UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 281-x

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

WELSH AFFAIRS COMMITTEE

 

 

Globalisation and its impact on Wales

 

 

Tuesday 22 May 2007

SIR DIGBY JONES and PROFESSOR DAVID REYNOLDS

Evidence heard in Public Questions 752 - 797

 

 

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Welsh Affairs Committee

on Tuesday 22 May 2007

Members present

Dr Hywel Francis, in the Chair

David T C Davies

Nia Griffith

Mrs Siān C James

Mr David Jones

 

________________

Memoranda submitted by Sir Digby Jones and Professor David Reynolds

 

Examination of Witnesses

 

Witnesses: Sir Digby Jones, UK Skills Envoy and Professor David Reynolds, Professor of Education, University of Plymouth, gave evidence.

Q752 Chairman: Good morning, could I welcome you to this session of the inquiry into globalisation and its impact on Wales. For the record, could our witnesses introduce themselves, please?

Sir Digby Jones: I am Sir Digby Jones; I am the United Kingdom Skills Envoy and former Director-General of the CBI.

Professor Reynolds: I am Professor David Reynolds, Professor of Education at the University of Plymouth, not the University of Exeter, in the West Country.

Q753 Chairman: Could I begin by asking about the Leitch Review. Why, according to the review, does the UK and Wales have such a relatively poor skills and qualifications profile, and is it the case that as a consequence of the increasing pace of globalisation the challenge is now all the greater?

Sir Digby Jones: I do not think this is anything new. If you look at statements made 100 years ago people were saying we have got a real problem with the skills base. One of the issues with the lack of vocational skills is that society, culture, parents, the media see it as beneath others, it is a very class-ridden approach and people tend to think, you know, my son is going to university, but everybody else's can be a plumber; utterly wrong-headed, but it is a fact. Also, it is not new in as much as we have always had this huge tail of unskilled people but of course we used to do something with them, it was not so prevalent in our society, it was not so much in your face or on the radar screen because we used to send them down the pit, we used to put them on the fields, we used to put them in car factories, shipyards, steelworks, cotton mills and textile mills. There were loads of jobs in this country for people who could not read, write or count. China has had your lunch; India has had your dinner and they are not there any more, so it is more obvious, it is more in your face that they exist. The comparative to which you compared in the second part of your question, we are not alone. America has got a huge issue with this and so has France, funnily enough. France has got a far more productive workforce but they have a huge issue with unemployed people who are not skilled. Germany has got it, Japan has got it, any of the developed world who are suffering from the fact that the developing world is saying for the first time I am not going to pay you premium prices for things which sell only on price, commodities, things to which there is no knowledge infill, no value added. For the first time ever the developing world is saying I am not paying you for that, I will go and get it somewhere else more cheaply, and the moment that happens if you are adding value, if you are exploiting knowledge, you are fine in the developed world, but if you are not you have a real issue. It is not just a British issue, it is not just a Welsh issue, it is very much a developed world issue, but we, lastly, have the other accentuating issue which is our higher education and our shift in our economy to the value added, innovative, branded, quality end of the game has been so much more successful than America or France or Japan or Germany or Spain or Australia or Canada. We have actually made the move, we have made the shift, we do not protect our markets with subsidies and tariffs. In France they have now declared yoghurt a matter of national security; we do not do that sort of stuff, we do not do the protectionism of America and so we have actually made the shift. For instance, in North Carolina you will still find so many commodity textile jobs employing totally illiterate and innumerate people but they are protected by tariffs. We do not do it, so it exists in all of the developed world, it is just that we have made the shift to where we ought to be as a developed world, i.e. value added and innovation, we have a very successful higher education system, but the problem is that it shows up the deficiencies at the lower end of the skills scale so much more acutely.

Q754 Chairman: Professor Reynolds, could you give in your response a bit more of a Welsh focus?

Professor Reynolds: Yes, sure. Just a few words about the general problem and the problem for Wales and for the UK is that historically one could be a society that generated a lot of innovative ideas and creative ideas and not work reliably on them because they stayed within your geographical boundaries, and you could be as it were an unreliable, relatively inefficient low skill economy and get away with it, but what happens now is that a new innovative and creative idea goes round the world in a millisecond and it relocates wherever there is labour to work on it. There is, therefore, no longer a premium on being a producer of valid ideas, the premium is on producing the ideas and working blind and that means high skill levels. In the Welsh context the specific problems that Wales has - just to give a historical tale - when Owen Edwards, the chief inspector of schools, went to the Rhondda Valley, to Tonypandy, in the early twentieth century he said - this is not an anti-Labour point - "The Labour men have the whole power and insist on Latin and French, they think they are the doors" and the Welsh notion has been very much that your chance of upward mobility was in acquiring academic not wealth-related or wealth production related skills, because the aim was to get you up and out as it were from Wales, often into England. The status of the academic and the low status of the vocational was, in part, because with our socialist background in Wales we have seen the workforce as something that should not necessarily produce direct wealth as it were through capitalism, but through something else. Changing that attitude, changing the notion in Wales because our education system has had a very high status, changing the notion in education is something that goes on only in schools, that goes on fulltime, that it finishes at 16 or 18 or 21 is a serious Welsh problem. Other peripheral regions of the UK have that problem, but not to the extent that we have in Wales. As an example, in the North East - we were talking before we came in - there was a tradition for sons to follow their fathers down the pit; that was never the Welsh tradition, the fathers' aim for their sons - this was at a time when people did not worry about their daughters - was to get them out of going down the pit, and that makes us different as a nation and a region to other regions of England.

Sir Digby Jones: If I could just add a specifically Welsh aspect, between 1985 and 2005, in those 20 years, employment in agriculture and rural activities in Wales dropped by 46%; in mining and utilities it dropped by 82%; the national average drop was 35% and 68% so Wales suffered a greater decline in that. In construction the drop was 14% less by 2005, in manufacturing it was 13% less than in 1985, but in all the public sector side of life - community and personal services up 30%; health care up 72%; education up 43%, public administration up 27%, so the shift in the Welsh economy in employment terms into using knowledge and using people with the ability to add value has been enormous and taking them away from using them as commodities has been staggering, more than in any other part of the United Kingdom or more than the national average, which is a fairer way of putting it. It is true that Wales has made this transition more effectively but there is an alarm bell which I know all of you will immediately have thought of, of course what you are doing is you are taking it away from the wealth creative side of life and putting it into the public sector, where is the wealth creation in getting people working in the health and education side of life if you are not matching it with value added, wealth creation to pay for it. The danger of it is that you have to get people into the knowledge economy of the wealth creation type, not just the knowledge economy but on the spending side because if not therein lies a route of consequent economic decline in the long term, if not then at least being propped up by somebody else's taxes which would not be happy.

Professor Reynolds: Where Wales does lag behind at the moment is that we are not growing the service sector, and most employment growth in most economies is in the service sector. Wales has a large public sector and a relatively large manufacturing sector by comparison to other regions, but the service industry is not growing and therefore there is no demand for skills.

Q755 Nia Griffith: Obviously you have put the picture very, very clearly. We were very impressed when we went to Bridgend and we went to the Sony factory to see the way that what had been essentially assembly line workers had up-skilled themselves to be dealing with technical issues in terms of mending appliances, providing advice and so forth. Would you see that as the type of thing we need to do to prevent the decline in competitiveness; we have to up-skill from being an assembly line worker who sticks a piece of something on something to somebody who has got a much more marketable skill?

Sir Digby Jones: Yes is the answer, but if you see it as a journey - David put it very well - the miner in Wales as opposed to Newcastle said "My son is not going to follow me" and so when the economic shift, the restructuring of the economy, took place it was an easier thing to pull off in Wales because the mindset was already there for improvement of the individual. I am generalising enormously, but the concept is a journey, so you came out of the pit and you went into the assembly line of which you spoke, but at least the attractiveness of Wales as a destination for inward investment meant that they came here to do it rather than Barcelona or Paris or wherever, so that was fabulous. If you notice, just after that you got the advent of the call centre and for all the people who criticise call centres they provided another fabulous pit stop if you like on the race through. It was never an end in itself, you would never say call centres were here forever, but it was a great way of facilitating the shift in the structure of the economy. When people say now "We are closing call centres", that was always inevitable because it would, again, find its natural home somewhere else but it provided that stop on the way through. Then you move up from those two into more value added, more innovation in what they do. Sony is a very good example in Bridgend because when they first came, of course, they were just putting together television sets - I say "just" as in not a lot of knowledge in it, but it was not just to the people who actually found the job, that was fabulous. Now they are saying actually I in Sony can go and get that done in - it does not matter where - Turkey or somewhere but what I need is the value added and the innovation from the minds of the people and I will do that in Bridgend. The warning sign is this is an absolute constant dynamic change, this does not stop. Anybody who is working in Bridgend today, in a knowledge-based, value-added job in Sony, ought to understand that this will be a constant up-skilling and it needs constant investment in better kit and it needs constant investment in people. Every time this will happen because what they are doing today I will tell you now in five years will be done in Tianjin and Guangdong, end of the matter, period. What we have to do is get people into the next level and then five years after that, that will be commoditised by the Chinese and that will go off. What Tianjin is doing today will go further west in China and what further west in China is doing today will go even further west in China, and this is going to go on forever. This has happened by the way: the Americans did it to Western Europe between 1860 and 1900; the Japanese did it to America between 1945 and 1960, South Korea did it to Japan between 1970 and 1985; the difference this time is that there are 1.3 billion Chinese: this is going to go on forever, so every time Sony in Bridgend say that is value-added innovation, fabulous, we are doing jobs, the only way is that five years on those jobs will go to fill that vacuum in China and we will have to invest again in the people - keep skilling the people. Then, every time this happens, there will be a skilled workforce in Wales ready for the next lot.

Chairman: Sir Digby, could I ask you to be a little more brief in your answers; you are anticipating many of our questions. David Davies.

Q756 David Davies: What Sir Digby is saying is very interesting and I would tend to agree. What worries me most is that at some point the Chinese education levels are going to exceed those that are in Wales and at that point we are not even going to have that five year lead advantage, are we, we really are going to be competing on a like for like basis. At the moment from what you have just outlined we have still got this five year edge on them, which we have to keep renewing, to sum up what you have just said, but what happens when we can no longer do that because they are going straight to the level which we are aiming for at the moment, if that makes sense?

Professor Reynolds: If you look at all the evidence about the Pacific Rim countries it is not that they are catching us up academically; they passed us a long time ago. If you look at all the international surveys in basic skills they are past us and in part they are past us because the function of their primary schools, which was to teach basic skills, ensured that everyone went forward in lock step.

Q757 David Davies: In that case that makes my question even more relevant, which is how are we going to have that five year lead time on them?

Sir Digby Jones: There are lots of reasons why people have things made or services provided in one particular company and one is speed to market. Geographically, Wales is in a much better place for doing that for 450 million sophisticated consumers in Europe than China is; secondly, there is the ability to be innovative at two levels. Universities are so important. Businesses clustered around transport in the nineteenth century, they clustered around the OEMs which were the equipment manufacturers in the twentieth century, in the twenty-first century they are clustered around centres of knowledge - they are clustered around universities, colleges, schools, anywhere where you can develop, exploit and transfer knowledge. That is a very personal thing, about how you have the freedom of thought, freedom of development of thought, freedom of expression, the ability to argue, the ability to express yourself and democracies tend to allow that to happen whereas totalitarian regimes tend not to let that happen. China's big challenge in this is that you can take them so far but what do you do then. The challenge is for us to be constantly innovative very quickly at the second level because at the bottom end vocational skills actually do not travel, which is excellent for us if we have enough of them. If you want a plumber in 24 hours time do not ring Beijing if you are in Bridgend. That is an important point.

Q758 Nia Griffith: Obviously we have talked about what has happened in Sony and we have seen similar things happening with Schaeffler Bearings in this area. Businesses are constantly changing and constantly being trained; what do you think are the main factors that we need to put in place for that to happen? Do there need to be incentives for companies, does there need to be partnership with higher education? How are we going to actually facilitate that scenario that you are describing?

Professor Reynolds: Clearly incentives and a lot of it is in Leitch - demand-led so that the training actually follows what people need rather than what it is assumed they want, and the improvement in basic skills. One of the key areas we have not touched on yet is that it is not just the issue of global competition and suchlike, it is that now knowledge is redundant every ten to fifteen years, it is out of date, it is finished, so what we have to somehow acquire is an education system and also later work-related training which actually teaches people how to acquire knowledge which they may not already know about, it is how to acquire what you do not know but you will need. Frankly, if we were to look at Wales currently there is some cause for concern. If we look at the UK there is cause for concern about IT: it is not particularly well-taught in schools, it is being trained for as an add-on to the classroom rather than as an integral part. All the studies show basically that IT does not give you very much on top of no IT which is extraordinary. It has transformed industry, business and commercial life but it has not transformed schools and it has not transformed learning. Why? Particularly in a Welsh context we should be, I think, very concerned about this because if we look at the learning country too, IT has one sentence where it says we are going to produce a plan about IT. It is an extraordinary dereliction of need to focus on this particular dialogue, so it is IT skills. It is IT that can access training for a group of persons or persons who are economically marginal - with IT skills they can be made as it were mainstream.

Sir Digby Jones: There is a lot more pressure on teachers to deliver employable people. The employer, be it public or private sector, is the customer and the teacher is the deliverer of the product called employable people. I know that is intensely politically incorrect, how dare I call 16-ear olds products, but that is true. There is also a relationship of course, a fiduciary relationship, between the professional teacher and the client (the pupil), of course there is, but in terms of what we need to compete in a globalised economy, people have to come out of school at 16 or move on through the education system at 16. Employable - that is not just read, write, count and operate a computer, it is also get the safety pin out of your nose, get your hands out of your pockets, turn up to work on time, turn up to work at all, actually believe that the pleasure of earning a living is not entirely everybody else's. If you talk to employers about what you find when you go to Slovakia and put your factory there, what you find when you use a call centre in India, what you find when you go to a factory in China, you find a work ethic. You find people who think the world does not owe me a living, I have to get off my bottom and do it myself.

Q759 Mrs James: I wanted to come to this point, Sir Digby. One of the pieces of evidence we have taken was about tractability and I have always used the word tractable in a very different context but this tractability that you are outlining there, that you hear about how Eastern European and Central European workers come to work to work, and that they are - it is an anathema to me to use this work - biddable. When they are told to do something they actually do it, they do not merely get into some sort of discussion about why, how and where, so this tractability, how do you think we should be either targeting or increasing this?

Sir Digby Jones: It starts at four, five and six, it starts in the home, it starts in our society, our culture, our media, our politicians and it also then starts, obviously, with teachers. Teachers cannot do this on their own and if anybody just beats up teachers for this - of course teachers are enormously important but they cannot do this on their own. I go to schools and to see them seeing their charges go out at half past three, they must weep to think that they come back at half past eight, nine o'clock, the next morning and nothing has been done to progress this at all in that intervening time. Parents have a huge responsibility but so have the other aspects of society - religious leaders, community leaders. This is about a change in the ethic of our society, about being employable. The important thing to get across is that this is not about working them harder, this is not about taking someone and sticking them up a chimney, this is not about saying that they should not have more than the minimum wage, this is about understanding that India wants your lunch and the only way to deal with this is to work more cleverly - not work harder, not put in more hours, actually make more of the hour you put in. To do that we need a culture change. If all you do is regulate this somehow - create laws to make this happen - employers in both the public and the private sector will just put this in a box called cost and compliance, get by with the least you have to do to pass my inspection a week on Friday. If you are actually saying this has to happen in our society and you go through a culture change, societal effort to make them tractable, then it starts at home. Do I think this achievable? Yes. Do I think we can do this in three years? Not a chance.

Q760 Nia Griffith: Can I just pursue a little bit your image of the young person of today, I do think that there are a very large number of young people who do work hard and do try hard.

Sir Digby Jones: I agree.

Q761 Nia Griffith: And who do turn up on time, but I actually think that possibly one of the issues at the moment is that we have an awful lot of opportunities for some of those young people and that what we are actually seeing is difficulty in recruiting what you might call the least skilled end of the scale. In fact, a lot of the young people who perhaps in the Eastern European countries or in India would be doing fairly mundane jobs here have the opportunity to move up to something more exciting with the expansion of higher education and the expansion of all sorts of opportunities. It is actually the very bottom level that we are getting in some of our industries and are then having difficulty with the skills.

Sir Digby Jones: That is the contradiction, is it not? You are right, the contradiction is that if you actually get to 16 or 17 with an ethic of training and up-skilling - what David called the constant retraining for the rest of our lives - if you come in there with a ticket through your exams, actually the ability to move up in our society in the world of employment is enormous. In fact it is one of the great triumphs of the last few years, it is fabulous, but it has left this other group of people who, if you went to a lot of them and said "What do you want to do?" it would be "I want to win Millionaire, I want to win the lottery or I want to be on Big Brother" because the get-rich-quick society has bitten into the bottom end of our society far more than anywhere else. All the surveys show - and this is just one I pulled out, which is the Federation of Small Businesses survey for Wales - 31% of employers said we cannot get people to do the bottom part of our jobs, which is exactly your point. How do you do that, because the easy answer of course is that the employer - public sector as well as private, this is not a business issue - says "I can go and get them from Poland, so why am I going to bother to train these people if they do not turn up on time when I can go and get them from the Ukraine." That is a challenge for you and me, how we do that in our society. You are absolutely right.

Professor Reynolds: This is where the expert witnesses start rowing and disagreeing. I am not certain that what we need is some kind of moral rearmament or young people taking pins out of their noses; I think we get the young people we deserve. If you were to look at the results of primary schools and what our young people are like and the proportion of our young people who leave our primary schools without adequate levels of literacy and numeracy, they are high, they are very high by international standards. Our educational experience is a very variable one and the outstanding problem of English and Welsh education is that there are schools which reliably ensure that all persons have basic skills and others that do not ensure that, and I think frankly that a lot of it is a question of self esteem and lying behind the apparently truculent persons who do not want jobs and who sometimes are rather aggressive about life and society is low self esteem. They are people who have been damaged by their educational experience because we have not attached enough importance to the acquisition of basic skills and primary education. Just to go back a bit to the Pacific Rim comparison, in the Pacific Rim I remember visiting Taiwan and it was extraordinary, it changed my life, an entire class would sit there waiting until the last child got it in maths before that class moved on. You would wait a few seconds in the UK before moving the whole class on; in Taiwan nobody was left behind, right first time schooling with enormously high levels of basic skill achievement. What happens in the UK? We leave them behind, we differentiate them out into groups within the classroom with different levels of work, you take the whole ability range and you differentiate it: that will generate a bottom, unlike the Pacific Rim, that has low levels of self esteem which I think can be found in a lot of the apparently high levels of low self esteem or aggression shown by young people. We get the young people we deserve and the solution is in primary education.

Sir Digby Jones: I am not disagreeing with you actually, that is spot on.

Q762 David Davies: Just a quick question, and it is topical. Do you not agree that there needs to be some form of streaming by academic ability, whether it takes place over the whole school, in the classroom or whatever?

Professor Reynolds: The jury would be out. The Pacific Rim does totally mixed ability teaching in primary school because they do not want - and it is a weird thing to think because people think of them as elitist and different - to separate children into different streams, because that would damage their self esteem. I would like to think that in the UK we can do it as far as possible mixed ability. If though - and it may be the case - the range is just too big and you have classes where there is a seven year range in reading ability, if you just cannot do it mixed ability then you might have to set.

Sir Digby Jones: I would say I definitely think that streaming is important and of course I would like to live in a society where we wait until the last kid gets it because the consequences - you are right - are where we are. The problem is the way we are as a nation.

Professor Reynolds: We would be waiting forever.

Q763 Chairman: Could you give your impartial observations on the current debate inside the Conservative Party on grammar schools? It is a serious question.

Sir Digby Jones: I understand that. I did jokingly refer a few weeks ago at the opening of one of the academies, when I was 10, 11 and 12 we had these, they were called grammar schools, and specialist schools we had those as well, they were called technical colleges. It is a very important part of a developed economy in the twenty-first century for a kid with no hope of affording any other sort of education to be able, through their ability, recognised ability, to lift themselves out, up and onwards. That is, to me, enormously important and the effort should go not into stopping that happening by dumbing it down, the effort should go into yes, you are a winner and we want winners. We want more winners than you can ever imagine, but what we have done before - which is picking up the last part of David's point - is we have then said okay, over there you are a loser, we are going to recognise you as a loser because you are going to another place, in another stream, and we are going to call it the losing stream. Are we surprised when we then deliver people who have no self esteem, no self worth, do not read, write and count and are, frankly, a burden to themselves let alone the rest of us. We have got to put a lot of effort in employment and in society onto those people to take them to a place where they can win. I refuse to believe that there is anybody who cannot win at something in this world, we are just not trying hard enough to find where it is, but you are not going to crack that one by saying to those who are clearly winners at 10, 14 or whatever, sorry, mate, for the good of this you are not doing it. Grammar schools do that, so my impartial view is that I think grammar schools should stay.

Q764 Chairman: We do need to move on but, Professor Reynolds, you wanted to make a brief comment.

Professor Reynolds: Being a totally impartial academic, guided by evidence, if you strip out of grammar schools the effect of them having very able pupils who are from normally quite advantaged - not exclusively - social backgrounds, the grammar school effect is minimal. I do not personally support grammar schools but although I do not support grammar schools one of the interesting things may have been for you in your visit to the Czech Republic that they have a system of specialised schools. They are not necessarily grammar schools, but one of their streams would as it were be a grammar-type stream. They have schools similar to what we would have as grammar techs historically. They would swear by them and there are a lot of countries who actually have argued that if you try and do vocational skills within as it were normal community comprehensives you will never get critical mass, you will never have enough people doing it or enough teachers of it to actually teach it properly. The answer therefore is some form of specialism, and you see this in the academies. Whilst, therefore, I would be against grammar schools because I am not certain that they give huge value added, I would not want that to blind us in Wales to the possibility of having to think more creatively about how we develop in the vocational area because other societies are doing it or have done it.

Q765 Mr Jones: I would like to return, please, to the Leitch Review. One of the recommendations of that review was that employers should be given a significantly greater role in decisions about the public funding of vocational training. How, in your experience, are employers responding to the need to provide training as recommended in the review?

Sir Digby Jones: We have to contrast one thing just for the record here, which is that Wales and England are different. Leitch took - rightly in my view - the idea of signing a pledge to say I will bring a train to gain system into my employment from Wales. It was a Welsh idea, the Welsh have already implemented it and it has been an enormous success. It is early days, but it is just going so much in the right direction and so the English will now implement this on the back of Wales. For instance, yesterday you saw an article on page 4 of the FT by Jon Boone saying the pledge has not been signed by any private sector employers in England and therefore they are not supporting it. Given that it is not being launched until 14 June that is just a tad difficult, they have put the one side and not the other. Originally when it was talked about in the pre-Budget report the public sector were not going to be involved in this, but we have worked hard and we have got all the permanent secretaries now to say that their departments will sign up to it. That is fabulous, but it is not down on the ground, not in your local hospital, and there are 400,000 people working in the National Health Service in the United Kingdom who cannot read. The answer to you is if you look at just Wales, the brilliant idea of saying the employer gives up two or three hours a week, the employee gives up two or three hours a week and the Government pays for it at level one and level two. If you move on to level three and level four, Government - be it the Assembly or Whitehall - are very reluctant to pay for it, in my view rightly, because when you get through level two, level three, level four there is some serious value added coming into the bottom line of the businesses if you are getting people skilled-up and it is only right that the employer pays for that and not the taxpayer. At levels one and two there is both the moral argument what has Government done if it has produced these people who cannot read in the first place but, secondly, what are we going to do about this tail of our society if we do not do it. It is a huge social issue as well as educational and as well wealth-creating. The drive in Wales I think has been of the great successes, I think it is going in completely the right direction and the only challenge you have got now is keep your foot on the gas actually to make sure you can keep going. In England it starts with the launch on 14 June and I can tell you that the big employers are up for this big time, but the challenge we will have is small business.

Q766 Chairman: Can I intervene on one point just in case we lose the thread of what you were saying. How does all this relate to the successor body to the NHS University, the initiative of Bob Fryer, and his role currently of widening participation at that lower level? Does this relate to it at all?

Sir Digby Jones: It was Bob's idea and then fabulously he got on with it and did it, which I think is excellent. What I factually do not know is whether this is going to be taken into the new Skills Commission or whether it is going to be left outside. The Learning and Skills Council is going to be left outside but the Sector Skills Council is coming within it, so I will not pretend to know whether Bob's department is coming in or out. What I do know is that Bob Fryer's initiative of trying to get down to the lower level - is it not strange, the NHS employs what must be the most skilled people in the world actually, brain surgeons and all of this, and then the same organisation employs this huge tail of unskilled people and his vision is to get down there. The whole system of the pledge will help what he is trying to achieve.

Q767 Mr Jones: You have mentioned small and medium-sized enterprises and you have said that that was a challenge. To what extent are you finding that employers in SMEs are willing to commit, put their contribution to education and training?

Sir Digby Jones: It is interesting. You know if you see the results of an opinion poll, would you pay more tax if you got better hospitals? Most people would say yes. Then when any politician is brave enough to say, right, I am going to vote for more tax they always get voted out of office because the British public are very hypocritical people when it comes to their politics. It is exactly the same with a small business. If you sit a small businessman or woman down and you say, "Look, you have got to train these people to be (a) more productive (b) because of this increase in the knowledge need and (c) just socially because you do not want razor wire on your boundary fences and your kids getting mugged by people who have lost all their self-respect." "Yes, you are right, you are so right, I am up for it." "Okay, now what we will do is ..." "No, no, no, you do not understand, I cannot afford it, I do not have the time. I train you know, but it is on the job training and it is a different sort of training - it usually means licking stamps and making tea - and people do not understand all the pressures I am under." I am both generalising and also being quite cynical because there are some fabulous small businesses that do good quality training, but the challenge is for us all. One of the great successes of the Welsh economy over the last ten years has been the creation of small businesses and the wealth, the drive and the employment that that has created in Wales. The challenge now is to get them on the training journey.

Q768 Mr Jones: But of course Wales is principally an economy of SMEs, it is overwhelmingly an economy of SMEs, and to that extent not only is it a challenge but it seems to be amounting to an obstruction, a positive obstruction to train. You have that attitude endemic within SMEs.

Sir Digby Jones: Not at the moment. If I could be a small business in Wales, what I would say to you is that "After 11 years of fulltime compulsory free education, that I have paid for through my taxes, you have let me down. You are producing people who cannot read, write or count and cannot operate a computer, and now you want me to pay for this do you?" To which you go, "Um, yes." Then you say that unlike a big business that can have a training programme you now want me to lose the value of these people because if these people are unskilled they are probably doing this all day (indicates repetitive actions) so if I take them away, although I do not pay the college to train them I do lose that manual hour, and when I bring them back in they are going to do the same job. If they are doing the job now and they do not read, write and count, why do I need them trained to carry on doing the job. You and I know why, we have had the conversation, but to try and persuade someone who is employing four people doing this (indicates repetitive actions), it is a very, very big challenge.

Q769 David Davies: I have employed four people in a very small business, a haulage company, and to be honest with you, up until now you have talked brilliantly good sense, but at this point I have to say why the hell should I? We have struggled, one month is good enough, another month is bad. You are not going to get people like me to do that and I do not really see why I should because you have got some greater aim and aspiration and it is not going to happen.

Sir Digby Jones: I do see your argument. Of course I disagree with you, but I do see your argument, I really do.

Q770 David Davies: You may do, but it is not going to happen, because people like me are not going to do it.

Professor Reynolds: I think we are missing the major point here which is that if you are a large business you can employ specialist persons who know about training. You can have an HRO department, you can have people who have been educated in those skills to help you. If you are a small or medium-sized enterprise you have not got that luxury so what you need is some help from people. Before coming here I looked through a lot of academic literature on how much evidence there was in the education and training fields about what works, in other words what kind of training, organised in what kind of way at what kind of age. The truth is that if you take this area there is about 1% of the total knowledge by comparison with the area I research in which is what makes a good school and what makes a good teacher. Where are the studies about what makes good training and how you do it? They just do not exist; they do not exist in Wales because they have never been done and there are precious few of them in England too, so when you have not got that knowledge base about what the heck you are meant to do - because that is what you need as a small and medium-sized enterprise because you have not got the person there to tell you - routinely given you by the Welsh Assembly you just do not do anything because you do not know what to do.

Q771 David Davies: With absolute and all due respect to you, because I have listened to what you have said and it makes sense, I know that as a small businessman if I heard you I would be thinking who are you to tell me what to do, you are an academic, Sir Digby you have run big companies, you have been in the CBI, it is big companies all the way through. I am the human resources department and the personnel department and all the rest of it, the debt collector and the trainer.

Professor Reynolds: I think it is like our kids appearing to be aggressive and cockahoop when they are not. People do that and say "I do not care about this" because they do not know what to do.

Sir Digby Jones: I do not agree with you. I think you are right in your analysis and in your factual presentation that they do not know what to do ---

Professor Reynolds: Even if we gave them blueprints they still would not do it.

Sir Digby Jones: I agree.

Q772 David Davies: I agree too.

Professor Reynolds: Maybe it is a winnable issue and we should try.

Sir Digby Jones: I can produce a way in which you can be made to do it without legislation. The big procurers of your goods or services, the public sector and the big companies - at the moment for you to get your contract with the local school, how many ethnic minorities do you employ, have you got an equal opportunities policy? It is great stuff, fabulous stuff, why is there not one on how do you train your people? You would soon do it then because you would not get your job otherwise. The trouble is, he has produced the fact that you do not know how, I have produced the fact that you can be made to ---

Q773 David Davies: It is what you said earlier on that you were quite right about, I tick whatever box I need to put in and do the absolute minimum.

Sir Digby Jones: Of course, of course. The trouble is I am doing both of these ---

Chairman: Order, order, at the risk of accusing the three of you of having a little sub-committee between the three of you, this is David Jones' set of questions.

Q774 Mr Jones: Yes, and the next question is a matter that I am particularly interested in hearing Sir Digby's opinion on because I first heard you express a view on this on a BBC File on Four programme a few months ago. Given that we are obviously living in a world where there is a greater mobility of capital and a greater mobility of labour, why should employers commit to training their employees and up-skilling them when they can relocate to other countries where there may be a better skilled or a better trained workforce, or indeed when they can actually import labour from overseas at a far cheaper rate?

Sir Digby Jones: If you look at the three pillars of globalisation - goods and services, intercourse around the world, capital flows around the world and the greatest migration of people the world has ever seen - that is basically it. If there is a nation that gets that better than any other in the developed world, it is us. We are more globally engaged, we are more open with people and money, and if people say to me "I do not want the Spanish to own Heathrow" I say "What are they going to do with Terminal 5, take it to Madrid, are they?" We are good at this. We should not be saying you must not come, do not bring your money, what we should be saying is we want to create an environment in which you do want to come and you want actually to risk your money, employ the people, pay the tax, help make Great Britain greater, help build the schools and hospitals. When Sony are thinking of the next bit in five years time we want them to do it in South Wales. Why? There are many reasons: we want a transport infrastructure in South Wales that gets your goods to market and your people to work. We want a tax regime in South Wales, both at the local and the national level where Sony are choosing - and it could be any of them - to keep more of what they have risked, but you will not persuade a multinational, indeed you will not persuade a Welsh company to stay, if all the component parts of the risk analysis in a business are not in place. Increasingly as one moves to a service-based, knowledge-based, knowledge transfer economy, yes you need your roads, railways and airports, yes you need a fiscal regime, but I would say you need your culture which actually is where Wales is excellent, at ease with its nationhood and actually allowing people to be free and develop the culture. People like being in a society that is at ease with itself and I would contrast one or two other parts of the United Kingdom in that respect, and Wales does that brilliantly. If you put all those jigsaw component parts in place but you cannot tap into a reservoir of skilled people, in a knowledge-based economy you are history. People do not invest in a country just because of the skill base, they do not invest in a country just because the airport is brilliant, they invest in a country for an amalgam of reasons. You have all got to work very, very hard - we have, I have, everybody has got to work very hard - to get all those component parts working in the right direction, one of the greatest ones of which in a knowledge-based economy is the people.

Q775 Mr Jones: If you are Pimlico Plumbers - or for that matter Porthmadog Plumbers - why should you bother training up someone in Pimlico or Porthmadog when you can actually get someone in from Poland, which is effectively what is happening?

Sir Digby Jones: It is a huge challenge and you are absolutely right, that is the biggest challenge of all. If I can get- not abuse - somebody from Poland at £6.00 an hour why am I going to pay £6.00 an hour to someone who cannot read? You are so right.

Q776 Mr Jones: In terms of training, is that not a major impediment?

Sir Digby Jones: Yes, it is. Put it this way: the Pole in our Porthmadog Plumbers example is not going to stay here for the rest of his life, he is actually going to go home. He is going to work here for three or four years, he is going to send his money home, build up enough to buy a home, buy a business, do something in Poland. They are not going to be the type of immigrant that in the past has basically come here forever; they will not be the burden on the health service and pension system in years to come. If I am even half right - because you are both shaking your heads - what are we going to do when they do go home, because the next lot ---

Q777 Mr Jones: Import some more.

Sir Digby Jones: The problem with that is that there are two big challenges. One is that as Poland gets richer the need to come will be less and, secondly, Germany has to open her borders to these people next year by law.

Q778 Mr Jones: That is true.

Sir Digby Jones: If I could just pop across the border and do all this, why am I going to come all the way to England or Wales, other than of course we speak English and they do not? Other than that the competition for these people next year will be immense, so if we do not do our own we have a problem. That does not persuade Porthmadog Plumbers but I would hope it would persuade a Member of Parliament.

Q779 Mrs James: I want to come to vocational training now which we have already touched upon, particularly the evidence that you gave, Professor Reynolds, and in your oral evidence. You talked about the education system in the Czech Republic and the differences; do you think that the education system in Wales should provide a more vocationally-orientated option for pupils, particularly at secondary level?

Professor Reynolds: The answer would be to say that in part we are under the pathways and so on. There are academic pathways, there are mixed academic and vocational pathways and there will be pathways which are heavily vocational from 14 onwards, so an increasing number of people from 14 to 16 to 18 will be on a vocational route, that is true, but the issue is the extent to which that will be effective if it is something that every school tries to do with a limited number of pupils, and here is the issue about the Czech Republic, potentially it is done best with a mass because you get critical mass. I personally think that we in Wales should follow the evidence and maybe have some trials about whether specialised schooling and not just specialised streams would be the answer. The difficulty there of course is that if work-related skills and vocational skills have not had high status within the school that is teaching those things, then you may not get many people. That is the difficulty, so I think we should run some trials to see if it is possible to work things out that way.

Q780 Mrs James: Would that help with the global challenges that we have got and that we need to change? We have talked about the churn and we have talked about how people have got to be constantly changing and preparing for the differences.

Professor Reynolds: The answer is I do not know but we should see. One of the defects in our discussion so far is that we have tended to think of skilling and education as just producing as it were work-related skills defined in a narrow sense, but most employers would say that the key problem is actually the social outcomes of the education system, it is the worker's capacity to collaborate with other workers in a team, and there are things that we could do here, for example, in Wales - which England has kind of dabbled in though maybe not very effectively. There are systems from America of something called collaborative group work whereby for half a lesson maybe children work collaboratively in groups on a task. There is not much of it in Welsh secondary and primary schools, there is a bit more in England but not much of it there and a whole lot more in America. What you learn in the collaborative groups is you learn politics and you learn how to tell people who are wrong that they are wrong, some people are the chairs, some are the secretaries of it and you learn to create a collaborative product whilst at the same time working on your own. It is the kind of thing one could bring very easily into the Welsh primary and Welsh secondary school system where there is a will; the difficulty with most teaching is that it is still a heavily individual thing and if you have groups they are not collaborative. For me the thing to do would be to address the knowledge base of children and young people, but also to think how we might give them the social attributes and social skills which that kind of emerging local economy would need. In that respect Wales could steal a march on England, which has kind of dabbled in it but not particularly successfully.

Sir Digby Jones: I completely agree with that. At the moment the companies investing in China, one of the problems they are having is that the single child policy in China for the last 15 years means that they have developed a whole generation of usually boys who actually have never ever been anything but the centre of attention and the apple of their mother's eye, and suddenly they are being asked to collaborate and be in teams. It is a big deficiency.

Professor Reynolds: Their weakness is not in the academic sphere where, frankly, they beat us, it is in the social areas where we have technologies to enable young people to work together and which, if we put them in every school, would give our young people probably self esteem plus the capacity to collaborate.

Sir Digby Jones: I agree with that.

Q781 Mrs James: When we were visiting the Czech Republic I was speaking to the mayor of one of the towns we were at and we were talking about the gymnasium systems, and he identified that it was very common to our experience here in Wales in terms of the role of apprentices. He was bemoaning the fact that there were fewer and fewer apprenticeships and it was quite ironic really that he and I were comparing notes on this. The Leitch Report recommends that we should have a dramatic increase in apprenticeships; do you think that this would help face the global challenges or is there another issue that we should take on board?

Sir Digby Jones: Did I understand you to say that the gentleman who was having a bleat was bleating about his economy not our economy?

Q782 Mrs James: Yes.

Sir Digby Jones: Right, because I was going to say that in Wales and in the UK generally the apprenticeships drive is actually on the up in a big, big way. It hit its nadir about eight or nine years ago and we have now got about three times as many apprentices as we had then.

Professor Reynolds: But with correspondingly high dropout rates. That is the worry, I think.

Sir Digby Jones: Yes, the challenge is now not the system. The Government should be congratulated on this, and employers should, to be fair. The thing started well, there are three times as many, but one reason is that if you have three times as many you are going to get more dropouts, simply on the statistical analysis, but the other thing is that I said earlier on about do not just have them licking the stamps and making the tea, you have to make it meaningful, and that is a bit of a problem. The other thing where Wales really could steal a march - and I am forming this view more and more as I get round and see in my job as the UK skills envoy - is why 16? What is so special about 16? 16 was an age that was pulled out of the air - my learned friend will tell me when it was, 1964?

Professor Reynolds: It was 1971.

Sir Digby Jones: Some Secretary of State for Education, well-advised by certain people, said 16. It is like the Clapham Junction of education, everything changes at 16. Why? There are many 14-year olds today - the world has changed, we have all moved on, life is different - who should be in a learning environment for sure but should be in a more work-related learning environment - it might be the public sector, this is not a business issue. They should be in a structured learning environment within a business or employment surrounding. They would be less disruptive in the classroom, they would let teachers get on and teach, they would get out of the way of the ones who wanted to stay and, more importantly, need to stay because we need the people who go through A-levels and university and all the rest of the stuff. When the Government said we want them to stay and learn until they 18, I think they are absolutely right. They never ever said stay at school until 18, the newspapers wrote that, but they did not. They actually said stay and train until 18 and that is absolutely right, but get them out of the classroom. What is the point? I do not want this societal driver - and again Wales could really win here - to deliver loads and loads of people with an upper second class honours degree in basket-weaving.

Q783 Mrs James: My next question actually touches on this because it is about the Sector Skills Councils in Wales. How successful have they been in promoting vocational training because you have both mentioned that there is still this idea that it is a second-class option, that somehow it is subservient, that you are going into different service industries. You need a different set of skills but particularly in the tourism industry, which I was involved in, it is very difficult to attract high quality young people.

Professor Reynolds: Part of the Welsh problem I think may be the FE sector and what it is in Wales by comparison with elsewhere. The FE sector is where a lot of skills training is done, it is where a lot of our adult returners go, it is where a lot of people go at 16 or 18 if they want to do vocational courses. All the evidence is that it is enormously varied because you have FE colleges in Neath and Port Talbot which take an entire achievement range, and you could in let us say one of the valleys have a college which has never taken that because the grammar schools took 40% or 50% and therefore their sixth form just hoovered up everybody who might have done A-levels or top end vocational routes. The colleges there would have been more menial as it were in the diet they were able to offer, and if you think about the other problems of our colleges there is the whole issue of funding, a very, very aged teaching force, a lack of management development of their leadership, the lack of decent performance indicator systems which the English colleges have now got through the Learning and Skills Council. There are lots of things that could be improved about the colleges in Wales that might do the job of improving the image of vocational skills.

Q784 Mrs James: Leitch sees this as key, does he not?

Professor Reynolds: Yes, and there is the inquiry at the moment in Wales into the FE sector, but many issues have not really been thought-through about that. If it is going to be demand-led funding following people whether they go to colleges or schools, the schools and colleges are going to be competing and yet the only way you can make sense of trying to create a better FE route is in certain circumstances planning an area so that maybe the school does not do anything after 16, the colleges did it all. In other words there is a mealy-mouthed discussion about this area, it really has not been thought through. FE college improvement to me would be a key to improving the image.

Q785 David Davies: Is the higher education sector working with businesses to develop ground rules in Wales and what more could they be doing to produce the sort of graduates they need? Specifically, is the degree in surfing studies that was and probably still is being offered by Swansea University over a four-year period a good example of how to produce the sort of graduates that Wales needs?

Professor Reynolds: It is a very good example of a vocational qualification.

Q786 Chairman: It is the Swansea Institute.

Professor Reynolds: It is a perfect example of a vocational qualification.

Q787 David Davies: In what way?

Professor Reynolds: Because it is aimed at training persons who will presumably be surfing instructors. I would not patronise it.

Q788 David Davies: It does not take you four years to learn how to surf.

Professor Reynolds: With the greatest respect people patronised geography 50 years ago, it was a new subject. We must be careful not to patronise.

Q789 David Davies: What I can tell you is that I know a lot about surfing, I have done it for 20 years, and you can teach somebody to surf in an afternoon and you can teach them how to teach people how to surf in a lot less than four years, and a surfing instructor gets paid probably, if they are doing very well, £10 to £15 an hour.

Professor Reynolds: I know something about surfing too and I know some surf instructors and they would say different.

Sir Digby Jones: I know nothing about surfing and all I would say is if I had been spending four years on that, to a degree qualification, and only that, this is not where this should be. If what you were doing was saying the predominant thing is to develop the surfing instructor who understands the surfing industry and who can then very much get into the tourism side of life, but if the four years - and I say this in complete ignorance - is all about just surfing I think I am with you. If actually you can turn it into how surfing can be part of the tourism offering, the business offering and understanding about managing people, getting the skilling right.

Professor Reynolds: Actually, that is what it is in absolute fairness.

Sir Digby Jones: As I say, I know nothing about surfing.

Professor Reynolds: That is what they try to make it.

Sir Digby Jones: That is the important thing and we have to get away from this idea that it is a sole technical subject, that is not what it should be. By the way, we should be saying if it was not a degree but another type of vocational qualification it should be up there and treated the same - different but of the same standard.

Q790 David Davies: But four years in university.

Sir Digby Jones: That is not where we are very good actually.

David Davies: Why four years, why not do it in one year or two years at the most. Why does it have to be four years?

Chairman: That question has been answered now. Mr David Davies, another question, please.

Q791 David Davies: Should teaching and training be promoted as a more valued profession? The obvious answer to that is yes, but I will throw it out anyway.

Sir Digby Jones: I will just make one comment about it generally. It is vitally important that teachers are seen by society as professionals; it is essential that society puts them back on the pedestal of being so vitally important to our community. Professionals are people, in my view, who are defined as those who put the interests of their clients ahead of themselves, that is the difference. You do not win respect in your society, nor do you deserve to be called a professional if you harm a child's development by going on strike. It is as simple as that. Do I believe that teachers and the training of teachers should be so far up there it is not true, yes I do; but they ought to help themselves and understand what the word professional means.

Professor Reynolds: If you look at these surveys that newspapers occasionally do about which is the most important profession, it is interesting that in the last ten years teaching has actually gone up those kinds of league tables, or if you ask people who would you trust, is it the vicar or the doctor or the teacher, teaching has improved enormously in the public esteem as a profession, and of course it has been much easier in recent years to get teachers and there has actually been a boom in recruitment. You are talking about a three or fourfold increase in applications to teach over the last six or seven years and that is good, but the difficulty is that historically - and I am not saying that less able people now go into teaching - teaching, particularly for girls and women, was where you went if you were able because you would have been blocked going into the City of London, or you might have been blocked going into industry. Teaching attracted working class boys who felt they might be being blocked, it attracted girls of all social classes and it attracted people from the country areas because it was the way out of the village and into the town. It is still the case in Czechoslovakia - I do not know if you found this - that teaching would still be attracting those kinds of persons, and I think those persons now go elsewhere in greater numbers. The issue then is if the very, very able are going elsewhere, what do you do to ensure your teachers are as good as they could be? To be honest, frankly, what you do not do is what we do now, which is say the job of teacher education is up to the schools because in the schools they would be being educated by people who themselves went through training 20 or 30 years ago, yet both England and Wales have really said - and it is not just an academic bleating that higher education does not do much of this any more, it is actually saying that the apprenticeship route where you put a teacher down at the foot of the master or the mistress in a school, may not be the way to teach the people whom we expect so much of.

Q792 Mr Jones: Is the Assembly wise to be developing a separate education system, given the global need for standard qualifications that can be easily recognised?

Professor Reynolds: You mean the Bacc.

Q793 Mr Jones: That is one example, and from what I saw in the Welsh Assembly in quite a number of ways from primary school right the way through to the magic age of 16 things are being done differently. I personally do not think it is a good idea within the context of the UK to be developing a separate educational system, but I wondered what both of you thought.

Professor Reynolds: The danger is if different means easier and therefore a qualification can be discredited and devalued.

Q794 Mr Jones: That is a possibility, but let us not necessarily accuse them of that.

Professor Reynolds: No, I was not.

Q795 Mr Jones: That is a possibility but that is almost a separate debate, but what is certain is that things are being done differently and people could come out with different qualifications such as the Welsh Bacc, which may not be instantly recognised, particularly by somebody in an SME in England because they are not going to know what went into it to get that. The easiest thing is to get somebody in with an A-level or a degree because I understand what that is.

Professor Reynolds: Yes, I was saying it is a danger but I do not think in the Welsh situation it is actually happening like that. What often happens is that when separate qualifications get developed by new nations or whatever, or by new parts of a nation, what tends to happen is that there is a bit of resistance whilst people like university admission officers understand the Welsh Bacc and people take time to become accustomed to it. If the people with the Welsh Bacc are as good as the people with just A-levels then the word goes round the university and everybody knows that the qualification means the same thing. You get a short term glitch often, but in the case of the Welsh qualifications my bet is - academics should not bet - that they will be shown to be as good as those things that they have replaced and to have numerous advantages.

Sir Digby Jones: An employer wants one thing, a ticket that he understands, that someone who turns up, I understand that, it has a currency that someone is coming in and saying I am skilled, I have got this, I have got my ticket, and that is universal. Frankly, the need of the employer is to know that they have a certain set of skills, they can prove that they have been trained - this is where I think the Bacc succeeds over the current system - but why on earth anybody thinks that they are going to succeed in life if they have a whole load of technical skills but they cannot write, or that they can write but they cannot add up, or they cannot operate a computer. We have to get them to be more rounded and employable, and that ought to be formalised into some form of ticket. In that I think the Bacc succeeds.

Professor Reynolds: The Welsh Bacc has that too because the core of the Bacc is doing exactly that; in IT, numeracy and literacy and, interestingly, some of the social outcomes that we were talking about.

Sir Digby Jones: You can actually say here is my ticket and I am more technically based, but the employer will know that they can still do the other stuff. That is why I think it will succeed actually.

Q796 Chairman: Can I just ask one final question about higher education? Universities always pride themselves in locating themselves in a global context, but is it not one of the paradoxes of today that that is increasingly the case but also they have to focus locally as well? If that is the case, do you believe, as I do, that universities in Wales and elsewhere have the lead role in raising awareness about the importance of skills?

Sir Digby Jones: The universities' role in our society in the twenty-first century will be like it has never been before. Firstly, they are an enormous exporter actually, they are greater earners of foreign currency because of the quality of their product; it is the ultimate in value added actually and innovation. Because of it they are very attractive to people to come, pay money and get some education from all over the world and we should not under-estimate how important to the British economy universities are in the immediate commercial activity. Secondly, the pillar that they represent, the totem that they represent in a local community, because of the fact that the developed world is shifting to a knowledge-based, knowledge development, knowledge transfer economy, then of its own they provide one of the constants in our society. They are no longer elitist, they actually reach out better than they have ever reached, their links with local schools, local businesses, local media, local everything is so much more. I used to go down, when I was at the CBI, and do small dinners of 20 people here, 20 people there and conventionally most people would think they were going to be all businessmen and women but you would more than likely get a couple of vice-chancellors in that room every time. They belong to places like the CBI and the Chamber of Commerce and all of that. They are taking their part in a community in a way they never did and that means that they also have a responsibility over the next century to be that pillar of constancy and development of society in a way that they were not before. Thirdly, they have to link in with the public sector because the public sector are going to have to deliver more for less, so become more productive and more efficient, and the private sector - because they have to create the dosh that is going to pay the tax that is going to pay for it in the first place. Both of those two drivers in our public and private sector in the next hundred years have only come out of the development and the knowledge in our society, and the great emblematic champion of that will be the university.

Professor Reynolds: It is an enormous tension though for universities because one is required to be concerned about research excellence and at the same time to be bothered about one's teaching; it is required to have international esteem yet at the same time remain very close to a patch, a locality, particularly if they have more disadvantaged children coming in and universities are now under more pressure because those kinds of tasks lead you often in different directions, yet somehow we have to handle it and keep it all together. Probably, though, the problems of universities in Wales are in part because historically the Welsh universities offered a broad-based tradition; you could do pretty much any subject anywhere because the tradition was that you went to your local university, which was the Scottish division. What happened less in Scotland - Scotland seems to have maintained the broad base so you could stay in your home or in your home patch and go to your local university, and what we did in Wales was to very much follow the English pattern in departmental closures which means that the close link between a university and a patch is a difficult thing to do in Wales because you may not be able to do the subject in the university on your local patch. The hope is that in Wales we knock together institutions to become sufficiently large that we can re-establish the possibility of going to your local place to do pretty much any subject, rather than just going down the long, lean, thin, vertical route of doing a small number of subjects to try and get research excellence.

Sir Digby Jones: I agree with that.

Q797 Chairman: This has been a most illuminating session; I hope you have enjoyed it, we have.

Sir Digby Jones: Thoroughly enjoyed it, thank you.

Professor Reynolds: Yes.

Chairman: If you feel that there are other issues you wish to raise with us we would be very pleased to receive a further memorandum. It has certainly prepared us for the future sessions, particularly the session with Sir Adrian Webb, who is undertaking, as you know, the review on further education in Wales that relates closely to the Leitch Review. Thank you very much.