WEDNESDAY 15 NOVEMBER 2000

VICE-ADMIRAL JONATHON BAND and MR D FISHER

  400. On the Learning Forces Initiative which was introduced as part of the Strategic Defence Review it does give, for example, £175 a year for expenses on educational self-development which people can reclaim. Is that enough to get that going? How is that working? It seems quite a low figure to me.
  (Mr Fisher) It is quite a low figure but it is much more than we were offering before. It is also pretty comparable with what is being offered by the private sector for that kind of purpose. The Government has also announced that it is introducing the enhanced learning credit scheme, which will make available £2,000 per annum for three years and that will be a significant enhancement of the scheme. If you look at the takeup, it has been quite encouraging. In the Royal Navy, after the introduction of the learning credit scheme as compared with the previous scheme, there has been a 34% increase in takeup, so that 2,650 people are now making use of it. In the Army, where we are starting from a very low base, there has been a 368% increase and there are now 2,089 people taking part in the scheme. The RAF, which was always the biggest user of these schemes, has a very large figure of 7,619 people engaged in the scheme, which is 14% of the Royal Air Force. I would say that is quite an impressive takeup rate.
  (Vice-Admiral Band) Particularly if you align it to the fact that that is for something that individual wants to do which can be practically anything. If you think increasingly our training is giving material which is accredited in civilian application, it is a twin pronged attack which is to show them that the training they are getting for their operational business needs gives them development and gives them something they can show for it. That has to be aligned to the fact that we have then got this specific scheme and the enhanced one for something that they particularly want to do, quite aside. This is why you will never get 100% takeup because some people are entirely happy with the training and education they are getting in the services for their operational role; it is what they want.

  401. It fulfils it.
  (Vice-Admiral Band) Yes.

  402. Nevertheless, it does seem quite a low figure for those who do look for an outside course to supplement it. I appreciate those takeup figures and they are very welcome but it still seems quite a low figure to me bearing in mind the cost of a lot of these courses which are very beneficial and complement the training they are doing in the armed forces. It strikes me that those who take the initiative and go outside will still be quite a lot out of pocket. Are you taking soundings as to whether this figure is too low so that can get reflected into Government and perhaps get a change?
  (Mr Fisher) We are certainly consulting very widely. What I would say is that the learning credit scheme is a universal scheme but there are lots of other opportunities for people to get higher education paid for if they can make a business case that they need an MBA or a degree in defence studies. There are plenty of opportunities to have those courses fully paid for. The learning credit scheme is something available for everybody but if you can show that there is a good reason why you need a particular qualification, then by and large the department is pretty good at paying for that.
  (Vice-Admiral Band) I am sure that we shall keep it under review. It was the start of a process which has been running for a few years. The takeup on the whole is encouraging. Certainly in our work we would highlight what is available and the enhanced one, where you can get £2,000 for a period even after you have left the service, is a very good package.

  403. What are you aiming for overall in the Learning Forces Initiative? Is it that the educational attainment of those in the ranks is higher or broadly comparable with those outside? Is it currently lower and you are aiming to make it comparable or is it comparable and you are aiming to make it higher?
  (Mr Fisher) The two objectives as I set them out before very much underlie this. It is first, if you are going to recruit and retain people, you have to be seen as an employer of first choice, prepared to offer these kinds of personal development opportunities. We do not have a lot of choice. If we are to get people and retain them, we have to be offering these kinds of things. The second objective is very much in line with the Government's learning policy, that we do see it as our responsibility to train and develop people so that when they go on to other jobs they have transferable skills, which picks up what we were discussing earlier. Those are very much what is underlying this.
  (Vice-Admiral Band) A hard comparison is quite tough in this area frankly. How do you compare a civilian to a soldier? With some difficulty.

  404. Clearly it is a Government priority to do something about it in a civilian sense. We know there is a lot of illiteracy and lack of numeracy.
  (Vice-Admiral Band) We are fully supporting that.

  405. Are you making it a priority that those who come into the ranks will get this at an early stage and all the stops will be pulled out to make sure they do?
  (Vice-Admiral Band) Absolutely. The services are part of UK, therefore we shall play our part in any Government-wide, countrywide education policy. We recognise the various targets in the various areas, whether it is tertiary education, basic skills improvement. Basic skills improvement is an area where we are absolutely hard and we will deliver that. There is a big effort going on at the moment to identify illiteracy which is apparent in the lower educational areas of the services and we are putting a big effort into it. The army particularly because they probably have the largest number are putting big effort into this. In the end, apart from wishing to support the Government in its wider endeavours, the modern sergeant must be literate. We are clear on that.
  (Mr Fisher) What I should emphasise here is that the money we are talking about is for personal development opportunities for people to pursue their own interests. We would see the requirement to provide the basic skills which we need to address, the numeracy and literacy problems which you have identified, as our own responsibility to provide as part of our education policy. One of the things this review is going to do is to produce for all the services a common education policy which will spell out very clearly the importance we attach to education and why we need to do it. Clearly one of the reasons we need to do it is that if the Army in particular is to recruit the numbers of people it needs to recruit, it has to recruit them from a wide range of society with varied levels of ability and with numeracy and literacy problems which it will then have to solve. We accept that as part of our education policy. It is not part of these sums of money.

  406. You would then be confident and would expect that you could achieve this, that by the time anybody who comes into the armed forces and has been through your training courses over a set number of years has finished that set number of years they would have that literacy and numeracy. No-one will leave without that.
  (Vice-Admiral Band) They will have it. In the MoD we intend to deliver the basic skills formula the Government has set out.

  407. One of the things which has dogged the armed forces has been a bit of inflexibility. Its hierarchical structure means that decision-making is at the top and people lower down say that actual decision-making is a job higher up. Is your training picking up on that so that people have decision-making skills at all levels and are confident to make them?
  (Vice-Admiral Band) I would not accept your view of the armed forces in the way you said it. What I would say is that the armed forces will always have a hierarchical structure because to a certain extent military endeavour requires different people at different levels to have different responsibilities and when the final crunch comes, that whole linkage must work. Part of the training—and this is why we have developmental training and why we bring people in for a corporal's course or a-leading-hand's course and then a sergeant—is that they are going to assume greater responsibility for people, they are going to take greater responsibility for their own actions and their group's actions. The services all do it and we are very keen to develop people, not just in the fact that they know more about radar as they get older, but they are going to be responsible for more people and they are equipped with both the hard operational leadership skills but also those softer management skills which are required to communicate intention further up and also feed back. That development training is very important. I think you will find the vast majority of the forces actually extremely open to ideas up and down. I believe our training system does encourage people first of all to be confident that when they are put in as corporal in that battalion they know what they are doing. The first part is operational competence in your role and from that spawns all the other things. I am fairly confident that is right in our case.
  (Mr Fisher) One of the key areas we are looking at is how we improve management and leadership skills at all levels, not just the higher level. We are very much addressing that.
  (Vice-Admiral Band) And in the civil service.

  408. I am told that in the United States they actually have a scheme whereby at the end of people's service in the armed forces they can go on to university courses and the cost of that is met by the armed forces in full as part of this transition.
  (Vice-Admiral Band) You are talking about the GI Bill.

  409. Yes.
  (Mr Fisher) The enhanced learning credit scheme which I mentioned earlier offers precisely that opportunity. People can draw this £2,000 per annum for 10 years after they have left the service.[1] In that respect it is fairly comparable to the GI Bill.

  410. That then is the equivalent of taking a university degree.
  (Mr Fisher) Yes; very much so.
  (Vice-Admiral Band) Yes.

  Chairman: I think you ought to send all the initiatives off to the House of Commons Commission. It would be quite good for us to have an accreditation system and soft landing when we leave. This is a very innovative Committee. I have never asked a question of a member of the Committee before. Mr Cohen, when you did your Master's degree, did the House of Commons pay your fees?

  Mr Cohen: No.

  411. Last question on accreditation. If so many people are entering the armed forces already with degrees, would the accreditation move them towards a second degree?
  (Vice-Admiral Band) Absolutely and the commandants, particularly Shrivenham and JSCSC, can talk to you about that at some length. Essentially one of the inferences of having an officer corps largely of undergraduates on arrival is that actually the subsequent education is focused at a post-graduate level either in post-graduate level modules or MAs. They will talk about the MA system which is offered at Shrivenham. Very much post graduate. Apart from the fact that that is the next stage for them, our judgement is that if you look at the challenges facing defence, both in the operational and the underpinning business sense, we are after people who are educated, can think out of their box, are intuitive and all those things. That is about continuing their education.
  (Mr Fisher) What may be useful may not be further degrees, it may be chartered status, something we are very keen to promote.
  (Vice-Admiral Band) Yes; a post-graduate level.

  Chairman: It is very exciting. I cannot wait to read your report.

  412. You have just mentioned when dealing with the managerial issues and personnel issues that you need some kind of softer style. Is that because that has been lacking in the past and you were not getting the people who have those skills? Are they coming in with them or are you having to change them?
  (Vice-Admiral Band) I just think generally we have done a lot of looking at management and leadership principles. Everywhere—and it is the same for business and the armed forces—compared with the start of the century when it was a more autocratic system, that is not what it is about now. The thing now is building on the strengths of all your individuals and adding all the sum and the sum of the parts is greater. Therefore while there is a time for a very firm operational style. When you are doing your company attack in Sierra Leone is not the moment to have softer skills and a debate about whether you should be doing that; that should all have been ironed out before. When you are back in barracks, when you are about to deploy, mother, girl friend, wife, hurt in a car crash, when you are trying to give people the confidence to go and do things, a little bit of leaning on the shoulder confidence building is increasingly part of the jig and you see it everywhere. It is that sort of life and making people who are the sergeants of a platoon also realise that their responsibility is—they do realise it but also giving them the power—to influence those people, to mentor them, to coach them, to be responsible for their reports. It is all those sorts of things and just realising that there is a time for harshness, but there is also a time for more of the fatherly approach.
  (Mr Fisher) There has also been a change in the requirement here. We are now putting servicemen much more into managerial positions, running agencies and things like that and not just in operational command positions. The requirement has changed and therefore we have to look to see whether the training has kept up with the requirement.

  413. Therefore the requirement now factors in that sort of training.
  (Vice-Admiral Band) Absolutely and it changes as a person's career changes. At the lance-corporal/corporal level he or she is responsible for five or six people, but it tends to be fairly well distributed round the system. As staff sergeant and RSM you are starting to be a very powerful person in terms of your influence, a role model. It is just that mixture of it there.

  Chairman: Thank you very much. That was very interesting.