MONDAY 22 JANUARY 2007

LEARNING & SKILLS COUNCIL

  Q340  Chairman: Meanwhile, back on apprenticeships, completion rates are quite low, well not that low, maybe just a little more than half complete their apprenticeships.

  Mr Cragg: Completion rates have gone up spectacularly, and I can tell you, for example, I have just looked at the numbers for my region, they have gone up another seven percentage points in the last 12 months, so well over 60% there.

  Q341  Chairman: That is very wide, but what is happening?

  Mr Cragg: What is happening is we have focused more and more on quality, we have focused more and more on getting the right specialist providers it goes back to specialisation and we have started to gain serious commitment and support from many more employers so that the employer contribution in the workplace means better retention. Remember, success rates are the total number that start and the total number that complete. Therefore, if you get a lot of movement, if a young person is unsettled in the workplace they will move on and go to another job. I think we are getting better buy-in from employers, a better reputation for apprenticeship, because it is a virtuous circle, and, most importantly, better specialist providers.

  Q342  Chairman: A lot of manufacturing employers, particularly smaller ones, do not have enough vacancies to justify the investment in apprenticeship. Is there a way around that?

  Mr Cragg: I will try and prove my credentials and show you that I know your patch. If you looked at the Herefordshire Group Training Association, who I think you probably know reasonably well, now operating in both Herefordshire and Worcestershire, they do a great job in supporting a whole range of very small businesses, especially in an environment like that, in a rural environment or a semi-rural environment. They are a Centre of Vocational Excellence so they meet my specialist criterion. They have success rates of over 70%.

  Q343  Chairman: The answer is collective apprenticeships are a good idea?

  Mr Cragg: They are definitely a good idea, and group training associations, which is the kind of networking which especially sits under the umbrella of EEF, works extremely well.

  Q344  Chairman: I will not lead you on this question, it is a slightly separate one, but how do we get more women into manufacturing?

  Mr Cragg: It is enormously challenging to break through the conventions. One of the best ways to do that is, firstly, do pilot programmes which genuinely demonstrate to young women and girls that they can progress and, secondly, keep banging on about where the pool of labour is available to employers, and demonstrate how if they continue in my region, I would say to you, to just recruit white males, then they are in serious trouble. If they ignore women and ethnic minority people, especially in the conurbation in the West Midlands, they are fishing in a very, very small pond.

  Q345  Chairman: Our predecessor Committee found that adult training programmes, talking about the age of apprenticeships as being important here, were particularly useful in bringing women in, is that correct?

  Ms Clarke: I think it is important, as Dave said, to demonstrate the opportunities for young people but also to clearly demonstrate the opportunities for adults who live in regional atmospheres with BME—black and minority ethnic—communities as well. I think apprenticeships are fundamentally important to that because otherwise what are the route ways for women to go into that industry. There is some evidence from some of the piloting work that these sector skills councils have done as a result of the Women in Work Commission, but we are not making enough of it in terms of demonstrating some of those route ways, not just for young people, because I think we have made some significant steps forward, but for adults.

  Q346  Chairman: If you want to give a bit more detail on these points, please feel free to do so.

  Mr Cragg: I think we would be more than happy to do that.

  Q347  Chairman: Yes, because these are important issues and we would be delighted to get further written evidence from you. Admittedly 18 months or so ago now the Institute of Fiscal Studies said Train to Gain was not adding much, that people who were part of it would have trained anyhow. You said that Train to Gain is a really important flagship strategy for your Council. Do you think those concerns were fair? Do you think Train to Gain has been adapted to address them, or were they unfair, and are you happy that enough effort is being made to attract in new employers to Train and Gain?

  Mr Cragg: I would like Jaine to comment specifically on the survey. All the experience on the ground for me is whilst they might have been fair in the early stages of Train to Gain, because there is a certain tendency towards initiative-itis to just sell things, I do not think they are fair now. To reassure you, the thing we have embedded in the new programme is a very, very clear set of light-ish touch, but very important, customer satisfaction checks to guarantee that both the employer and the individual employee is feeding back on the quality of training and the training experience and that we are not caught in the area which is I think where the difficulty lies of just assessing people who have already got skills and are simply going through an assessment process.

  Ms Clarke: What we have learned from the Institute of Fiscal Studies report is all of the evaluation, the checks and balances that we have in place clearly focus on testing how satisfied the employer is with the service. The skills broker organisations, which operate in each of the nine regions, are challenged and paid on the basis of getting to small hard-to-reach employers. We are very keen that that is a real focus of that valuable skills broker resource. In the majority of regions, not in all regions at the moment, the regions are performing well above the targets that we set for small hard-to-reach employers, in fact in some regions we are at the 80-90% mark of it being small and hard-to-reach. I think we have very much learned from that initial exercise. We are also very clear that Train to Gain is a service and that an element of that is what we will fund from the public purse, but we are also very clear that actually this is about the employers' entire workforce, some of whom might already have a First or Level 2, so the Government will not fund for that, others might not, but also looking at the skills needs of those who are at level 3 and level 4. We think the service is much more holistic than the Pilots, and we think there are sufficient checks and balances in the system to ensure that we do not get ourselves into some of the issues we did in the very early days, to be fair, of the Employer Training Pilots.

  Q348  Chairman: Finally, do you think there is a problem of a lack of aspiration and motivation amongst some of the young people you are trying to reach and train?

  Mr Cragg: Yes. We would have much higher participation rates, would we not, if there was not a problem of motivation? Equally, there is a challenge to us to make sure that the offer is right, especially if young people have disengaged completely from education, probably often well before they have got to Key Stage 4 or 14-16. I think there are real challenges for us to do things differently. Interestingly, we are embarking again in my region this year, on a wholly new approach looking at young people not in education, employment or training so that we target in a much more individual way. We are looking at individual skills assessment or individual educational training assessment and looking at ways in which we bring them back into the system. Those are quite significant challenges to us to change the way we are purchasing what happens out there.

  Q349  Chairman: You have done a sterling service, Mr Cragg and, indeed, Ms Clarke, this afternoon. We are very grateful to you. If, when you review the record of this, you think there are things you would like to have said more about you have indicated some of those already to us we would be very, very receptive to additional written evidence to back up the points you have made.

  Mr Cragg: Thank you, Chairman.

  Chairman: Thank you very much.