|
UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 281-xii House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE WELSH AFFAIRS COMMITTEE
Globalisation and its impact on Wales
Tuesday 12 June 2007 SIR ADRIAN WEBB Evidence heard in Public Questions 871 - 937
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Welsh Affairs Committee on Tuesday 12 June 2007 Members present Dr Hywel Francis, in the Chair Mr Wayne David Nia Griffith Mrs Siân C James Mr David Jones Albert Owen Hywel Williams Mark Williams ________________ Memorandum submitted by Sir Adrian Webb
Examination of Witness Witness: Sir Adrian Webb, Non-Executive Director, National Assembly for Wales Executive Board, gave evidence. Q871 Chairman: Good morning. For the record, Sir Adrian, could you introduce yourself? Sir Adrian Webb: Certainly. Sir Adrian Webb, non-executive director of the Assembly Government Management Board and chairing a review of further education in Wales. Q872 Chairman: Thank you for coming along today and thank you in particular for your very helpful memorandum. You may know that this inquiry into globalisation has found the issue of skills extremely important to us and we have been taking quite a lot of evidence and it is rather timely that the Welsh Assembly has decided to respond to the Leitch Report by inviting you to head this review of further education. I understand that you will be reporting in the Autumn; could you outline briefly what are your emerging findings? Sir Adrian Webb: Yes. Can I be clear that I will not outline possible recommendations at this stage; you will understand why. Perhaps I could underline too that I will be speaking in a personal capacity, especially because I am chairing that working party. The issue really falls into two big blocks, one of which is the skills of the existing workforce, which is what Leitch was addressing, and clearly that is absolutely critical because those already in work or of working age will form the vast majority of the working population for a decade and a half to come. The first big issue, therefore, is how do we up-skill the existing workforce and that ranges from, at the one end, how do we correct the lack of basic skills and indeed the lack of educational training up to level 2 in the existing workforce, and at the other end it is about how do we ensure the further development of high skills in the workforce. That is one block and, if you like, that is the stock issue, that is the stock of skills in the stock of the workforce. The other issue is the flow and the skills that the 14 to 19 year olds are going to acquire in that period of education and training and take into the workforce. There we have a whole series of issues; perhaps the most important in some ways is how do we develop a broader and higher quality range of pre-vocational and vocational education at 14 to 19, but remembering the context of demographic change and falling rolls we have to do that in a way which is complicated by those falling rolls. The critical issue for us is, how do we move from a position in which people want excellent institutions - schools and FE colleges - to one in which people understand that we need excellent institutions embedded in really good networks. You have to network the institutions because they are not going to be sufficient in themselves, either to give the breadth or, given demographic change, in some cases to survive. Those are the two big blocks of issues that we have having to grapple with. As I said, forgive me, I will not talk about recommendations at this stage. Q873 Chairman: In your call for evidence you have used phrases like a "broad 'whole system' view of future needs". Sir Adrian Webb: Yes. Q874 Chairman: A grand sweep of things. Taking that analogy further, how can you actually anticipate future skills needs in such a rapidly changing global situation? Sir Adrian Webb: I guess again there are two quite different answers to that. One is how do you try to anticipate quite specifically the skill needs of the future and changes in skill needs. A lot of work has been done inside the Welsh Assembly Government in the process of, for example, spatial planning, the spatial planning regions have done a lot of analysis, so there is a lot of analytical work at national and at regional level about how skill needs may change in the future. Obviously, major employers and not only major employers but employers in fast-moving industries also engage in exactly the same activity; we have to bring those things together, we have to bring the ability of employers to look forward and the ability of government to look forward in terms of future skills needs, and that is partly about integrating the different departments in the Welsh Assembly Government, it is partly about ensuring that the information is turned into real understanding at regional and local level, not just national level. That is about how do we anticipate specific skill needs and how they change? The other issue is more fundamental in one sense: how do we ensure that we provide a good, broad, basic education which will enable people to go on learning through life, because the most critical, almost fundamental, guarantee that will adjust to changing skills demands is to ensure that people are prepared and able to go on learning through life. Lifelong learning has become a cliché, one of the biggest tasks we have to face is that a substantial proportion of the young age population in effect disengaged from education very early and they are never going to be lifelong learners unless we do something significant about them. That is about enhancing the motivation to learn through life and enhancing the confidence to go on learning through life, enhancing the learning skills needed to go on learning through life. There is a fundamental answer and there is also a specific skills answer. Q875 Albert Owen: Good morning, Sir Adrian. The review is charged to look at the "mission and purpose of further education in Wales". Sir Adrian Webb: Yes. Q876 Albert Owen: You are speaking in an individual capacity but what is your definition of the mission and purpose of further education and, importantly, how do you see it in the wider globalisation context? Sir Adrian Webb: That is quite a difficult one. In England there was the Foster review of further education institutions and in fact what Foster said was that there is one paramount mission for further education institutions, and that is about delivering the skills needed for the economy. I do not think actually we can say that in Wales, I do not think Wales would want us to say that. We have to say that the mission of further education is complex, it has multiple facets. For example, further education always has been and should be about developing skills beyond basic education; that is the very notion of what further education is and it is broader than further education colleges in that sense, it is work-based learning too. Further education has always been and I think has to go on being giving people a second chance, those who were not effective learners at school age. As I indicated in the paper I sent in, further education has a very important function, even adult leisure learning has an important function in terms of enhancing the social skills of people. An extra year of learning actually increases the social skills, the social gain. People live healthier lifestyles, there is lower criminality among populations that have longer periods of learning but fundamentally we have also got to say that further education colleges have to be with employers, have to be the powerhouse of developing a local or regional economy. Q877 Albert Owen: Are you saying we have a broader outlook on FE than England does? Sir Adrian Webb: I would not want to comment on England. Q878 Albert Owen: You mentioned England. Sir Adrian Webb: I know I did, I said the Foster report in England. I am saying that in Wales we need a broad vision, and that makes it slightly difficult to give a one-sentence answer to what is the mission and purpose, but I think it personally would be a mistake to narrow that mission and purpose down so sharply that it is only about skills for the economy and skills for the present economy. Q879 Albert Owen: To take that a step further, does the FE sector in Wales measure itself against our near neighbours, England and Scotland, rather than Ireland, the rest of Europe and indeed internationally? Sir Adrian Webb: In some ways I would love to know what individual FEIs do. I guess the first answer is that Wales being a small country contiguous with England means you cannot ignore what is happening in England, you cannot ignore performance in England and the best FEIs, sure, are looking across their shoulder and saying how are things happening in England, not least in things like mergers of FEIs in England, some them becoming very large as a result of competition in the marketplace, which is a bit different from Wales. To answer your question differently, we do need the confidence in Wales to begin to properly benchmark our performance, properly benchmark the performance as a country but properly benchmark the performance of individual institutions as well. If we are serious about world class, that has got to be international, but the Beecham Review argued that one of the things Wales does need to do is to select baskets of countries which are not dissimilar to itself in terms of size, in terms of power if you like, economic power, and to benchmark itself against those specifically. I would argue that there is an important benchmarking job to be done which is not systematically yet being done, but should be. Q880 Albert Owen: One final point. You mentioned comparing like size countries, but I was talking about England and other near neighbours because there is an issue of course on the borders. Is there close co-operation between colleges because between them they have a large catchment area, and what might divide them is Offah's Dyke? Sir Adrian Webb: There are particular problems along the border in terms of how institutions relate to each other; that affects universities too. I may come back to this, but there is emerging a quite fundamental distinction between England and Wales in their approach to public services in that England has a variety of approaches but one of them and a big part of one is, if you like, a marketisation of the public sector, to drive competition by individual choice. That is much less clear in Wales. There are forces for competition in the way we fund institutions, but there is a philosophy which says what is much more important is to collaborate across institutional boundaries. The answer is it varies, but there is quite a fundamental philosophical distinction now which occurs around about Offah's Dyke between the overall philosophical approach to how we run public services. Q881 Mr Jones: Sir Adrian, your memorandum to the Committee notes that "the Leitch Report ... has created a UK agenda to which Wales must respond". Sir Adrian Webb: Yes. Q882 Mr Jones: What do you see as the main challenges for Wales presented by Leitch and how successfully is Wales responding? Sir Adrian Webb: Wales has not produced as yet a systematic response to Leitch, there are bits of a response, but partly because a systematic response will be embodied in the response to this report that I am developing, so we just need to note that Wales has quite specifically deferred a comprehensive response to Leitch. What are the challenges? First and foremost, as I said before, quite rightly Leitch identified the need to up-skill the existing workforce because the flow of new entrants into the workforce will not dramatically change the skills in the workforce, we do have to up-skill the existing workforce. That is about investment and it is also about saying what is the role of the state. Leitch was very clear about this, and I do not disagree at all, that the fundamental role of the state is to be involved where the market fails. If you look at people in employment, employers do a pretty good job of up-skilling their workforce, but intend obviously to up-skill those people who already have a base in education and training and in skills. What that means is a market failure; a significant body of people in work who have a poor educational background, low levels of skills and who will not be readily invested in by their employers. That therefore is about basic skills, raising people to level 2, as I said earlier helping people to have the confidence to begin to learn again and to go on learning, so it is those areas of market failure in the existing work force that the state really has to invest in and address. One of the problems about that is that some of the least efficient learning is with those who are adult but do not have a good educational background; making up that deficit is actually a very difficult task. The other big issue from Leitch is to engage employers, and that is not only about engaging the employers in what are their present needs and do we match their present needs precisely, it is also about quite an important issue, which is do all the courses available actually deliver skills which employers can use? A number of courses do at times have an academic component without providing the skills training which employers need and will recognise at the end. The third thing, which we discussed before, is involving the employers in looking forward and saying what will the future skills needs be in Wales and, above all, how can we raise the level of performance of the Welsh economy because it is running at a relatively low skill level. Q883 Mr Jones: On that point Leitch presents a pretty bleak analysis of the UK's performance in terms of skills, that the UK lags behind its competitors and you say that in relation to the 30 OECD countries the UK is 17th on low skills, 20th on intermediate skills and 11th in high skill levels. How does Wales relate to the rest of the UK within those things, are we doing better or worse? Sir Adrian Webb: In a few areas we are doing better, generally we are doing slightly worse, but I think there is a different issue. When Leitch says we lack skills, there is a skills deficit, we are behind other nations, that is a message which may make a lot of sense in, say, the South East where the economy itself has a momentum and is driving forward. The problem with Wales is really rather different; the problem in Wales is to stimulate the economy and take it up the value added chain to give Wales more jobs which are high-skilled jobs. To put it differently, in Wales we have a fundamental problem that you need two hands to clap: we need the training on the one hand but we need to drive the economy forward on the other so that they can absorb higher skills. A skills deficit, therefore, is not necessarily as disastrous for the present Welsh economy, what is potentially disastrous is that the present Welsh economy is not demanding high level skills. You have got to have two hands to clap. Q884 Mr Jones: In a way it is very much chicken and egg. Sir Adrian Webb: It is chicken and egg and it does mean that you have to have an integrated approach to economic development on the one hand and the development of skills on the other. As I say, in the South East of Wales you do not have to worry so much about the economic development, it is driving itself and the demand for skills is driving itself. Q885 Mr Jones: Clearly not in the rest of Wales. Sir Adrian Webb: In little bits of Wales but it is pockets, and for much of Wales the high value added jobs are not growing fast enough, we are not growing the demands for high skills fast enough. Q886 Mr David: As a supplementary to what you have said, Sir Adrian, you did mention that there is a need in Wales for a greater integration between skills development and economic development. Some people have suggested therefore that there is a case to be made for restructuring the departments in the Welsh Assembly Government so that skills are linked formally with economic development. Sir Adrian Webb: You may say that; I could not possibly comment. Can I put it differently? There is a conundrum is there not that if you leave a skills agenda with education you could argue that the skills and the vocational will not get the driver that it needs, but it would get that driver if you ally skills and vocational with economic development. Indeed, in Scotland of course they have allied higher education to economic development in that way. There is another, equally fundamental argument. If you take skills and vocational into the economic portfolio you split the educational portfolio, and the most fundamental issue for me at the moment is how do you get high quality vocational education which is not seen to be in some way subordinate to the traditional academic route to GCSE and A-level? Either way you have potential disadvantages. Personally, I do not think structural solutions very often answer our problems; what we actually need is to make sure that whichever way it goes there is integration across those departmental boundaries so that they do not operate in silos. That is true at the national level, it is true at the regional level, it is true at the local level. Q887 Chairman: Could I follow up on that point? You were asked earlier about international comparisons and you responded by saying that Wales should look at similar size countries. Is there an ideal model that you could identify elsewhere? Sir Adrian Webb: No, but Wales is looking rather seriously at what kinds of countries it should be comparing itself with, but it is not just about size, is it? It is also about characteristics of Wales. We do need to look at other countries that have had a low skill equilibrium but have changed that, so we need role models if you like of countries which have significantly changed and the level at which their economies perform. If they were smaller countries that would be good because you have to recognise that a large economy has a powerhouse that a small country does not have, but then you begin to narrow it down and make it ever more difficult to find a comparator. How can we find a country which is relatively small which has an aging industrial infrastructure like ours, but which has overcome that and is driving forward - how many of those are there in the world? What I am saying is I think we need a systematic approach to benchmarking, to test the reality and to find examples. We have to learn from elsewhere. Q888 Mr David: Following on in a sense from what you said about the best way is not always to find structural solutions to the issues that we are talking about, the Leitch Report for example talks about "embedding a culture of learning" and it also talks about "raising awareness and aspiration" which are all well-meaning phrases of course but profoundly difficult to achieve. How do we begin to move towards the achievement of those objectives? Sir Adrian Webb: For a significant though minority part of the population a culture of learning is embedded. We have a substantial body of young people who know that they are going to go on learning for life. If you want to give reality to those phrases the big issue that we really face is that if we do nothing there is a widening gulf between those who are already embedded in the culture of learning and those who are fundamentally not embedded in the culture of learning at all. For me to give meaning to having a culture of learning actually is about overcoming the problems of those who disengage, those who do not acquire basic skills, those who do not acquire the confidence to go on learning, those who do not acquire the learning skills to go on learning. For me a culture of learning is actually about that disadvantaged group, and it is a big group, it is not homogenous, it has different needs. Sometimes it is fundamental basic skills, sometimes it is actually about learning later in life but it is about addressing that issue, it is not an easy issue to address and it is not a cheap issue to address. Q889 Mr David: The next question in a sense goes from the general to the quite particular and I wonder if you could say a little about Sector Skills Councils and how you see their role in articulating and championing the particular needs of the Welsh economy. Sir Adrian Webb: We have to recognise that Sector Skills Councils will and are resourced to operate at a fairly general strategic level. They cannot get into the detail of the skills needs in a locality, let alone the detail of the future skills needs of a locality. We then have to recognise that Sector Skills Councils are not hugely well resourced across England and Wales and certainly they are quite variable in terms of the resources that they have to apply within Wales. Not all of them have an officer dedicated wholly to Wales or a team dedicated wholly to Wales, some of them share that with other bits - the South West of England or whatever. We have to recognise, therefore, that Sector Skills Councils basically will operate within Wales at a fairly strategic level, they will operate in terms of identifying and policing the learning routes and the qualifications process and what we need to do in Wales is to bring together those bits of an even more strategic Welsh Assembly Government approach at the national level. What we are talking about - I said right at the beginning about networks, networks of schools and FE colleges. We have to have local networks of FE colleges and schools which are providing a broad range of academic and vocational style of learning and they have to be closely integrated with their local employers. The Sector Skills Councils cannot do that, we have to find mechanisms for doing that in Wales ourselves. Q890 Mr Jones: Sir Adrian, you have commented on the role of the Sector Skills Councils; could you tell the Committee something about the role of the Skills Commission and what effect you feel that would have in Wales? Sir Adrian Webb: I cannot tell you what it will do because it is still a piece to be developed, but as I indicated I think the critical thing is to ensure that at a Wales strategic level we are bringing together a lot of information that we have from employers, from people organisations such as the TUC, CBI, FSB and so on. From the Welsh Assembly Government departments themselves we bring that together and turn that information into understanding the direction of travel for Wales. That is the critical role that the Commission will have to embrace; it has to cut across government departments, it has to cut across government, employers, people organisations, academe, so it really has to be a powerhouse for understanding the needs of Wales at present and try to anticipate the crucial needs for Wales into the future. Q891 Mr Jones: Presumably also it will need to interface with the DWP. Sir Adrian Webb: Yes. Q892 Mr Jones: As well as with devolved institutions. Sir Adrian Webb: Yes, it certainly will, and as I said in the piece I gave - do not misunderstand me, I am not pointing a finger at DWP - non-devolved departments do not necessarily always have the freedom in Wales to do something quite different to that which they are doing in England, but it may well be that we need non-devolved departments to do things differently in Wales in order to really drive the Welsh agenda along. I do not comment in any more detail about that, but it is terribly important that we ensure that non-devolved departments can work fully with devolved activities in Wales and that they have some degrees of freedom to do things differently in Wales where that is appropriate. Q893 Mr Jones: How could that be achieved? Sir Adrian Webb: It is not so much about national policy, it is about the management of non-devolved functions when they are in Wales and giving some greater degrees of freedom within the management - indeed, the management of performance of those non-devolved functions in Wales. I do not want to be drawn too much on that, if you will forgive me, because I have not yet got to the point in the committee's work where we talk through with the non-devolved agencies, so I do not want to imply that they are unwilling to co-operate before I have even talked with them. I am just outlining a generic issue that arises in our pattern of devolution. Q894 Hywel Williams: Thank you, Sir Adrian, good morning. I might suggest one to you, that the way that the Revenue and Customs are rearranging themselves across England and Wales is having some particular very local effects on local economies, removing comparatively large numbers of people in the higher skills levels from the local economy because of centralisation. I just offer that as an example. You do say in your paper that there is a need for devolved and non-devolved areas of policy to mesh more effectively. Sir Adrian Webb: Yes. Q895 Hywel Williams: I wonder if you could tell us what "mesh effectively" actually means; I was thinking broad mesh for elephants, fine mesh for white mice as it were, but what does that actually mean, to what extent is it already happening and where are the areas for improvement? Sir Adrian Webb: I suppose at the very highest level what is important of course is that general economic policy is supportive of the nature of the Welsh economy. The Welsh economy is significantly more dependent on manufacturing for example at the moment and so policies that affect manufacturing are important; there is that very broad level of mesh. I suppose I would then go down to the kind of example where, for instance, there is a very specific attempt to enhance the economic performance of a region, a sub-region, to begin to tackle economic inactivity such as in the Heads of the Valleys, and that is where you need to ensure that non-devolved functions are able to work effectively in what is a regional strategy. As I said, I do not really want to get into any detail because I have not talked with them about it, but it is the sort of area where, for example - just take a for instance - if that was hugely successful and you reduced the bill for 18 to 21 year olds in terms of benefits, would it not be wonderful if some of that could invested in the very process that one is driving forward, because it is a saving for DWP for the UK but it would be great if that could be invested - it is that sort of issue that we need to begin to think about. There are ragged edges in our devolution. Q896 Hywel Williams: Thinking about the point that you made earlier on about comparative countries, presumably most of the comparative regions have a language and we tend to look at the Basque country which has a similar aging industrial sector and also it is similar in its relationship with central government, is it not? Sir Adrian Webb: Yes, indeed. Q897 Hywel Williams: That is another option is it not? Sir Adrian Webb: Of course, absolutely. The general issue there is that we do need to be serious and active about developing benchmarking, because otherwise the tendency could be either to fool ourselves that we are doing better than we are, or actually the other way, to be overly pessimistic about what could be achieved. Q898 Hywel Williams: Your memorandum offers an example of how a distinctively Welsh approach to education and training might develop, and that is around the school leaving age. In what other ways might a distinctively Welsh approach develop, and what policy challenges are there which would need to be overcome? Sir Adrian Webb: I am not sure about the policy challenges. One of the things that we have going for us and which we need to embed and use and probably modify is the Welsh Baccalaureate, both at GCSE type level and A-level type level. What we have here is potentially a vehicle which can give us a highly flexible mix of vocational-style learning, of experiential style learning if you like, and of the more traditional academic type of learning. Let me be clear about an issue that we have not really discussed. One of the things that I think is crucial is that we develop a vocational style of education, not simply in the sense that we want to develop more higher skills, but because people are motivated to learn in different ways. I was a waste of space in grammar school, I did not perform, and it was by the skin of my parents' teeth that I got into the sixth form. I still did not perform in the lower sixth - I mean, two maths, physics and chemistry; I did not know which way was up. I went back to the sixth form because my mother really pushed and pushed but also because by that time I thought I knew what I wanted to do career-wise, and I went back in and studied economics and so on. I only became motivated to learn when I thought I knew what I wanted to do in life, and what is terribly important is that we do not just talk about vocation-led to mean skills for people who are less bright, or groups that develop skills for people who are less bright. When I talk about vocational education it is about experiential learning, it is about motivating people who need to be motivated by an end goal rather than simply by the love of learning or the desire to learn for its own sake. To get that right, therefore, is terribly important; the Welsh Baccalaureate offers us a vehicle for that because it offers us the flexibility so that rather than have streams which are vocational on the one hand and academic on the other we have the opportunity to mix those within the single qualification. That could be tremendously important, tremendously valuable. Q899 Mrs James: I would like you to turn now to investment in education and training. The Leitch Report talks about a historic skills deficit throughout the UK and your memorandum also highlights a "low skills equilibrium". What level of investment does education and training require to make Wales grow more competitive? Sir Adrian Webb: You will have to be content with me saying biggish. We are looking with the Assembly Government at the moment at what the implications are, but let me put two different responses to you. One is that I think we begin to know fairly clearly and quickly what it is that we need to invest in, the other is that it does not necessarily have all to be new investment, we also have to think quite systematically about how we reallocate, if you like, the resources that we presently have. Remember that I said we are facing a significant demographic downturn; one of the things that we must be very careful about is that we must not, faced with that demographic downturn, simply allow our education system to become more and more inefficient. If it did we would actually have to throw buckets more money into it in order to maintain it, let alone to develop the kind of new things that we need to develop. So it is about efficiency of the existing system, also over time it could be about diverting some of the resources as the school rolls forward, but we know what sort of things we need to spend on. We need to invest in basic skills; that is absolutely fundamental. If kids have not got basic skills by the age of 14 to 16 they are condemned, very largely, so we have to put that first. We have to invest more systematically in those that disengage from education and that is about finding different ways of motivating them, as I said earlier, different ways of engaging them, teaching them outside the school context, teaching them in different ways, changing the curriculum for them, all of those sorts of things. We have got to invest in the disengaged. We have to invest in pre-vocational programmes, 14 to 16 - it is no good just having vocational at 16 or 18, you have to begin to do that earlier partly for motivational reasons - and we certainly have to invest more in vocational education, including a significant investment in apprenticeships, 16 to 19. At the moment apprenticeships are almost exclusively post-19 in Wales but we also have to invest in more apprenticeships post-19 as well, there is an unmet demand there. We will have to invest in perhaps quite a modest but nevertheless an important increased programme in foundation degrees as a bridge into higher education, to level 4 learning and we have to invest capital in our schools. I have to say it is a shock when you go round some of our schools; the state of capital is poor and it is a long-standing problem - it is not a sudden problem, it is not the fault of the Welsh Assembly Government and there has to be a long term investment, but remember that vocational education is often quite capital-intensive. I take one example: beauty and hairdressing. It is tremendously popular, lots of people going into beauty and hairdressing and some people make quips about you would think that the whole of Wales was employed in the beauty and hairdressing industry, but actually it is not a cheap area of vocational learning, it is quite a capital-intensive area of vocational learning. Those are the sorts of things that we have to invest in but I cannot put a figure on it. Q900 Mrs James: One of the things that I notice that you did not mention there was the employer. As we have been taking evidence from employers and talking about the skills gap, how do you think that you can match all those aspirations with giving the employer a voice in that process? Sir Adrian Webb: There are two senses in which you give the employer a voice: one is the structural things that we talked about before, the Skills Commission or whatever you would like to call it, the Sector Skills Councils working there and, as I said, getting them engaged in the local networks of providers. That is tremendously important because it is meeting the needs of the local economy, and that is all about employer voice, i.e. the employer indicating what is needed, whether what is delivered is appropriate et cetera. The other is different and that is do you put more cash into the hands of the employer, and if you do that will you displace the cash the employer would have already spent? There is a case for looking at can we put some more money into the hands of employers in order that they can buy what is genuinely needed, but we do not want to do that in such a way that we are simply replacing what they need to spend anyway. That is quite a tricky one but it is important to recognise that in some areas it may be important to invest more directly so that the employer is more able to purchase what is needed. Q901 Mrs James: Just to pinpoint it, do we see that happening at an earlier age because I am very interested in schools getting involved in the role of education and work and what business skills they need? Sir Adrian Webb: Yes. Q902 Mrs James: Do you think that should happen at an earlier age? Sir Adrian Webb: As I said, I think it is terribly important that schools and colleges are working with employers, yes, in terms of developing the kind of pre-vocational programmes at 14. It is bizarre, is it not, that some of the brightest people in the land go to university to defer choice of career and some of the more educationally disadvantaged people are forced to make choices at 14 which are career-determining. It is tremendously important that we do have the kind of pre-vocational tasters and so on which enable kids to begin to get a sense of "I may want to be in manufacturing", or "No, actually, come to think of it, I did not really like hairdressing" so it is important that we invest in that and it is important that employers invest their time, and it may be the case that small companies may have to find ways of helping them invest their time in that. On the other hand, it would be unfortunate indeed if employers were narrowly constraining people at age 14 to 16 into groups which only led to a particular kind of job, so we have to attain flexibility in those early years, but we do have to get employers engaged because apart from anything else we want them to give kids tasters in the real work environment. There are all sorts of things about that: health and safety, child protection, it is a nightmare, but it is terribly important to develop. Q903 Hywel Williams: In a previous answer you floated the idea of a market model for employers to be better empowered. Sir Adrian Webb: Yes, those are not my words, but yes. Q904 Hywel Williams: In a good market you have a perfectly informed customer. I have been involved for 16 years in selling skills-based training and providing it to mainly the public sector and voluntary sector employers, and my feeling essentially is that if you ask them what they want they ask you what you have got, so in that way they do not know their own minds. Sir Adrian Webb: Sure. Q905 Hywel Williams: How confident would you be that if you empower employers, particularly small employers as we have over a vast swathe of the country, would they know their own mind, either individually or collectively? Sir Adrian Webb: That is a difficult area. There is a lot of argument about whether employers really know what employers need. What I was talking about was empowering employers to create markets where there is quite a specific skills need or a specific skills gap. For example, it already happens, all I am saying is should it happen on a larger scale? It is important when, for example, a new industry moves into an area or when an industry really takes off in an area and grows rapidly. In those circumstances it is not too difficult to know what the immediate skills needs are and it is important to create a market for those skills. All I am saying is at the margin it may be better to push some of that money through employers that create the demand rather than simply push it into the providers directly. It is an issue we need to look at. I am not talking about something new, it does happen, it is a question of whether we expand that somewhat. Q906 Mrs James: If I can just continue this theme, it appears to me that investment in skills, as your paper states, "is not necessarily in itself a route to growth unless we ensure that employers are able to utilise the skills available". How do you match those two things up, that the investment is there and how they then go on to operate that and meet the targets? Sir Adrian Webb: There are different ways of doing it. One is simply to say we will over-invest in skills and we will trust that the economy will come right. If you like it is the Ireland model; Ireland over-invested in skills for decades. I did some economic research and worked with people in the Irish economic social development planning process way back and they were doing economic and social planning for decades before the Irish economy took off and they were over-investing in skills. The problem is that that is just a bit hit and miss. It happened for them, but it happened for a variety of other reasons and then you have a skill pool that you can really draw on to drive the economy forward. What I am suggesting is that you need a whole range of areas in which we make those two hands clap more effectively. It is the strategic approach across the government departments in Wales that says these are the ways we need the Welsh economy to go, we can influence it somewhat. We need to make sure that where we are influencing it then the skills base is there and we do need to look at where there is the potential or actual development of economic clusters and say, okay, in those areas how do we ensure that the employer, the providers and the Assembly Government at regional level is engaged to ensure that that cluster of activities - for example petrochemical in Pembrokeshire - is supported by a cluster of skills and we do not fall short, we do not create skills gaps. That does happen at the moment, we do create skills gaps at times. The other, as I said, is to take a particular and focused approach to areas of economic deprivation, to areas of economic inactivity such as the Heads of the Valleys and have a major strategic onslaught which cuts right across all government departments and say we are going to do our darnedest to raise the performance of this area in every respect. Some more of that is also needed, so it is a combination of these different things; there is no one easy solution, if there was I am sure we would have done it already. Q907 Nia Griffith: Thank you very much, Sir Adrian, it has been very heartening to hear your many comments, particularly this issue of how you get the skills to match the economy and also the need for 14 year olds to be well motivated and have options to look at about where they might be going in the future. I speak here as a former teacher and schools inspector, and I am interested in your comment about the fundamental issue being raised by employers relating to basic skills. Are we saying that we are failing a certain sector; are we still failing, for example, the bottom 30%? Teachers are being motivated to get lots of grades of Cs, but perhaps they are not so motivated to get those Gs and Fs up to Ds and Es, or are we saying that it is right across the sector, and is it an issue to do with motivation and accuracy or is it to do with specific ability groups? Sir Adrian Webb: I think the answer is actually quite a complicated one, so bear with me, but can I comment on your first point fully? What I am saying is that actually Wales faces a much bigger challenge than, say, the South East of England because we cannot just take the Leitch approach. We have to take the Leitch approach, but we cannot just take the Leitch approach. Raising skill levels in and of itself will not drive the economy forward in an economy which is relatively lower skilled, so that is where we need to get these synergies. To go back to your issue, there is undoubtedly a significant body of youngsters who do not have basic skills in numeracy and literacy and it is worse for numeracy of course than it is for literacy. That is one issue and one problem there is that we do not necessarily identify those people early enough and then blitz it, and when we blitz it what we have to do is to find innovative ways of tackling that - for example, tying numeracy and the development of numeracy to the exploration and understanding of your leisure pursuits. It is not just teaching numbers. Q908 Nia Griffith: Would you say that the current GCSE syllabus is actually very abstract, there are a lot of abstract concepts and perhaps what you actually need is a different form, a different approach to numeracy? Sir Adrian Webb: That is where I was coming to because there are conflicting reports about what numeracy and literacy skills mean for employers and there is a fair bit of comment, not least in organisations like the CBI, that even people with GCSE maths and English do not have the numeracy and literacy skills that they want. That is not terribly difficult to understand - let me give you an example given to us by one employer. It is fine for me to take somebody who has GCSE maths and even A-level maths but can they operate as comfortably in imperial and metric measurement systems immediately? No, generally speaking not. That is just a very specific example of the kinds of things employers are looking for, and certainly there is a fair body of comment or at least some evidence which says that what employers mean and want by numeracy and literacy is not necessarily what is delivered by GCSE, certainly not necessarily what is delivered by basic skills numeracy and literacy. Have you done a basic skills test, anybody? It was the first thing I did when I took this role on, and I have done it before. For example, being able to put which version of "there/their" is appropriate in a sentence, i.e. a multiple choice type test of your literacy, is not the same as being able to write a simple report on a problem within a factory about health and safety. If the employer needs somebody to be able to write ten sentences about an incident, you are not testing that in basic skills literacy, you are testing something rather different, so there is a general problem here of what do employers really need, what is it that we really test in basic skills testing and in GCSE and, also, how do you best teach in a way that motivates those who are falling behind? All of those issues have to be addressed. Q909 Nia Griffith: You also mentioned social skills being a key element in employability. Sir Adrian Webb: Yes. Q910 Nia Griffith: They have always been seen as the "soft skills" and often the ones that children dismiss because they do not get a grade for them. How do we actually raise the profile of that and actually integrate that into the school achievement? Sir Adrian Webb: In part that is being addressed in the prominence being given to key skills because key skills try to look at the application of that work, not just at the arithmetical or mathematical skills, and also look at other types of skill. Clearly, employers do say that they want social skills, the ability to work in teams, the ability to offer leadership and that sort of thing. There are some even more indeterminate and different words: creativity. One thing we do know about the future of the economy faced by global challenge is that it will be a much more creative economy requiring people who are much more creative. There is a growing body of research on creativity; I do not think you can teach creativity, but the way you teach can help foster creativity or it can stifle creativity. I am not just talking about creative industries, I am not just talking about filming and that sort of thing, I am talking about people's ability to think out of the box and to have confidence to think out of the box, to develop out of the box. So I think we do need to look at issues like creativity. The other thing that I mention is that the period of education itself confers social gain as opposed to social skills, by which I mean that if you have a longer period of education you will tend to live a healthier lifestyle. If you have a longer period of education you will tend not to fall foul of the law, if you have a longer period of education you will tend to operate in ways which are more conducive to social cohesion and society. One example that came up very strongly with us from an employer was the ability to operate in a multicultural, multiracial society is increasingly becoming an important part of working in some employment contexts, and if people have not got the social skills to work across ethnic, religious and other boundaries then they will be disadvantaged in the workplace in an increasingly complex and diverse society. It is an interesting example of how skills we do not seek to teach directly may nevertheless be quite fundamental to the employability in some businesses or at some levels in some businesses and, perhaps, critical to the economic performance of our society as it changes. In Wales that has an interesting characteristic in that, as you know, most of the ethnic diversity in Wales is concentrated in certain places. What we now have is an influx of Eastern Europeans which is coming into other bits of Wales, and that is creating an educational problem in terms of English as a second language. Areas that did not have to have a high level of infrastructure for English as a second language are now having to face that issue quite sharply. Q911 Chairman: I am conscious of --- Sir Adrian Webb: Time. Chairman: Not so much time but a number of members of the Committee who want to come in with supplementary questions. Mr Wayne David had put one down earlier. Q912 Mr David: Very briefly and following on from what you said, like Nia speaking as a former youth policy officer, many of the skills you are talking about are the sort of skills which are developed by the youth service, and one of the things that we need to recognise is to ensure that the youth service, for example, is part of and integrated in the skills and education programme. Do you agree with that? Sir Adrian Webb: That is absolutely right, and one of the things that is interesting about it is you asked what is distinctive in Wales, I said the Welsh Baccalaureate, but one of the interesting things is that Wales has put a distinctive emphasis on non-formal and informal learning. That is tremendously important, it is important to capture that and, as you say, it can happen through youth programmes, the youth service and all sorts of other activities. We also have to remember that young people are now gaining information in far more diverse ways than they used to do with the internet and networking, and recognising that that kind of informal and non-formal learning will be crucial is important. The difficulty of course is how do you recognise it, and if you begin to start placing it into qualification frameworks you kill it dead when you want to foster it. Q913 Mark Williams: I want to briefly go back to the issue of basic literacy and numeracy and where you see the roots of any deficiencies that we have talked about actually lying. Some would say that target-led teaching has meant that people leaving the primary sector have then faced hurdles at the early stages of Key Stage 3 which have then had ramifications further along the line. What is your view on that? Sir Adrian Webb: Let us start with the stark fact that the proportion of people who perform well in numeracy and literacy declines over time in the secondary school period. What that tells us immediately is that while there may be a group of people who find numeracy and literacy skills very difficult to grasp, and there may be a group who find it increasingly difficult to keep up as the demands get racked up through secondary school, the biggest problem is those that are disengaging progressively during the secondary school period. It is that that we really have to capture and it is that that we have to really turn round. For some people a non-academic style of study may be a problem, for some people an academic style of study is a problem, not because it is inherently a problem but because they do not see its relevance - and we are back to motivation and where I was at school - and for some people the very culture of school is the problem and getting them out of the school context may be important. If you go and talk to people in further education colleges and say why did you go to a further education college after school to do GCSEs or A-levels, a significant proportion will say because actually they like the environment, it is not just the teaching or the teaching methods, it is the environment, it is an environment which is if you like more adult. Other kids of course thrive on the more structured environment that school offers, so I think we have to take all these things on board: competence - and obviously we need to invest more in those that have the biggest learning disadvantage - confidence and motivation, the context in which you teach but also, as I say, whether you try to engage people in developing basic skills through things like leisure activities and not just formal learning interludes. Q914 Mark Williams: There is an acknowledgement there, therefore, in respect of the report that came out last week, pertinent to England, that the disengagement process for some certainly is not helped by the number of examinations and tests that young people have to endure at a secondary level. Wales obviously led the way in terms of Stage 2 SATs. Sir Adrian Webb: As you know, there is quite a different regime in England and Wales, but that has not meant that we do not have a problem in Wales. I do not know of any evidence which specifically shows that disengagement itself is a product of testing regimes, but clearly the testing regimes must bear quite heavily on those who feel incompetent or lack confidence. Not having testing regimes is not itself a solution, we actually do have to identify people early, we have to invest energy and we also have to find different ways of motivating and teaching. Q915 Mr Jones: Very much on the same theme, one of the most disturbing pieces of evidence I personally heard during the course of this inquiry was from the witness from Admiral Insurance who told the Committee that it was almost invariably the case that graduate employees taken on by that firm were unable to lay out and write a straightforward business letter. I found that disturbing, particularly since I can recall that as part of the English language curriculum when I was at school we were all taught how to lay out and write a business letter. Why is this happening? Why is this no longer part of the curriculum? Surely educators must, must they not, at least be able to guess that a significant proportion of their students are going to go on to a commercial environment where that sort of skill will be essential? Sir Adrian Webb: We could get into quite a long discourse about where education has gone over the last four or five decades on that. Q916 Mr Jones: It was not that long ago. Sir Adrian Webb: I was a university teacher and I first began saying, just a minute, I have a problem; people know what a comma is and what a full stop is but they do not know what a colon and a semi-colon is, and they are not terribly good at paragraphing. I first ran into that as an academic back in the early Seventies, so we have had quite a significant problem of not developing a formal English style and competence in some people - not all - for quite a long period of time. I do not particularly want to go there, but it does illustrate the fact that what employers need in the work context is not necessarily always what we teach in the formal qualifications. Q917 Mr Jones: That is the whole point of my question. Sir Adrian Webb: Yes, and that is something we do have to change. Q918 Mr Jones: If I can just interrupt you there, at one stage it used to be taught, it appears no longer to be taught, and what I am interested in is why that should be the case. Sir Adrian Webb: I am saying I am ducking the question as to why. Q919 Mr Jones: I know you are, but that is why I am pressing you. Sir Adrian Webb: I am ducking the question as to why and you are taking me quite well beyond my FE brief, though you are absolutely right, and we have talked quite a bit about it, if we do not get these things right you can put all the effort you like into further education or into post-16 education or even post-14 education and you will waste quite a bit of it. Q920 Mr Jones: Indeed, that seems to me to be not terribly well targeted. This is a simple basic skill that employers require and it is being neglected by educators. Sir Adrian Webb: We are clear in our inquiry that it is not presently part of our job - goodness knows, a minister might decide it is and then, dear me - to look at curriculum and qualification agencies et cetera because that is a hugely complex area. This is a hugely complex world in terms of curriculum and qualifications; we are not going into that. What I am underlining, absolutely rightly, is that I think it is tremendously important that we listen to what employers need to make people employable and ensure that our curriculum qualifications in schools are delivering as much of that as possible. Mr Jones: My last final point --- Chairman: This is a very long supplementary. Q921 Mr Jones: This is the final point, Chairman, with your permission. Is it fair to say therefore that educators have not been listening as closely to employers in terms of the skills as they ought to have been? Sir Adrian Webb: I do not think that is necessarily true, I think it is reasonable to say there has not been a clear articulation of the employer voice to educationalists; I would not say they have not been listening. As I also just said, the whole world of curriculum and qualifications is an immensely complex one and it is a slow vehicle to turn round, even when you recognise the issue or problem. Q922 Mark Williams: If I can carry on with the skills issue, your memorandum describes quantitative analytical skills as "the bedrock of high value added economic growth - in the service sector as much as in manufacturing and science". Sir Adrian Webb: Yes. Q923 Mark Williams: What more can you tell us about the development of those skills in promoting high value added growth? Sir Adrian Webb: This is an interesting area that I had not really thought about a lot before this. Let me put it this way in terms of what I think the problem is. If you think about it, just about every large organisation now runs on data; it runs on data in terms of planning its business - and I mean the public sector as well as private, I mean service industries as well as manufacturing. Big organisations run on data in terms of the interactions within the company or organisation and with other organisations - they are swapping data all the time - they are running on data in terms of measuring their performance, performance management. What the research is beginning to say - and this is quite a specific body of research - is that what we need is a significantly larger body of people going forward who use a language that they call techno-mathematical literacy. I do not like it; academics are wonderful at inventing these sorts of phrases, let me invent another one, I just talk about quantitative analytical skills. The point they are making is that those are not synonymous with mathematics, they are not synonymous with mathematics A-level or O-level. Let me put it this way: you need the ability of organisation, you need a large body of ability, not simply ITC in the sense of keyboard skills, but the ability to use data and discover, interpret, what they mean. That is one thing, so that is an analytical competence. It is also about confidence in handling data to do that, but perhaps even more fundamentally you need the skill which says that what those data purport to say is not necessarily accurate because the data themselves may be flawed, may not be valid. So you need both the skills to interpret data but also to assess whether the data are themselves giving you the message that they seem to be giving you. Those are higher level skills which, increasingly, every organisation runs on - government departments run on them, this place runs on a lot of that. Service industry is run on it, not just manufacturing, and as the global economy drives us to higher levels of competitiveness it will also drive us to higher dependence on these kinds of quantitative analytical skills. That is the argument. The argument is also that we are not delivering those, even through mathematical qualifications at the moment, and the academic argument is that you need to deliver more of those quantitative analytical skills right across the curriculum, not just in maths, but you also probably need to deliver them at a higher level as well. You will see, for example - it already happens - that you can more systematically develop those kinds of quantitative skills in many courses in university where they are not presently seen as a primary objective of teaching. That is the issue, but how we begin to solve it I do not know for sure; it is an important point to begin to grasp because, as I say, big organisations run on data. Q924 Mark Williams: My background was in primary education and I would like to think that we had some of this structural positioning of issues like that in place, and I think throughout the secondary sector as well. Sir Adrian Webb: Yes. Q925 Mark Williams: However, there is a huge motivational issue there as well, is there not, in getting people engaged in that? You touched on my next question which is that again in your memorandum you talk about mathematics pervading the workplace. Sir Adrian Webb: Yes. Q926 Mark Williams: As much as conventional literacy pervaded working life in the last century, but it is not simply about pushing towards GCSEs. Sir Adrian Webb: No. Q927 Mark Williams: It is almost, to use an education term, using the cross-curricular approach in the workplace as well. Sir Adrian Webb: Yes. Q928 Mark Williams: How, in particular, do you see developing those skills, particularly mathematical skills, in the in-work population? Sir Adrian Webb: Let me separate that into two different issues for you. There is a body of disciplines that fundamentally require some mathematical competence - the science, engineering, technology disciplines. One of the problems there is that if you are locked out of them you are locked out of reasonably secure, reasonably well-paid employment, and one of the other problems is that disproportionately at A-level and therefore through into university those kinds of A-levels are being taken outside the state sector. Disproportionately, those kinds of A-levels are being delivered by the non-state sector secondary schools, so there is a significant exclusion/social justice issue about science, engineering and technology at A-level and going, therefore, through into university. That is one of the things we do need to look at, both in terms of the supply of those higher level science, engineering and technological skills, including maths as a foundation into the workforce, both in terms of what the workforce needs but also in terms of social justice. That is one issue. The other issue, as we were just saying, is there is the need, which is different to traditional mathematical competence, to feel comfortable with data, really feel comfortable with handling data and with analysing data. That is a broader need and that really needs to be developed across the curriculum and, for example, across the curriculum in apprenticeships. All I am saying is I think we need to focus on that more clearly as one of the outcomes that we increasingly need to get from a whole range of learning. Q929 Mark Williams: In practice in the state sector how do you see that cross-curricular approach being pushed forward? Sir Adrian Webb: Pass. I do not know yet, in truth I do not, nor do I know yet how we should in Wales drive the science, engineering and technology agenda, but I do think that we need to look at that seriously, as I said, partly because of what the labour market is likely to need but partly because it is a social justice problem. Q930 Albert Owen: If I could just bring you back to the vocational programmes; we have had a general discussion on the skills and I was interested in what you said in your memorandum about re-branding, redefining vocational programmes and the seamlessness from 14 to 19. You have highlighted the Welsh Baccalaureate as being distinctively Welsh, and I assume you mean by that successful in its early stages. Are you suggesting that we have a junior Baccalaureate at 14 to 16 so that people get used to having those skills that they are going to need in later life, and are you suggesting that that runs alongside GCSEs or do we cut the number of GCSEs down? What is going to be this re-branding that you talk about? Sir Adrian Webb: I think the Welsh Baccalaureate potentially provides us with a framework which can encapsulate GCSEs but can also encapsulate more traditionally academic styles of learning, but can also encapsulate more vocational styles of learning or, if you like, more experiential styles of learning. As I said before, that is about capturing motivation as much as about giving skills, that is tremendously important. You were saying how do we brand that? Q931 Albert Owen: No, you were saying about re-branding vocational programmes in Wales. Sir Adrian Webb: The old saw used to be that we need parity of esteem for vocational, but I do not think we start at that end, I do not think we say we must give parity of esteem to vocational and academic. I actually think we need to begin to dissolve those distinctions, and in my view all education and training from 14 to 19 should be providing a varying mix of knowledge on the one hand and the skills to learn on the other, and also some other kinds of skills - social skills perhaps, employment-related skills, more broadly employment-relevant skills. The mix will vary, it depends on what kids want to do and where they want to go, but all of them should be to some extent in a 14 to 19 curriculum. The Welsh Baccalaureate provides a vehicle for that and all I am saying is that we should look seriously at is this something that can deliver gold for us. Q932 Albert Owen: Beginning at 14. Sir Adrian Webb: Beginning at 14, yes. Q933 Albert Owen: Something has to give; we now have a very restrictive curriculum. Sir Adrian Webb: Yes and no, but as I said we are not specifically looking at that kind of curriculum issue. It may be that coming out of work is the need to look at that kind of curriculum issue systematically; what I am saying is we need to develop much more and much better vocational or pre-vocational strands at 14 to 19 alongside the traditional GCSE type. You could repackage all of that into a 14 to 19 Welsh Baccalaureate and you could modify, the way the Welsh Baccalaureate has been working so far, to create a single qualification which incorporates a mix of more vocational, more academic, more experiential and more didactic styles of learning and content. It is no good arguing for parity of esteem, what we have to do is make those vocational and pre-vocational activities so damn good and so valued by the employer that they become valued by parents, because the problem we have here is a cultural one. It is not just the teachers may want to hang on to kids in the academic stream and so on, for traditional reasons, but parents do not see the value of things other than GCSEs. One of the unintended consequences of expanding higher education so much is that many parents no longer see anything worthwhile that is not relating directly to university, to A-levels. The other thing that we have to do, therefore, is make very clear that all routes can lead through to higher education including the vocational routes. Let me come to that slightly differently. Bizarrely, higher education, I think, has made a much better job for a long period of time at mixing the academic and the vocational than the school system has. After all, universities have been teaching vocational degrees for many, many decades; indeed, they started with a vocational degree which was called the priesthood. Training for the priesthood was vocational, it was a mixture of skills and knowledge, and they have done it with medicine, they have done it with law and so on. However, because the entry qualification to university is purely academic, that has forced the schools to drive down a purely academic route. The entry demands of higher education have distorted what schools were about; that has happened for the whole of the twentieth century, and we have got to change that distortion. We have got to say you can get to level 4 and level 5 through the vocational route and you can do that through school, through apprenticeships, through graduate apprenticeships, you can do it through NVQs and then onto foundation degrees because we have to be able to show that vocational does not mean you are locked out of university. Q934 Albert Owen: Practically, there has to be greater day release into the workplace as well. Sir Adrian Webb: Yes, of course, absolutely. Chairman: I can feel a supplementary coming up on the right-hand side, but have you finished? Albert Owen: I have. Chairman: We are coming to the end of a very productive seminar, although it has been an evidence session. Mr Jones, briefly. Q935 Mr Jones: Very briefly, I promise. I was interested in your comments about non-traditional routes into higher education, which I think is commendable. Is not the difficulty however that in a place as small as Wales a lot of students will be looking to higher education across the border in England or even in Scotland? Sir Adrian Webb: Yes. Q936 Mr Jones: Is not, therefore, an all-UK approach required and not simply a Welsh approach? Sir Adrian Webb: That has been happening for quite a while now. When I was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Glamorgan a very high percentage of our students came into that university without A-levels. They came into the university via NVQ, BTEC et cetera and the largest single group of learners was aged 25 to 35. More than half my students worked part-time, two-thirds of my students were mature if you define them as over the age of 21, but the opportunities to go into university through non-traditional routes have increased enormously because of the new universities. Let me clear about it, it is because of the new universities - not only but especially. What is more problematic is that parents, children and schoolteachers do not realise that, they do not recognise that there are so many opportunities to get into university at level 4 and 5 nowadays which are not the traditional, gold standard A-level route. They simply do not realise it. I frequently talk to parents and say do not worry, let him or her do what they want but remember that there are real opportunities to come into the university at the age of 20 to 30, do not worry about it, there are lots of ways back into higher education. What I think is necessary is to make that much more publicly visible and make it absolutely clear that there are vocational routes through. I would say, just going back to the business of devolution and non-devolution, there is a danger - and some of my colleagues would not like me to say this - that when the polytechnics became universities they were forced into chasing research performance and what I would call "traditional criteria of university excellence". In other words we had a single model of what a good university looked like and it was forced onto the new universities because they wanted to compete, they had to compete. I would feel better in a sense if a new university could say we are out and out about vocational higher education; education that has a strong vocational ethos about it. I would also be more comfortable if I was sure - and do not misunderstand me, I do not know, I do not have the evidence - that the rash of non-vocational degrees that have sprung up are actually genuinely imparting useable skills as well as knowledge, and I do not know about that. It may be something that somebody wants to look at; perhaps you should look at it. Let me end on this note: you can devolve to Wales but you cannot insulate Wales. You cannot insulate Wales from English, particularly English policy. The way in which the universities have competed to perform against a single pro forma of what a good university looks like is English-driven and you cannot escape it in Wales. I will just give you one other example. It is the problem of Wales being, if you like, infected - I do not mean that unkindly - by the policy strands that are in England, which you cannot avoid. Another is academies; academies come left of field in England and you cannot just ignore this policy development in England in Wales, but you have to begin to work very hard to see how you can make it fit, or whether it fits, because you do not necessarily want to drive the Welsh education system by something that is happening in England; equally, you do not want to disadvantage Welsh employers by not doing something that may be very beneficial. It is quite difficult in a small country because devolution can happen, but you cannot insulate it, you cannot insulate Wales in the English policy context. Q937 Chairman: On that note could I once again thank you very much for your attendance this morning, it has been very illuminating. Thank you for your written memorandum and if you feel that there is something that you have not shared with us, particularly your experience in higher education, we would be very pleased to receive a further memorandum. Sir Adrian Webb: I have just touched briefly on that. Equally, can I say that if members want to send me any examples or problems for the FE review, then I am very happy, obviously, to listen. Chairman: Thank you very much. |