Examination of Witnesses (Questions 220-239)
CHRIS HUMPHRIES,
TERESA SAYERS,
TOM BEWICK
AND FRANK
LORD
25 JUNE 2008
Q220 Dr Iddon: In your view, are
they prepared to do that? Will it work?
Frank Lord: I think that, for
that, you have to engage them in the whole field of learning and,
for me, that comes back to engaging individual adults through
employer development centres, as I gave an example earlier, through
to making it easier for employers not to be confused, as there
is confusion now between Skills Pledge, Investors in People and
between Train to Gain; these are all confusing things for employers.
Chairman: You have not answered the question.
Q221 Dr Iddon: Are they prepared
to put real money in to get their employees trained? That is the
basic question, is it not?
Frank Lord: I think that is the
real, big question.
Q222 Chairman: What is the answer?
Frank Lord: I think the question
is more interesting than the answer. I do not know what the answer
is to that, but I would be quite happy to—
Q223 Chairman: They are not going
to?
Frank Lord: Well, I do not know.
I am quite happy to reflect on that and put a note to you on that.
Q224 Dr Iddon: If they do not, Level
3 and Level 4 provision will not expand, as the Government is
expecting, will it?
Frank Lord: No.
Q225 Dr Iddon: The Skills Pledge,
McDonalds and a few well-known employers have signed up to it,
but it has not been very successful so far, has it?
Frank Lord: No, it has not.
Q226 Dr Iddon: What do we have to
do to get more employers to sign up to the Skills Pledge?
Frank Lord: Well, I think there
needs to be some clarity around what is behind the Skills Pledge
for employers and to actually understand that we have Investors
in People as well as the Skills Pledge and we have to understand
what we are trying to achieve with the Skills Pledge. If it is
to engage employers to develop a plan to invest in the training
of their people, then just getting them to sign up to a pledge
is not necessarily going to make it happen. It is what happens
after that, and what is important is how this links in with business
advisers in the local business support services, and how they
engage employers in that Skills Pledge is going to be very, very
important and critical, but it is confusing at the moment for
employers with Skills Pledge, with Investors in People and Train
to Gain; they all seem to merge together.
Q227 Dr Iddon: The Government is
going to expect a legal right for employees to have time off to
go and get some training. Is that going to have a significant
impact on the expansion of training, do you think, or are employers
going to react against that?
Frank Lord: I think there will
be a reaction to that from employers because what employers want
in terms of time off, businesses will be looking for some kind
of compensation for that or some kind of incentive. If you want
to create this kind of change, unless you are going to legislate
for it and make training compulsory, which might be the case in
terms of the Leitch targets and achieving them, I think that debate
will go on, and at what point you might need to enforce something,
I am not sure.
Q228 Dr Iddon: Let me ask other members
of the panel. Tom?
Tom Bewick: I have not obviously
seen the detail of the legislation, but, if it is anything like
the legislation already in place, for example, for employees to
request flexible working and family-friendly working, then of
course I think this is a really positive move, and actually good
employers, certainly the employers that I work with, do this already.
What I would just say about any sort of system that gives, in
a sense, the employee the right to request, the employee himself
has still got to be motivated enough to want to demand the training,
so I think there is still that question about how do we, in the
workforce development and lifelong learning system in this country,
sufficiently motivate demand at the level of the workplace to
take up training. In my own organisation, and obviously, being
a sector skills council, we want to lead by example, we allow
all employees to take up to five learning days a year in addition
to any annual leave entitlement. I think it is very, very revealing,
those employees that take up that entitlement within my particular
organisation and those that do not, so I do not think the right
to request in itself is really the whole answer to generating
more demand at the workplace level.
Q229 Chairman: Teresa, do you have
a comment on that?
Teresa Sayers: I would simply
add that financial services is a sector that does do a tremendous
amount of training. The challenge that we have here is to encourage
employers to do things wider than simply meeting regulatory requirements,
that it is about the development of other skills. I completely
agree with Tom in that the demand also has to come from the individuals
and, if it is an individual that works in an environment where
they have to already undertake a lot of training simply to meet
a regulatory requirement, there is a tendency to not want to go
forward and do any more.
Frank Lord: Just going back to
that question, in the East Midlands 99% of employers are small
businesses employing less than 50 people and, of those, 95% are
micro-businesses employing less than 10, so I think we have to
take the points that are being made within that context, and it
is important to bring the learning into the workplace for those
businesses to enable that to happen.
Q230 Dr Iddon: I think we have got
that message quite clearly from you, Frank, this morning.
Chris Humphries: If I may, I completely
agree with Frank about the need to capture SMEs and I completely
agree about the idea of employee development centres in business
parks and industrial centres where they cluster, but, remember,
it is still true that 73% of the UK workforce works in firms,
34,000 firms, with more than 50 employees. If we have to actually
have strategies that reach the bulk of the workforce who are in
our larger firms, the 50-plus, and strategies to develop to reach
the other 28%, the other quarter of the workforce that are in
SMEs, that probably means doing these things differently. It probably
means treating the larger and the smaller firms in different ways,
it certainly means reaching the SMEs through clusters, but it
does also mean recognising that 34,000 firms employ almost three-quarters
of the UK workforce, and we also, therefore, have to have strategies
that work for the big national employers and the big companies
who span the whole of the UK.
Q231 Dr Iddon: We have heard that
the SSCs are not well-resourced and yet, Tom and Teresa, you are
expected now to play a new role in qualifications and accreditation
of the qualifications. If you have not already got the resources
to do what you are already doing, are you going to be able to
do that as well?
Teresa Sayers: It certainly will
be a challenge. It is about, firstly, understanding what is going
to be required of us in the new world, and it will be a case of
prioritisation about where we put our resources to first meet
those requirements of the SSC licence undoubtedly.
Q232 Dr Iddon: Tom, in your sector,
do you think you can cope with this new role?
Tom Bewick: In short, no, in terms
of the current envelope of resource. The core resource, on average,
to a sector skills council is between £1.5 to just over £2
million a year. We are expected to operate across the nations
and regions of the United Kingdom, we are expected obviously to
collect world-class labour market intelligence, and we are expected
of course to raise employer ambition and ensure that there is
real impact on the ground in terms of the skills and workforce
development profile. Therefore, the short answer, just doing the
sums, is no, but what I would say, and this, in a sense, is where
the sectoral response will differ and where it will come in, is
that in my sector, for example, we are looking at qualifications
reform from the point of view of informing the consumer who goes
on, for example, one of these 180,000 courses predominantly in
FE and HE with market intelligence about the employment rates
and the pay rates and whether or not there is demand for those
particular courses and qualifications, so we are not going down
this sort of Ofsted-style route of saying that it is about having
the resource to send people into colleges with clipboards and
to check whether or not a qualification is fit for purpose. However,
having said that, there are other sectors where a licence to practise
operates where actually that sort of approach is needed, so I
think we need to look at the resource quite intelligently.
Q233 Dr Iddon: My final question
concerns the interface between FE and HE. It is beginning to get
blurred with foundation degrees at one end, and I think we have
heard throughout this inquiry that there is a difficulty there
with that interface. Have you anything to add to what we have
heard previously about those difficulties? Do you see that there
are difficulties or not?
Tom Bewick: Well, difficulties
or challenges, I think we just need to be realistic that the higher
education system in this country historically has been difficult
to engage with because of the special status, the autonomous status
that higher education institutions have in terms of their own
awarding powers, et cetera. It is very interesting that the UK
Commission's remit of course, and this is to be welcomed, covers
higher education, but I do think it is going to be an uphill challenge
to persuade, not all elements of higher education, but certain
elements of higher education to really take up this challenge.
You are seeing it around the diplomas and recognition of the new
diplomas in England and you are certainly seeing it around recognition
of apprenticeships as a passport and a progression route on to
university degrees.
Teresa Sayers: I would certainly
add that employers in our sector have already voiced their concerns
over the responsiveness of the higher education system through
the Chancellor's high-level group that was convened to look at
competitiveness in the financial services, so we have developed
a sub-group working both with employers and universities, so there
is now increasingly a willingness to sit round the same table,
to understand the language that both sides are talking and to
bring about some real results and improvements in the system.
Q234 Dr Iddon: Are the universities
being responsive enough in this Skills Agenda?
Chris Humphries: No, I do not
think they are. I think they have only just very reluctantly and
very recently understood the need to sort of have a better focus
on this. I think the other area we have to look at is the poor
levels of progression that operate between FE and HE. If you look
at Canada and America, the progression between community colleges
and universities is part of the system designed in and we have
not got that yet.
Q235 Dr Iddon: Are you in favour
of one funding council, Chris?
Chris Humphries: I think there
is an argument for exploring tertiary education in concept and
in operation.
Chairman: Thank you, Sir Humphrey!
Q236 Mr Cawsey: I want to ask a bit
about government agencies and programmes. We have spoken a lot
already about how many there have been and how they have changed
over the years, and, Frank, you mentioned the fact that you thought
there were signs that the system was just beginning to work in
and we are going to change it all again. How do you think employers
feel about the abolition of the LSC and its replacement by the
Skills Funding Council? Do you think they welcome that or do you
think that they think it is a backward step, or do you think they
are just trying to run their businesses and there is just general
apathy to what happens at that sort of level?
Frank Lord: Apathy and it hacks
them off, to be honest, the changes, because they get involved,
as I say, with the employment and skills boards, they just get
involved with them and things are moving forward, they get involved
with education and business links and the whole scenery then begins
to change and there is uncertainty about the future, and that
really hacks employers off, so it does not engage them.
Q237 Mr Cawsey: Is that the general
view from the employers that you talk to?
Chris Humphries: Very much so.
Even many of my commissioners have been meeting with ministers,
saying, "You have just made far more complex a system that
you have asked the Commission to try and simplify, and that is
going to pose real challenges".
Q238 Mr Cawsey: I was going to go
on to ask how is it going to affect your organisations, but you
would say that it is going to make it more complex?
Chris Humphries: This is now one
of the biggest discussions going on around the Commission table,
how we offer proposals on simplification in a system which has
suddenly got more complex.
Q239 Mr Cawsey: And how is it going
to affect your organisation, Teresa?
Teresa Sayers: I would agree.
I tend to think that employers, on the whole, simply do not care
about what the landscape looks like and all they simply want is
that it is going to work for them and be responsive and deliver
what is needed, so that is my comment with regards to that; I
think it has become overly complex.
Tom Bewick: I must be clear, that
many of the same people end up, because of employment, being transferred
to these new organisations, so there is not always as much of
a hiatus as people make out, but I think what does happen, and
I see this now with all the changes and machinery of government
changes going on, is that the talk around town is not anymore
about the agenda, about skills and about lifelong learning, about
life chances and opportunity, the talk around town is one of,
"Well, what job have you got?" or "Where are you
going to be in the structure?" and that is what keeps on
happening at the moment. Every few years, as we move around the
deckchairs, we change the plaque on the wall and the debate becomes
internalised about the system rather than about actually the skills
agenda.
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