaks volumes.
Q185 Chairman: Can you give me an
example of one of those?
Frank Lord: Yes, Derbyshire Employment
and Skills Board would be an example. I think they are still seeking
to get an employer on their board.
Q186 Chairman: Are you content with
the rate of progress to achieve the Leitch targets? Do you think
we will be there by 2020?
Chris Humphries: No, I am certainly
not satisfied with the rate of progress at the moment, but we
will issue a formal report on that in March next year, it is a
part of our remit. The whole thing about the targets is that they
are quite consciously structured as a way of measuring the behaviour
of the supply side. Frank is right in saying employers do not
care about them but actually most employers do not know about
them. What they will tell you very clearly is we need basic skills
and key skills addressed, we need employability skills addressed,
but we also need higher level skills because there is not enough
of a focus on the skills that are going to drive us up the productivity
ladder. By the way, we are likely to want more people at Level
4 and higher as well because that is where the economic challenges
of the next 10 years are coming from. They may not reflect numbers
in the way that Sandy Leitch's targets reflected numbers but they
hit all the same buttons. The messages for employers about what
the big skills challenges are today are actually consistent with
the issues, priorities and gaps that Sandy identified, but business
will never know those targets. Why should they? What would it
take and what would the value be of them knowing what the target
would be? What they want to see is the system changed to deliver
the skills the employers need, and that is where your rate of
progress question is completely valid. The latest evidence from
the OECD is that both in terms of the proportion of our adult
population that have got secondary education and in terms of the
proportion that have got tertiary education we are going backwards
compared to our major competitors in the OECD, not forwards and
I think there is a real need for a sense of urgency around this.
Q187 Dr Turner: You have already
alluded to the number of people with fingers in the pie. Is it
indeed reasonable to describe the thing as a system anyway? It
does not seem to be terribly coherent. Has it become too complex?
Have there been too many changes? The government is still spewing
out policy papers at the rate of one a month or even more frequently.
Is there not a need for some simplification so that people can
see an obvious way through the system before we get results?
Chris Humphries: Given that simplification
is one of the explicit remits of the Commission I guess my answer
to that must be yes! I think you are absolutely right. The system
has got more complex over the last six months, not less with the
changes in the machinery of government, the splitting of the departments,
the move to devolve part of 14-19 to the level that 19+ is operating
at. All of those things have brought more organisations and interrelationships
and partnerships and co-ordination roles into greater demand.
What is certainly true today is that I do not think there is an
employer in the land who understands what the elements of the
new system are, particularly pre-19. Undoubtedly complexity is
a big issue. On top of that, employers report that it is incredibly
hard to get the answer you want out of the system because so many
organisations are actually remitted to create a public and visible
brand for themselves and so every organisation is actually challenged
to make sure employers have heard of them and each time they do
that and each time another letter arrives from yet another organisation
on employers' desks, they want to disengage. Sir Mike Rake said
it when he was first appointed that something like 67 organisations
with skills in their remit wrote to him to tell him it was essential
that the Commission worked with that organisation because they
were the heart of skills development in that particular sector
or area and Mike had not heard of any of them until that point.
Are there too many organisations? Probably. Do we make it harder
for employers to find a way round it by requiring each of them
to present themselves separately and independently? Not only do
we have complex wiring on our circuit board but we publicise each
part of the wiring rather than trying to hide it so the employers
and individuals get it simplified.
Q188 Dr Turner: It sounds a bit like
a job creation scheme for administrators.
Chris Humphries: Education is
complex. It always has been and it always will be. Anybody who
thinks it is going to be a simple matter just needs to look at
the different functions that an educational system has to perform
to understand that it will have a degree of complexity. To me
it is about whether you design the system to make it easy and
simple to access or whether the way you set it up works against
that goal. I think we have started to work against our goal of
simplification and I think it is a big challenge. The biggest
request we get from major employers is to simplify the system
so employers can find their way to the right place and get the
right person as and when they need it.
Q189 Dr Turner: These are devolved
matters across the country and yet your organisation is a UK-wide
organisation. How do you mesh in with the devolved authorities?
Chris Humphries: I think it provides
a great opportunity. We know there is a different pattern of employment,
unemployment, social inclusion and exclusion, productivity and
competitiveness in different parts of the UK. There is not a common
UK economic structure or economic situation, things vary by geography.
One of the things the four nation approach of the Commission offers
us is the ability to monitor and learn from a number of different
laboratories in which different things are being tried in order
to get the system right. I do not believe there is a country in
the world today who would say they have the perfect system post-school.
In fact, most countries are asking radical questions about how
to change them. The first value to me is that we have a chance
to learn from each other. The second one is to say there may be
a need to look at the lessons of areas of the country with 3/4/5
million people in as a model for running the system. There are
many observers. For example, the World Bank in a seminar last
week commented that one of the things they are beginning to believe
is that running an education system in population groups of 3-7
million may be the way to ensure quality, progress and effective
operations. They were asking me as a representative of the Commission
whether we had a view yet on that issue. I think there is a real
opportunity to learn from the ways in which different parts of
the country respond to the different challenges they have when
using employment and skills as drivers to get the whole system
to perform better, but we have to find a way of doing those things
that should be done nationally at a high level, those things that
are best done regionally or on a country basis and those things
that are best done locally. I do not think we have got that clarity
of framework yet.
Q190 Dr Turner: I was going to ask
you at what sort of regional level you think these issues are
best addressed. You have obviously got different problems in different
areas and if you do sector analyses you will come up with different
answers in different regions. Who do you think is best placed
to do this work and lead this work? Do you think we have got the
balance right between the responsibilities of the sector skills
councils and the RDAs for instance? Should we be thinking of shifting
resources towards the RDAs rather than the skills councils? What
do you think are the answers?
Chris Humphries: The skills councils
do not have anything like the level of resources of the RDAs.
They are short by a factor of at least four. I do not think there
is an answer there. The fact is that there is far more resource
at a regional level than there is at a sectoral level.
Q191 Chairman: Are you suggesting
that we should change those resource allocations? It is all right
making a comment about it—
Chris Humphries: It was just because
the suggestion was that there was an argument for moving it. I
do not think there is quite enough investment into the sectoral
side of things. I think we are asking SSCs to do more than we
are resourcing them to do, but I do not think it is a major big
issue and I would not be suggesting moving the delivery of resource,
which is what I think should be going down on a devolved basis,
back up to the national level. I think the sectors play a critical
role in helping us to understand those things that are common
across sectors and industries and understanding global trends,
understanding what our nation's businesses have to do to keep
pace with the world and keep competitive. You then need to look
at and act at a sub-national level and I think there are some
big unanswered questions around that. We have a very confused
system. We have RDAs, we have regional skills partnerships, we
have employment and skills boards that are operating at a sub-regional
level and we have multi-area agreements that are operating at
another level. We have not yet anchored on an appropriate sub-national
structure and we are in a process of change. I think the concern
people have is that they are not sure where the end destination
is on all of this. Again the view would be that if you are going
to use employment and skills problems to solve social exclusion
and productivity problems then you have to work in sensible economic
areas, you have to work in labour market areas, rather than either
artificial regional boundaries or individual local authority boundaries
where those organisations are part of a bigger economic unit.
The move at the moment is towards trying to service economic units.
We are seeing city regions increasing their approach because they
make up more coherent economic areas than the current regions
as we have structured them. Even in places like Scotland, Northern
Ireland and Wales there is a recognition that they may have to
behave differently for certain parts of their country than in
other parts of their country. They have a sub-national approach
as well. What I think we are working out at the moment is the
right form, but we need to get on with it because at the moment
most employers are very confused about what the spatial operator
levels and requirements are.
Teresa Sayers: I would agree with
a lot that Chris has said. Employers are not just confused but
extremely frustrated. If you consider firms which operate in a
global context, the complexity of operating within a UK context
is absolutely mind blowing for them. Sometimes they may latch
onto an initiative. For example, many of our employers like the
skills academy that we have created. Why do we not have one in
Scotland? It is a different policy context that we are operating
in there.
Q192 Dr Turner: How have we got into
this situation? We do seem to have a national talent for over-administrating
things to the point of complexity where they do not work. It is
not just your sector of education where this applies. How did
we get here?
Tom Bewick: I think we have a
national obsession in this country with structural reform—I
have to plead guilty myself as someone who is a former ministerial
adviser—and responding inside the policy framework for a
new organisation or a new structure. The truth is, when you look
abroad at other complex employment skills systems what you do
see are very complex and at times controversial debates about
how best to serve the population in terms of employment and skills
but you also see far more across-party consensus. It is not the
institutions that need to change, it is the behaviour, it is the
attitudes and it is the outcomes that need to change as a result
of shifts in technology, shifts in employment and other changes
in society. My first job was for this man, Mr Humphries, here
at the TEC National Council 12 years ago. During that period I
have worked for the national training organisations and I have
worked for the Learning and Skills Council. You could say I just
cannot keep a job down, but I have been in my current role for
nearly four years now! There is an obsession with this structural
reform. The former Secretary of State Mr Blunkett said in 1998
that the system was like a Soviet warehousing operation and, I
have to say, you could still level that accusation at the system
today.
Q193 Chairman: Do you agree with
that?
Frank Lord: Yes. I do not think
we are going as far forward as we think, we are going backwards
because the sub-national review, rather than necessarily getting
down at sub-regional level, is moving towards local authorities
and unitary arrangements. The things that were working on a sub-regional
basis were working across boundaries local authority areas. That
is where our Alliance and Skills Board has had the most impact.
There is not a duplication of resources, there is joined-up thinking
and we are able to involve the commissioning of things across
areas where employers work. We seem to be moving away from that
and relying on the RDAs now linking through to the local authorities.
I feel that the business voice in this is beginning to get lost
and I am very, very concerned about it. It was much stronger before
with the LSCs.
Q194 Dr Turner: If you look at the
educational institutions that used to be involved, it is within
my lifetime that there were polytechnics which were run by local
authorities, which delivered an awful lot of the training that
we are talking about. They are out of the picture now because
they have been taken away from local authorities. Most of them
have been transmogrified into universities and they do not want
to know. Is that where it started to go wrong?
Frank Lord: I do not know. I went
to a polytechnic myself. I am not sure where things started to
go wrong. Change for change sake is not healthy and transformational
change in itself is not always a good thing. We should be thinking
about how we can take things forward incrementally and design
things from within what we have to take it forward. As long as
we have knowledge and an understanding of what it should look
like and we can move towards that then you should work with what
you have got because employers just get confused. I tried to do
a mapping exercise last night of the changes and it was absolutely
mind boggling when I looked at how simple it was before and how
it is now.
Q195 Chairman: The record shows a
mind boggling chart!
Frank Lord: We have had the RDAs,
business support, the Skills Funding Agency for adults and skills
post-19, then the National Apprentice Service, the National Employee
Service, the Adult Advancement and Career Service, the link with
FE and providers, then to the LAs for the 14-19 entitlement, the
Young People's Learning Agency for the 16-19 provision, the 14
to 19—
Q196 Chairman: Enough!
Frank Lord: Exactly.
Q197 Dr Turner: Do you think there
is a case for tearing it all up and starting with a clean sheet
of paper, if you could do that?
Frank Lord: What we have was just
beginning to work. There were signs coming through.
Q198 Dr Turner: It was just beginning
to work?
Frank Lord: Yes, I think it was
just beginning to work.
Q199 Dr Turner: But that has now
past.
Frank Lord: Never say never!
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