Examination of Witnesses (Question 320-339)
DR DAVID
COLLINS, DR
MALCOLM MCVICAR,
PROFESSOR DAVID
EASTWOOD AND
PROFESSOR DEIAN
HOPKIN
9 JULY 2008
Q320 Dr Turner: In the best British
traditions we like to make things fairly complex and we have an
increasingly complex pattern of qualifications available which
may or may not be terribly relevant. I would just like to know
what your view is from your different perspectives and whether
you think we have now made the present system of qualifications
for skills and training too complicated?
Dr Collins: I think there are
something like 22,000 qualifications at the moment on offer and
hopefully the UK Commission on Education Employment and Skills
will begin to simplify that framework and make them more relevant.
What is important to our sector is that the credit-based accumulation
system is brought in so that people can acquire qualifications
in smaller chunks over a period of time and that in my view at
the moment seems to be painfully slow in progress. If we do want
to get people involved, they do not always want to sign up for
a very long qualification, they want to get them in in suitable
steps and indeed employers are much more interested in buying
chunks than whole qualifications from my experience
Dr McVicar: The answer to your
question is yes. It is not just the qualifications framework which
is quite complex, it is also the structural arrangements for delivering
the skills; they are over-complex as well.
Q321 Dr Turner: I was coming to that!
Professor Eastwood: Can I make
two comments. The first is that I think there is a challenge to
higher education in how we describe students' achievements and
I think here the work of the Burgess Group is important, looking
for a way of using transcripts or other kind of reporting mechanism
to capture the range of skills and qualities that students have.
That is an interface between HE and employers, and indeed graduates
themselves, that we can and should enhance. How we describe the
qualifications is important. Also we are embarked on a process,
at Level 2, Level 3 and at Level 4 and above of bringing some
clarity to the landscape that you describe and I think we are
all signed up to do that.
Q322 Dr Gibson: I would agree that
the American system of assessment of students is better than the
silly First, 2:1, 2:2, Third and Fail classifications, which I
have always been against and as somebody who marked thousands
of papers, I could not tell the difference between 68% and 70%
but this is the first time I have ever been honest about it!
Professor Eastwood: What I am
doing is putting some flesh on the bones of a comment that Deian
made about the kinds of skills that students acquire. We need
to have ways of making sure that they are clear about the skills
that they have achieved at the end of their programme and that
employers are. It is clear at the moment that employers value
the current system of degree classification so, as Burgess said,
there is no incompatibility between retaining degree classification
and developing a richer methodology for describing student skills.
Dr Gibson: But are teachers in higher
education and further education trained to mark examination scripts?
I never was, ever, you are just thrown into the job and you are
expected to know it; it kind of accumulates around you.
Q323 Chairman: These are revelations
which are coming out; it is a good job nobody is listening! Deian,
do you want to comment very, very briefly?
Professor Hopkin: Avoiding the
temptation to go for 69 in between 68 and 70, which we usually
did, the reality is that we need two things to meet the complexity.
It is very likely that we need to decomplexify—if I can
use another phrase—but more importantly I think we need
to ensure proper progression from different qualifications so
that people are not locked into cul-de-sacs. Secondly, that then
requires very robust advice and guidance. I think that is the
critical requirement in all this. No matter what system you have,
if you cannot give the right advice to the right people to go
on the right course, then you really are sunk. I think we have
to invest far far more in giving advice not simply to young people
but I think particularly to adults.
Q324 Dr Turner: Who is there out
there to give that advice? I certainly do not think it is available
in schools and colleges through careers advisers, unless they
have come on in leaps and bounds.
Dr Collins: I need to correct
you there. Certainly colleges will have careers advisers in them
who are professionally trained careers people. For the adult Careers
Service there are proposals in Leitch that should be more fully
implemented and this is a key part of making sure the skills targets
can be delivered. Nobody has actually said how that is going to
be paid for and one of our suggestions would be maybe the brokerage
system for Train to Gain which costs £40 million a year might
be a useful source of a place to look.
Q325 Dr Turner: We not only have
a complex picture of different qualifications but we are getting
an increasingly complicated structure to manage the whole system.
The Learning and Skills Council is going to be replaced by the
Skills Funding Agency which will not be a single entity; there
are four bits of it. Do you see any advantage in this?
Dr McVicar: I cannot comment on
the transfer from the LSC to the Skills Funding Agency. I think
the whole pattern of the structure of delivering the skills agenda
is over complex. If you sit down and try to map it, it is very
difficult. I regard myself as reasonably intelligent and I find
the whole plethora of bodies which is delivering the skills agenda
almost incomprehensible.
Q326 Dr Turner: Will you honestly
know to whom you are accountable?
Dr McVicar: I am accountable to
David!
Q327 Chairman: You are accountable
to the LSC.
Dr Collins: There is a general
view at the moment that the new arrangements are either a pig's
ear or a dog's breakfast and need to be sorted out with a degree
of operational clarity to make sure that we do not lose the progress
that the Learning and Skills Council has made over the last six
or seven years.
Q328 Dr Turner: Would you say that
we are repeating a particularly British administrative mistake
which we do over and over again with different institutions—and
it is FE and HE's turn for it—of we carry out a great reform,
set up an organisation and ten years later come along and say,
"Let's do it all over again," and we repeat the same
mistakes over and over again?
Dr Collins: I think the interesting
thing is that in the White Paper the Learning and Skills Council
is accredited with considerable progress and being a great success,
so it does seem rather strange to be taking it apart at this time.
Professor Eastwood: In terms of
higher education, we are not seeing that kind of perturbation
at the moment. The Higher Education Funding Council has in effect
has been here since 1919 in one form or another. I think that
kind of stability has real advantage, just as the fact that the
majority of our funding reaches institutions as block grant gives
them real flexibility. I think one of the things that is transparently
valuable in higher education is the block grant and reasonable
stability of funding to institutions so they themselves can be
responsive, because in many cases it is higher education institutions
themselves who are best-placed to make those sorts of judgments.
Q329 Dr Turner: How useful do you
think the RDAs are going to be in this structure? Do you feel
they are equipped to take on a role in skills partnerships?
Dr Collins: They are probably
in a better position than subregional partnerships of local authorities.
At the moment the LSC has gone down a regional structure which
is beginning to work and, arguably, the helicopter view of the
RDAs is more likely to produce sensible policies on skills development
for an area than small sub-groupings of local authorities.
Q330 Dr Turner: Do you think they
have the knowledge base within them?
Dr Collins: I think they will
have to acquire that knowledge base because I think there is going
to be quite a gap in the market when the LSC disappears.
Q331 Dr Turner: So there could be
quite a long period before the new system, for want of a better
description, starts to function well?
Dr Collins: I think it is ambitious
that it is actually going to be functioning fully by 2010.
Dr McVicar: From a higher education
perspective, I think RDAs can be useful allies but universities
do not operate just in a region, they are national and international,
and I certainly would not want RDAs to have any role terms of
funding or planning. I think that would be entirely inappropriate.
I would like to echo David's point, the funding regime that operates
through HEFCE is entirely appropriate for the future of higher
education and, arguably, would be appropriate for FE as well,
if I may say so.
Q332 Chairman: So you would have
a single funding?
Dr McVicar: I certainly would.
Q333 Dr Turner: How do you relate
to the sector skills councils because they almost cut across the
new structure? Do you think there are too many representative
bodies for employers?
Professor Hopkin: Can I first
of all declare an interest as a member of the Sector and Skills
Council Skills for Health but also the LSC as well by the way,
and that is why I was very quiet! I think the sector skills councils
have built up a very strong and developing partnership, not only
individual ones but collectively with universities, through partnership
with Universities UK. We recognise the need to work with consortia,
particularly where in some cases they represent very important
areas like e-skills, creative and media, where we need to understand
what the industry is looking to in the future, and so for us the
sector and skills councils in recent years, particularly in the
last couple of years, have been an asset in our forward thinking.
That said, like my colleagues, we are very concerned that we do
not get destabilisation of the system when different organisations
are created so we have to gear ourselves up always to meet the
turbulence of organisational change.
Q334 Dr Turner: Is part of that turbulence
and churning that can occur related to the funding structures?
Professor Hopkin: We are very
content with the way in which the funding structure works for
us.
Q335 Dr Turner: Universities maybe
but you are not the only part of the structure.
Professor Hopkin: As I said earlier,
I think we have learned to develop economies which do not depend
on one stream or another. We have to be much more responsive.
That is why we work with regional, local and national government
inter alia.
Chairman: I am going to move on, Des,
because I am very tight on time. Tim?
Mr Boswell: I think the members who are
giving us helpful evidence will be aware that I have a certain
history in both FE and HE, and we seem to be parading our radical
criteria and qualifications at the moment.
Ian Stewart: A Marxist Conservative!
Q336 Mr Boswell: I did not go that
far but do not press me! As you look across this—and we
have already had some helpful input from David—how are the
structures within this room, as it were, FE and HE, going to have
a change to reach the Leitch agenda? There could be a tendency
to stuff it all off onto UKCES or somebody else and say they have
to sort it out, but bilaterally and, as it were, representationally
how are we going to get these two major interests to work more
closely together?
Dr Collins: The college sector
is working very closely with many universities at the moment on
foundation degrees and franchise work, et cetera, so certainly
over the last five or six years there has been a coming together
of work at Level 4 in most areas.
Dr McVicar: We certainly have
a very large partnership network with a range of further education
colleges and the university. That partnership based on collaboration
works well. What would not work well is if there was an encouragement
to competition between FE and HE, I think that would be negative
and dysfunctional.
Q337 Mr Boswell: When you say collaboration
do you mean self-generated collaboration rather than imposed planning?
Dr McVicar: It is certainly self-generated.
It works on the business of the two networks of institutions working
together; that is not planned or imposed, it is self-generated.
Professor Eastwood: We are currently
taking forward a new approach to HE/FE collaboration which is
to invite FE colleges that deliver higher education to have strategic
statements which capture the kinds of collaborations that they
have and the kinds of progression arrangements that they have
developed.
Q338 Mr Boswell: When you say available,
will there be some kind of inducement or mechanism?
Professor Eastwood: We will fund
HE in FE Colleges where they have those strategic statements.
The other thing which is quite interesting on the way in which
collaboration develops is we have funded an employer engagement
initiative at Harper Adams University College which has some 30
partners (other HEIs and a large number of FE partners) and I
think that demonstrates the way in which the divisions between
higher and further education, which have been unhelpful in the
past, have started to blur.
Professor Hopkin: There is a very
quick point on partnership which we may be in danger of missing.
Leitch is about the UK, the Commission is about the UK; the cross-border
issue is also critically important, how you create partnerships.
Companies work cross-border in the devolved administrations and
we have systems which sometimes militate against that. I think
we have to find ways where we encourage cross-border partnerships
too because that is in the interests of people who are migrating,
are moving around and collecting qualifications across the piece.
I do not think we have done enough to understand the dynamics
of that.
Q339 Mr Boswell: Just really picking
up David's point: one funding agency in the future? What is the
point of more than one, bearing in mind also that of course there
is a separate stream now for pre-19 funding which is going to
be assigned? Is there a tidy way of dealing with this or is there
some justification for plurality?
Dr Collins: What we would prefer
in FE, in the same way as HE has, is the ability locally to interpret
the needs of the area and to be able to respond to them without
being put under artificial constraints. We do feel at the moment
constrained by some of the particular funding streams such as
Train to Gain for not being able to move into other areas where
there is demand. We are not forgetting that skills are very important
to the economy and upskilling the nation, but they are also important
to social cohesion and mobility and equality of opportunities,
and some of those elements have been a little bit lost in the
discussion about skills and moving the employer needs forward.
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