Examination of Witnesses (Questions 361-379)
MR TOM
WILSON, MR
WES STREETING,
MS ANNE
MADDEN AND
MR ALAN
TUCKETT
9 JULY 2008
Q361 Chairman: Could I welcome our second
panel before us this morning and apologise that we are running
somewhat over time. Tom Wilson, the Head of the TUC's Organisation
and Services Department at the TUC (I am pretty sure you were
very happy to hear the last comments); Wes Streeting, the President
of the NUS, welcome to you; Anne Madden from the Equality and
Human Rights Commission; and last, but by no means least, an old
friend of various committees, Alan Tuckett, the Director of NIACE.
I wonder if I could start with you, Alan, and ask do you feel
that the Leitch targets are actually meaningful for individuals,
particularly older workers returning, women workers returning,
perhaps ethnic minorities with particular cultural issues to be
addressed? Are the Leitch targets useful?
Mr Tuckett: I think the Leitch
analysis was useful. I think the problem with the targets is that
they bleach down into a very narrow set of measures ways of reaching
goals which everybody could sign up to, so that for people who
are adults who study part time, if they have the confidence to
join in in the first place, what a full-fat Level 2 does is to
force you to commit yourself for a long time. It does not fit
in with the way you fit learning around your family. For the people
you illustrated, Chairman, the issues are often about finding
the space to fit learning into your life. That is why unitisation
is really important and critical and once that is there, but if
those targets are to be addressed seriously it is important that
we do it episodically a little bit at a time and not in the "big
bang" numbers that we seem to be forcing ourselves to do
at the moment.
Q362 Chairman: Anne, the same question
to you: are they meaningful to the individual, because this session
is about individual workers and students rather than the other
organisations?
Anne Madden: I think it is very
important to say that the aspirations, the targets, are tremendous
and have the potential to do a great deal for individuals, but
the problem rests with the fact that basically they are large
volumes of numbers and they are not about people. I think what
we would have liked to have seen were some indicators below the
target which was about disaggregating them down for different
groups, and that just does not exist, it is not there. All the
points Alan makes about how people like to learn actually are
lost in the way that the implementation arrangements are at the
moment. They are very single focused basically. Yes, I think there
are some issues there potentially, yes, but actually at the moment
potentially, no.
Q363 Chairman: Tom, who do you think
is left out here? Who is left out of this target-led agenda? Everyone
seems to be nodding to those comments.
Tom Wilson: I think there are
two main groups who are left out really. The first group is the
millions of people who are not in the labour market at all and
if the whole system is employer-led, who is speaking up for them.
The other group is the 40% or so of employees who work for employers
who frankly do not do very much training at all. In a sense the
problem with the Leitch agenda, which we broadly supported, was
that it assumed that all employers were basically benign and keen
on training and, frankly, our experience is very much that is
not the case. We do not really think that Leitch paid anything
like enough attention to the people who are either not in the
labour market at all or are churning around, in and out. In some
ways, just to echo what Anne was saying, if there had been a bit
more analysis and discussion of the equalities and diversity dimension
of the labour market and the real difficulties that many, many
disadvantaged groups have—women, Bangladeshis, single-parents,
the unskilled, the older workers over 50—whether they are
employed or not, many of those simply do not get the chance to
have any experience of training at all.
Q364 Chairman: Tom, obviously your
organisation is involved with students throughout, not just simply
higher education students. We heard earlier from the Vice Chancellors
representing the higher education sector that there was evidence
that literally millions of people wanted to have the skills. Where
is the evidence from the NUS's point of view that there are millions
of potential students knocking on the doors of universities and
colleges and other training providers? Do you have any?
Wes Streeting: I am not quite
sure it is the right emphasis to say that there are literally
people knocking on the door, if anything we are desperately trying
to get out there and explain why this agenda is so important,
why skills for life is becoming so critical and if that is not
the case why on earth are we spending so much money on publicising
the fact that the skills agenda is so important. Clearly there
are people out there who have a need and a potential to succeed
if they gain those skills, but I think the emphasis at the moment
is still so much on explaining the pathways that are available
and explaining the benefits. Certainly for students who are already
in education we are seeing now more and more emphasis on employability
and certainly students in higher education are becoming a lot
more savvy about employability. I was quite taken aback when the
Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills undertook their
citizens' juries at the extent to which employability was one
of the key issues that came out in that. We are aware that students
are keen to get jobs when they graduate, of course they are, but
the extent to which this is now at the forefront of students'
minds and they are constantly thinking throughout their course
about how they get extra skills to beef up their CVs is a really
interesting development.
Q365 Chairman: Can I just say, the
points that Alan, Anne and Tom made about groups who are not touched
by the Leitch agenda, are the NUS conscious of that? One of the
great failures over the last ten years, perhaps, of higher education
has been—and this is not a party political point, I think
all of us are struggling—how do you get these under-represented
groups to engage with what is on offer? Does Leitch solve those
problems?
Wes Streeting: The benefit of
Leitch is that once again it has reinforced the importance and
principles which lie behind getting more people active in education
and receiving the skills and training they need to succeed in
a workplace, and again underlining not just the social case for
expansion of higher education and widening parts of post-16 education
more broadly, but the economic case for that too. I think there
are problems in the delivery, the emphasis on delivery through
employers and employers as the gatekeeper, I certainly agree with
Tom is a significant issue. For us, I think we have an increasing
challenge as a result of expansion about how, as the National
Union but also students union locally, we represent the interests
of a very diverse group of learners. Whilst there have been significant
steps forward, and there are some excellent models of good practice
amongst our membership, we still have some way to go in that.
Certainly for us reaching out and engaging part-time students,
mature students and work-based learners is incredibly difficult.
It is something we are very actively looking at, but at the moment
there are no magic solutions, I think, for NUS and students unions
in the medium term, it remains a really significant strategic
challenge if we are going to be the legitimate and representative
voice of all students in the UK.
Q366 Chairman: There is obviously
a lot of support for your comments across the whole of the panel,
but I am going to come back to you, Alan. The Leitch agenda is
very much focused about upskilling. NIACE is an organisation that
is very, very concerned with lifelong learning, making sure that
is embedded into the schools agenda. Is it possible to have those
two separate targets brought together and, if Leitch is not the
answer, what is the answer?
Alan Tuckett: If you do not have
a participation target as well as qualifications targets, you
do not notice who is paying the price. What we have got currently
is a small number of people increasingly getting qualifications
through the Train to Gain programme but our survey this year shows
a dramatic drop for all the core groups that government is after.
Never mind the marginalised groups who you probably started with
Full-time employees, 7% fewer of them saying they have been involved
with learning over the last three years since two years ago; part-time
workers the same; C2s, a key group for government thinking, 8%
down; DEs have not shifted in ten years; 25 to 34 year olds 7%
down. Now if you were to describe a demographic, and we are attempting
to engage with the principle that learning is what matters, you
would be worried to see such a dramatic drop. At the heart of
that is a belief government seems to have that short courses are
of no intrinsic value in themselves. To go back to the question
you were asking Wes, if you do not motivate people, if you do
not give them the chance to put their toe in the water and do
something that they feel some agency over, they do not sign up
with a passion to the long full-fat qualification. I think the
difficulty is not the aspiration, it is the view that qualifications
are the only way to get there when they really work for labour
market entrants, they really work for young people but they do
not work like that for most adults in the economy in the same
way at all, and we have a one-size-fits-all big boot to attempt
to make it work and those people are paying the price.
Q367 Chairman: Anne, you were nodding
there, do you want to briefly say something?
Anne Madden: I agree with that.
I think one of the issues for Leitch was about trying to increase
productivity through putting more skills into the labour market,
but in order to do that we need to move more people through the
different levels. What we are not doing, what is not there, is
any real focus on progression. There is a lot of progression in
principle, but in practice in terms of implementation there is
no real methodology built in to achieve that. It would have been
great to have had some progression targets. It would have taken
cleverer civil servants than me to create them, I am sure, but,
nevertheless, I think that is what this whole agenda is about,
it is about taking people from there and moving them up there.
That is how we are going to get the high level skills that the
economy needs and that is what individuals need. If I can just
say, what we do not have in the entitlements is any focus on renewable
skills or renewing skills so, in fact, people could achieve a
level 2 and sit with a level 2 forever if you are of a certain
age because there is no entitlement to be retrained in something
which is economically viable and which is going to get you a good
job. I think there are a lot of barriers in there which we need
to address if we are going to make the system work.
Q368 Chairman: Tom, I just want to
return to this point, and then I will bring in my colleague, Gordon
Marsden. This issue of reskilling has come out time and time again
during this inquiry. How do you, as the TUC, and how do the unions
actually approach this with employers to say what actually matters
is people in jobs which are going nowhere gaining the skills to
move on to go somewhere else? There is no incentive for employers
to engage with that agenda, is there, or do you think there is?
How could it be?
Tom Wilson: I think Train to Gain
is trying to create those sorts of incentives and where it works
well and a Train to Gain broker can identify the skill set of
the workforce is no longer relevant and they need to upskill and
retrain and so on, and the broker can help the employer to see
that, then where it works well employers do work with brokers
and drawdown Train to Gain funding and work in that way. I think
as the previous witnesses were saying that is very patchy. What
is interesting about Train to Gain is that in some regions it
is working quite well, in others much less well, from which you
would deduce it is the delivery of it rather than the original
concept which is the problem. I think that is what we find in
some ways because where it has been loosened to be able to work
more flexibly with what employers need so that, for example, this
notion that if you originally had a level 2, that is it, you are
never entitled to get one again, where they can begin to chip
away at that a bit and meet people's needs a bit more openly and
flexibly is far better. The other thing I would say is that part
of the problem that Alan rightly identifies about the over-emphasis
on qualifications is because the current qualification system
is too cumbersome, too big, it needs to be broken down, modularised
in the way that has been discussed and were that to happen—and
we would very much like to see that speeded up—that could
help enormously. What we find with our union members is that they
do value qualifications enormously, but the problem is this notion
of a full-fat level 2 or nothing. There is an awful lot that needs
to be done to make it work well. We would take issue with the
notion that Train to Gain is inherently flawed, it is more to
do with the way it has been delivered and some of that is improving.
Q369 Mr Marsden: Anne Madden, one
of the issues you always come across in these sorts of inquiries
is the effects of unintended consequences. When the Government
issued its Raising Expectations paper at the beginning
of the year there was a lot of discussion around it, but I think
there is some concern that one of the unintended consequences
of it may be to make the situation for adult learners in particular
worse. I just want to bounce off you—given your position
at EHRC—a quote from the submission from NIACE to the Government
on this. They said that: " ... NIACE was both surprised and
shocked that Raising Expectations did not appear to assess
the impact of change upon the Government's agendas for fairness
and equality". Is that a concern that you share?
Anne Madden: It is absolutely,
yes. There was an assessment of the original skills strategy,
an equality impact assessment, looking at the impact on a whole
range of groups in the community. We would have expected the Raising
Expectations consultation similarly to have done that exercise.
I think I am right in saying we searched high and low but we could
not find that assessment. I do not know if any of the other witnesses
were able to do that. I think it goes back to my original point
that that absolutely should have happened because, you are right,
there are unintended consequences. The consequences are that large
numbers of people, and in fact those who are most in need often
of acquiring the sorts of skills that this agenda is about, are
left out of the arrangements for delivering them. Yes, I think
you are absolutely right.
Q370 Mr Marsden: Okay. Nevertheless,
it is the case that the Government's strategy at the moment is
very much about investing large sums in specific skill trajectories.
The Government would argue as well that they in any case, and
of course they have an informal learning consultation out, are
doing quite a lot on learning for its own sake. I wonder if I
could come to you, Alan, because you have said again that some
of the informal learning things are not being captured in the
way that those programmes are being done. We talk a lot about
enabling skills, soft skills, the Government talks a lot
about enabling skills and soft skills. Is there not a way in which
their imperative to follow the Leitch agenda and to get people
with qualifications and enabling skills and your agenda, which
is to get people back on to the ladder of learning through the
short confidence building informal thing, can be matched?
Alan Tuckett: I thought that used
to be called other further education. Huge amounts of qualifications
of the kind that Tom was talking about, unitised programmes, often
accredited by the open college network, demonstrated that people
were picking up soft skills, engagement with other people, picking
a portfolio that fitted their own lives en route to mapping that
against what employers would want in terms of career chances for
them. That is the provision that has paid the price from the narrowing
to the targets. You will see this most dramatically, the problem
about the big full fat qualifications and their difficulty of
fit for people acquiring skills, when you look in the Skills for
Life area which is a terrifically successful programme for Government.
It has helped millions of people improve reading, writing and
language skills, however the target in tightening budgets with
a tougher CSR round, privilege people with the shortest journeys
to qualification who can progress quickly and yet we know poverty
is most powerful at entry level 2 and below and gets replicated
inter-generationally. That is really where the difficulty is,
it is the tweaks that allow us to learn as we go along. Tom is
right, Train to Gain has—
Q371 Mr Marsden: Can I briefly bring
Tom in on that point. We are talking very structurally here about
how you can chase them. Union Learning Reps, great success, the
Government is listening to you and wants to expand the role. Is
there a way in which you could, via the Union Learning Reps system,
intervene more actively to get that sort of unitisation away from
the full-fat system which would enable both the Government to
meet its targets and you to meet your aspirations?
Tom Wilson: Absolutely. What we
would very much like to do is work towards a system where Union
Learning Reps were working very closely and actively with the
brokers so that together they could go to the employer and say,
"Look, maybe if you were to flex the Train to Gain funding
rules in these sorts of ways, for example to drawdown additional
funding where people had had a level 2 but some time ago, where
there was a need for upskilling that was clearly identified in
that workplace, where, for example, within particular Sector Skills
Council footprints there might be agreed criteria about the way
in which Train to Gain could be flexed within that particular
footprint", there are all sorts of ways in which, as Alan
says, you could then begin to build up a much more flexible way
of using Train to Gain. Many employers say this too, they
say what they find is that Train to Gain is far too rigid and
is not flexing in the way it was originally intended to do. I
think if you couple that with a much more flexible approach to
qualifications, and I do repeat our members do want qualifications
but, exactly, as Alan says, of those kind of bite-sized chunks
that you can put together and employers are not necessarily opposed
to that, what they are concerned about is getting the skills they
need and if they can be accredited, fine. The problem from an
employer's point of view is that often it is only the whole thing
or nothing.
Q372 Mr Marsden: Finally, on that
point, because I think you were here for the previous session
and you heard what the FE/HE representatives were saying. Do you
think FE and HE are doing enough yet to meet the bite-sized vision
that is the future that you are putting forward?
Tom Wilson: In a word, no.
Q373 Ian Stewart: A general point:
1972 UNESCO 4 Report Learning To Be said that lifelong
learning should be the core of education. Have we achieved that?
Does Leitch help or are we going backwards?
Alan Tuckett: We have gone on
an extraordinary journey in the last ten years. We looked like
we really had the aspiration to do both things, the economy and
the richer citizenship development side of things. We then got
panicked, as we periodically do, by industrial competitiveness
internationally and narrowed it to a bleak utilitarianism which
has undone pretty much all the good we did in the first years,
I am afraid. That would be my summary of how we are doing towards
the wider agenda. The pity of that is that hurts industry as well
as the other agenda. The separation of learning for social cohesion
and personal enrichment and learning for work is unhelpful for
they interplay with one another. If you have got the confidence
to learn in one place it leaks across to another area and that
is something we seem to have lost: the confidence to trust people
to get it right. You expect Government to set targets but they
should be modest ones, leave people the chance to do what you
were saying, a little bit around the edges so they can make it
fit for purpose.
Q374 Mr Marsden: I want to move on
to ask some questions around skills accounts and where they are
taking us. We all know the previous history of a good idea, hell
among thorns or thieves or however you want to describe it. This
is ILA accounts mark 2 in some ways, is it not, but we still have
very little flesh on the bones as to how they are going to operate,
in my view. Tom Wilson, is that a fair view and, if it is, have
you got any proposals to put any flesh on them?
Tom Wilson: I think there is a
lot of discussion going on but I think you are dead right, I do
not think people have yet got to a clear concept of what a new
skills account might look like. For us, the key features would
be, firstly, that the range of kinds of qualifications or training
or opportunities that they could pay for would be as wide as possible,
and not, as Alan was saying, some rather narrow utilitarian approach
that was just very tightly focused. Secondly, I think they were
collectivisable and there is this interesting concept, the collective
learning funds, which we pushed for and secured inclusion of in
the previous FE White Paper where there are some pilots being
explored now in the East Midlands and the North West. The idea
is there that workers could pool their learning accounts working
with Train to Gain, perhaps, with employer funding too, create
a collective pot and in that way get far more than the sum of
its parts because training, generally, most employers would, I
think, prefer to do in a systematic way with a group of workers
rather than just one-by-one.
Q375 Mr Marsden: Wes Streeting, forgive
me for saying so, I have sat on other education select committees
and it has become an annual ritual when the NUS turn up before
select committees to say that they are moving on, if I can put
it that way, to look at the issues in respect of adult learners
and getting involved with more older students and all the rest
of it. On this particular area of skills accounts, what thoughts
have the NUS got?
Wes Streeting: I think certainly
funding is an important part of the dimension, but for us it is
also about empowering individuals to make informed choices in
a system now that is increasingly diverse and offering a very
diverse range of qualifications. My concern is Dearing said that
it is all very well having a whole series of pathways but you
need signposts to guide people on the way—
Q376 Mr Marsden: That is all very
general. You sat on the Burgess Inquiry, have you got any specific
thoughts?
Wes Streeting: Certainly for information,
advice and guidance in terms of adult learners I think there is
a massive gap in provision and lots of emphasis on giving information,
advice and guidance to young people. Even at the moment there
are very welcome developments coming forward from Government and
ministers and both departments talking about a renewed push on
information, advice and guidance, particularly in light of the
14 to 19 agenda. Again, this is taking place exclusively around
young people's interests and we are not talking enough about adult
learners too. I think in terms of making a real difference to
people and getting people knocking at the door, first of all you
need the signpost to point them in the right direction.
Q377 Mr Marsden: Alan, I heard last
night at another occasion Baroness Sharpe, who of course sits
for the Lib Dems in the Lords, talking very eloquently about how
it really would not be very problematical for the Government to
push the envelope of funding and support for training for post-25s.
Of course, Government is responding in terms of IAG with the Adult
Advancement and Careers Service. What is your view at the moment
as to how far that is likely to do the sorts of jobs that you
have been describing? Perhaps you would like to say a bit more
about the National Learning Outreach Service?
Alan Tuckett: It is very hard,
as with the skills accounts, to see quite where the developments
of the Adult Advancement and Careers Service are really fleshing
at the moment. Learn Direct's telephone line and on-line advice
service over the last ten years has shown terrific development.
How do you integrate that locally with labour market information,
with the kinds of choices and knowledge about the complexity of
the system you have been hearing before? You will not get that
out of aggregating JobCentre Plus advisers and the bits of the
Careers Service relating to adults which surround that service,
you will not quite get the coherent picture that Tom was pointing
to. Whereas I think Union Learning Reps, learning champions where
we have seen them, point towards something that is, at least at
the moment, missing from the discussion, which is the need for
people who have been turned off education and training to have
people who go out and negotiate the possibilities with them. So
that as well as the more passive, reflective advice and guidance
service being available to people I think you have to go proactively,
and that is what I see the great strength of the Union Learning
movement.
Q378 Mr Marsden: Finally, can I come
to you, Anne, because in response to my earlier question you said
that the Commission had been concerned about the lack of that
equality check, if you like. On the principle of once bitten twice
shy, what are you going to be able to do practically to have your
voice heard on those issues when it comes to the roll-out of the
skills accounts and it comes to the Adult Advancement and Careers
Service?
Anne Madden: We are already talking
to officials about how those initiatives are shaping up. We do
have some ideas about Outreach, particularly with the Careers
Advancement Service.
Q379 Mr Marsden: Ministers?
Anne Madden: Of course we should
be talking to ministers and I hope we will be. We are a new organisation
and we are putting our programmes in place at the moment. What
I would say is this is a very important agenda for the Equality
and Human Rights Commission. There is the whole issue about enabling
people to acquire skills and progress and also to use them, because
what we have not talked about here is underuse of skills in the
economy, and that is massive too, particularly for women who have
been out and for older learners. There are some very real issues.
What we do not want to be is an organisation which just raises
the problems and points to the fact that there are not equality
impact assessments but which also helps to develop some of the
solutions.
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