WEDNESDAY 16 JUNE 2004

PROFESSOR GEOFF CHIVERS AND MR TOM MULHALL

  Q200  Chairman: I was about to ask whether you were responsible.

  Mr Mulhall: Not induced by me, I hasten to add, but, because I had very close working relationships with these individuals, I could spot that something was going wrong. Where you have a ratio of trainer to recruit of 88:1, it is almost impossible to get to know people.

  Q201  Chairman: What were the clues that you would have picked up?

  Mr Mulhall: Basically, if you look across the other Services—and I know it is an unfair comparison because the Army is by far the biggest grouping when you compare it with either the Navy or the Air Force, so we have to be careful here—the impression I get is that you can get through the basic training, that is not a problem for most people; you are talking about keeping up fitness levels and weapon training. My concern is that when you move on to your trade skills, that is where you may have a problem and people cannot cope. My view basically was that if you actually have an educational attainment level people should try to achieve, they may not achieve that initially, but if you put a provision in hand to bring people up to that level, it is like the previous gentlemen from IOSH said, you can reduce your wastage levels. What I also found staggering was that only 30% of the people actually wanted to be in the Army, which gives you other problems. If only 30% want to be in then 70% do not really want to be there, but I understand that for 40% it is the occupation of last resort, which is again going to bring its problems.

  Q202  Mr Hancock: Do you believe those figures?

  Mr Mulhall: I have no way of assessing it. That was a survey conducted by the MoD themselves of 500 people. It seems extraordinarily high to me.

  Q203  Chairman: A very small sample though.

  Mr Mulhall: Yes, 500 people. That is contained within the document Care for Service Recruits and Trainees. Basically it says that 50% either are at or fail to meet the literacy and numeracy standards of the average eleven-year-old; 60% of the recruits in a sample of 500—all right it is very small, but you have to start somewhere: when is a relevant sample, not a relevant sample?—have no formal academic qualifications; 30% have a real aspiration to join the Army; 40% look upon the Army as an occupation of  last resort; 50% come from what might be considered deprived backgrounds; 50% were in and out of at least eight jobs in the previous two years; 69% come from broken homes. These are their own figures. When you compare those figures against what the Army achieves, I think it is brilliant, I really do.

  Q204  Mr Blunt: So why are we investigating this?

  Mr Mulhall: Because they have a problem.

  Q205  Chairman: I have always thought the Department for Education should pay half of the defence budget, because it seems to me that the Army is doing a lot of the work where I am afraid teachers are less than spectacularly successful. Perhaps you could just elaborate slightly on the question I asked earlier. You were talking about the three out of 15 people you had who had stress related problems and then you picked it up. I understand the Army's worst case now is 38:1, so that is not as good as your 15 to observe. Is that a reasonable figure to be able to make an assessment as to whether any of the warning signals are manifesting themselves? We are not specialists in this. Can you give us an idea of the kind of symptoms you would be able to pick out early on in your people who were suffering?

  Mr Mulhall: My people were all managers from an investigative background and the type of thing that happened was people turning up late for duty on a regular basis; people being extraordinarily busy but actually achieving nothing seemed to be quite a key issue; always busy, always on the telephone, always in a hurry and when you look and evaluate their work they were achieving nothing or doing nothing, hiding caseloads. In an Army context the obvious becomes drink problems or aggressive behaviour, or the opposite, withdrawal behaviour, or just simply poor performance and poor standards.

  Q206  Chairman: This is a case study of the Defence Committee. How quickly were you able to draw all of these factors together and say that this person had a problem?

  Mr Mulhall: Quite quickly because I knew the individuals involved. One of the people actually self-harmed and that was a good indication something was quite wrong. When an individual turns round and ends up trying to commit suicide and says "I'm not even successful at that" you have a serious problem on your hands. It was a question of getting medical and psychological treatment for that person.

  Q207  Chairman: How many of these factors would have to be evident before any alarm bells would ring?

  Mr Mulhall: Very few, but you have to be careful; they are only an indicator, they are only a starter for 10 as Bamber Gascoigne would say. That is all they are; they are starters. You have to be careful, because if you start over-observing people, people get very, very sensitive and think all you are ever doing is watching and spying and not giving them an opportunity to develop. They are just starting points.

  Q208  Mr Hancock: May I go back to talk about the recruits coming into the Army. I asked a question at the beginning of my questions to the previous witnesses about the suitability of the recruit and the judgments which are made by the people who interview them and whether or not those people are really up to the job of judging whether this person should move into the Armed Forces before the initial stage. I am curious about how the services recruit their recruiters and the sort of judgments that these people are making.

  Professor Chivers: We are getting the impression from the paperwork that there is a numbers game going on and that they may be erring away too much from the side of caution to keep up the numbers. Where people are being moved into jobs with a great deal of training requirement to move to higher level achievement in civilian life, then recruitment policies are really quite strict today because nobody wants somebody working for them who cannot achieve even after training, because of the cost implications. Our impression is that the first thought of folk is to take a chance, if somebody looks as though they might have even a fighting chance of getting through, and take them. If that is leading to a cohort group developing where 50% will not get through into action later, then that is extremely damaging to morale everywhere. Week by week it is very damaging to those who think they are on the edge of being excluded and how you handle telling them they are going to be excluded is crucially important; we see that in university life. For those who are caring in that cohort group about their colleagues, they also become extremely distressed that their mate looks as though they are just on the edge of being taken out, despite their best efforts. Generally it is very discouraging for people in the training and instruction role, who have probably put more effort into the weaker ones, to know that they are still not going to make it. I think the issue you are raising is enormously important: to look very closely at recruitment strategy and to try to learn, to do more research into the competencies which are required for somebody to come in as the initial trainee and to   be successful. Those are clearly education, psychological makeup, motivation to succeed and so on. I am quite sure much more could be done to select out or, from an educational point of view particularly, to say to people "You're not ready yet. Your basic skills, from an educational point of view, are too low for you to make it through on the first run". I would strongly suggest, that what is done then, through the Adult Learning Inspectorate or in other ways, is to advise those young people onto a further education programme, perhaps with the offer that if they make themselves successful there, at least in basic skills at level one, then a place will be made available for them to become a trainee in the Army later. They rush them through these programmes to get to this Part 2 and then to find that they are stumbling once again at the educational barrier, which has caused them to be seen as a failure all through their school life from five to 16, is a very sad position to put these young people in. I would say that it is not a fair way forward.

  Q209  Mr Hancock: Do you agree with that?

  Mr Mulhall: Yes, many organisations today do competency based recruiting. I have done it myself. The basic idea is that you work out a job specification, what you want the specific job to be and then you base an interview specifically around the job and the attributes of the job and the suitability of the person. However, in fairness it is not 100% and at the end of the day it is a judgment call. People talk about psychological testing. I remember years and years ago going for one of these aptitude tests for a specific job. I did not get the job—they have a lot to answer for—and about six months later, for a completely different, unrelated job, I got exactly the same aptitude test and I was selected. I queried this and asked what was going on because it was within the same company; the same aptitude test for two totally different jobs. I was told that was the clever psychologists; whether you get the job, depends on the answers you give. It was amazing. Some of them were mathematical questions with right or wrong answers, so which job were all the wrong answers for? It is a judgment call at the end of the day.

  Q210  Mr Hancock: If you believe what the Army found in their own survey of 500, they start from a position of 40% of them being there because they could not do anything else or get anything else; it was the job of last resort. Why do you think the Army in particular has not come to terms with that and said "Surely we're doing something wrong here, if so many of our recruits don't complete training? So many of the people we initially accept for training are people who come here grudgingly, because presumably if they did not want to be in the Army and they could have got something else they would have got something else". 40% is really a huge number of people who are doing something they do not really want to do. What has the Army's response been to that sort of statistic, measured against the numbers who actually drop out at some stage during either Phase 1 or Phase 2 training? Have you seen any evidence that the Army has learned from what they have discovered?

  Professor Chivers: It seems to me that we are back to this question of culture and the Army in some respects is not a learning organisation. This is going back to the fundamental idea of survival of the fittest in the field; the ones who somehow or other develop these competencies will survive in a battlefield environment and the process is to weed out those who would not be suitable in that environment. It is a pretty brutal way of doing it, by raising the hopes that finally there may be a place for them in modern society in the Armed Forces and to dash those hopes again over a matter of months later will cause emotional problems for young people. A far more refined way could be developed to try to identify what are the competencies required, the education, the training, the physical fitness, the psychological factors as well at the outset. I can assure you if there were any higher of further education course where routinely 50% of those recruited into it to go into a specific walk of life were failing at the training stage, that would be seen as quite horrendous. It does seem to be an old historical idea that we just go for survival of the fittest and weed out all these people who are not good enough to be one of us.

  Q211  Mike Gapes: Is there any evidence that some of the failures are the people who have come in as a last resort? Perhaps people will change once they have gone through the system and they may actually come out at the far end being amongst the most dedicated and committed people several years on.

  Mr Mulhall: You are absolutely right. What is needed is more refinement of those figures. Because 40% people do not choose it as their first occupation, does not necessarily mean they are not any good at it.

  Q212  Mike Gapes: That is at a particular point, is it not?

  Mr Mulhall: Yes. It does not mean they are any good. What you really need to do is to zero in on the failures and see which of the categories they fall into. The 30% who choose it as a career of choice might be among the first failures. You have to zero in on it. I wanted to be an international pole-vaulter, but I could not even get to the bar. It is a fact of life that we do not always get what we want. You need exit interviews to find out precisely why people want to be there, which category these people fall into. You are absolutely right, as I said at the beginning, from the course I run I get good visibility because a lot of Army people at varying ranks come on it and it is amazing how many of them actually went into the Army with no qualifications whatsoever and came out the other end with a Master's. To me that is brilliant and that is what it is all about: giving people a second chance at life. That is why I am saying we cannot be too harsh. I am just saying about the statistics that if you end up with 50% who have literacy and numeracy problems and all the other associated baggage, why is anybody surprised they have difficulties? But that is only one part of the scenario. You are absolutely right in what you say.

  Q213  Mr Hancock: Do you think there are particular barriers, not just in the Army but in all three of the Armed Forces, which actually prevent change happening and prevent them being able to cope properly with managing the risks they are putting people through during both Phase 1 and Phase 2 of their training?

  Professor Chivers: From the documents and some of the comments which have been made already today and from the senior officers you interviewed, there is a focus on the success side and we do have Armed Forces which we can be very proud of in the modern environment and that can lead to a degree of arrogance. The word over-confidence was used earlier, but I would not even say that: I would say it is more a question of not thinking about the consequences for the others. There is a strong focus on yes, this works very well for some, but what about the ones it does not work for? That is why I say that in other walks of life, where people are trained, they would be rather horrified by 50% of any recruitment not getting through, because their minds would be very strongly focused on those who were not successful rather than the ones who are successful. It is what we are putting them through that is the issue today.

  Q214  Mr Hancock: If there are barriers—and from what you are saying there are obviously certain barriers within the Armed Forces which prevent them really analysing those risks—is there a way of bringing those barriers down without damaging the coherence of the Armed Forces to start with, the regimental ethos in the Army or the operational effectiveness of the unit? Are there ways and mechanisms? Is there training which can be put to officers and senior NCOs to enable them to have the ability to accommodate, assessing properly the risks they are putting these young people through and still get a good service person at the end of it, whether it is a soldier, sailor or airman?

  Professor Chivers: Anybody who works in human resource management as against training, what we call human resource development, will tell you that if you take totally the wrong people there is nothing you can do in the training development environment which will then make them competent or successful. So recruitment is crucial and you have quite rightly focused on that. Beyond that, there is still a lot that can go on to turn that trainee into somebody who will be successful or turn them away from success. So the environment in which the training then takes place is also crucially important and we have known for a long time that we have to look at the cognitive knowledge development, the education and formal training side, the skills development side, including personal skills as well as functional skills—we have talked about weapons quite a bit today—and then this affected domain needs development too, to do   with values, beliefs, confidence in yourself, confidence in where you are and that this organisation is right for you, that you can make an effective contribution. All those things interlock and if any one of those areas is not developing well then the person will tend to fall by the wayside. As has already been said today, I do feel that there is a tendency to focus more on the technological functional side, certainly on the cognitive education and understanding side and not sufficiently on this affected domain when it is going wrong for some of the young people.

  Q215  Mr Hancock: When do you think a stage is reached when it moves from respect of the trainer to fear of the trainer, which actually changes the mentality of the person going through that training?

  Professor Chivers: First of all I ought to say that in my view, as far as possible, we need people coming forward as instructors in the Armed Forces who are there because they want to be there. If you have in a sense pressed youngsters who see this as the last resort from everlasting dole on the one hand, it is not ideal if a high percentage of the instructors are also there because they have been ordered to be there rather than because they want to be there. We know in school teaching that some of the most unsuccessful schools have teachers for whom teaching was the last resort after university, when they could not get a job doing something else or circumstances left them, part-time perhaps, in that inner city school where they did not want to be. The focus on the circumstance of the instructors is very important. Is this seen as a worthwhile career move? Do you get brownie points in the Armed Forces for being a very successful instructor? Does everybody get proper training in all the aspects I have spoken about or just some of them? To know how to do it well yourself is not a good case for saying you will be good at explaining it to somebody else. Are you a good role model? Is you behaviour admirable in all respects? Can young people learn from you, from the way you bear yourself, the way you interact with other people and so on, how to be in the Armed Forces later? Are you actually, in your behaviour, not a very good role model? These are things which people in education and training worry about all of the time. In earlier testimony it was said that they never shout at them and then a contradiction "Well, we do sometimes, because we have to, because they are going into an aggressive environment". I am not sure what was meant by an aggressive environment, but we really need to be very thoughtful on the battlefield and deal with risk. You can shout at somebody to shout encouragement; I do it to my football team every week and at the television set when England are playing. Or we can really be shouting abuse, we can ridicule in front of other trainees in a way which is extremely damaging to the morale of some of these young people. When I was at school and maybe some of the older folk here were at school, bullying by other kids, by teachers, was commonplace and we were hardened or fell by the wayside at a young age. Kids were locked in cupboards for the whole morning, hit with objects, I have seen books thrown across the room which have cut open a face, kids hit across the face with a cane. It is not good, but it was done. It is not done any more and if you do that you end up in prison. There are youngsters coming through now who are rather shocked when, for the first time in their lives, they have been yelled at when they are crawling through the mud and somebody's face is a few inches away from them hurling abuse or ridicule in front of their mates. That is an issue which does need to be looked at. It does seem to me that in other walks of life, in factory work and so on, where when I was young it was quite normal to be shouted at by your surname in front of other workers if you were thought not to be performing very well, in those areas by and large we do not manage like that any more. There is an issue about that, particularly in the training environment, which does need to be looked at. It was said earlier in evidence, quite rightly, that bullying is in the eye of the person being bullied. What might seem to be quite a normal way of behaving towards young people in the eyes of the instructors or other staff might be perceived by some young people as being very hurtful and unnecessary bullying and harassment. If they are sensitive in that way then that does need to be taken account of.

  Q216  Mr Blunt: Are you talking about situations in the Armed Forces where people are being shouted at in this way which you think are unusual or commonplace?

  Professor Chivers: In an environment where it looks like that is how it is here, young people can adjust quite quickly. I mentioned bullying in school days, kids who every day had their head pushed down the toilet and flushed; they expected it and they got it every day. In a way, if it seems like you are picked on at random for that, young people can rationalise that; that is the way things are done round here. If certain people are bullied and picked on all the time at the expense of others, others are spared from that, that is particularly damaging to them. I am saying that at the outset maybe some of these young people, despite their image of what is going to go on, are probably going to be quite shocked by what they find and not just things around harassment and bullying, just the living conditions, just taking your clothes off in front of other people, which you may not have done except with siblings before, having your body parts ridiculed, those types of things, which were normal in the gym and the changing room when I was young may not happen now for some young people. There are things around that. If that becomes the norm, people can adjust to that, they can laugh it off and they can adjust to it. If it becomes vindictive, picking on certain individuals at the expense of others, that is then very damaging to people. To my mind there needs to be a more open climate for discussion around these issues than I have read in the papers so far. The world is changing, the expectations of young people and their parents are changing and my impression is that, particularly in the Army, things may not be changing so much.

  Q217  Mr Blunt: You have not entirely answered the question by saying whether you think this . . . perhaps by implication you are saying the kind of behaviour you are describing is endemic. The wider issue here, particularly in terms of the study, is the input into the Armed Forces and the Army required by the Ministry of Defence, by Parliament, in order to sustain a certain size, in order to provide these Armed Forces which are so widely admired—and I think in the opinion of everyone here man for man we have the best Armed Forces in the world. Here is an organisation with this input level which from this survey is horrifying in many senses: a reading age of 11 for half the people they are taking in; 70% of them not really wanting to be there; for 40% it is the career of last resort. For the military training organisation then to turn out people who arrive in civilian life on your courses, by your own evidence, who are thoroughly well equipped both educationally and in how they do it, do you not have a degree of concern about making suggestions that the behaviour is endemically wrong and not achieving its objective?

  Professor Chivers: You are making reference to success again. We have some of the best universities in the world, but we do not have a 50% dropout rate. We do not shout at our students when they are not doing very well. We try to find out why they are not doing well. I am not saying there is bullying going on and I am not saying people are shouting.

  Q218  Mr Blunt: But is there anywhere else for the Army to go for its recruits? The Army has to produce an output of 15,000-odd people a year for its trained strength. That is a huge burden on any organisation. It is not the best paid job in the world and when economic times are good, every Army struggles to fill its ranks. Yet we have an Army which not only manages to fill its ranks but then produces a quality of output which is the international comparator for everybody else.

  Professor Chivers: It seems to me that it is a good system for those who are successful in the system. To the extent that the Army and the other Armed Forces come out with people, who can fulfil the role to what we are all agreed is a very high standard, it works for them. What I am saying is that it does not work for the ones who are not successful and it seems to me it is how they are feeling about it as they are going through this and seeing themselves fail which is really the issue for this Committee.

  Q219  Mr Blunt: In terms of using the principles of risk management as used in the business world, how do you think they could be applied in the military environment to address this problem?

  Professor Chivers: We have to look at what it is that is causing the successful ones to be successful. I am not convinced that in any training programme or any job an element of bullying or even shouting at people when they are not doing very well is helpful to anybody, successful or unsuccessful.