Barry Sheerman

Labour Party | Huddersfield

Post-16 education and training

Perhaps as the chairman of the Select Committee on Education I am not the right person to address this conference, for I am not a representative of the Government, nor am I a minister. But with my committee I do have a role in acting as the focus for parliamentary and public scrutiny of the whole educational system in England.

We have every right, and indeed a duty, to monitor and evaluate the performance of the government, but also a further responsibility to stimulate debate, develop a dialogue and even to open up windows of possibilities and potentials in order to ensure that our educational system is central to public interest and concern.

I believe it is our role to ask the questions concerning the performance of our educational institutions. And when we find that they are failing to deliver an excellent education that fulfils the potential of all our citizens or falls short of equipping them with the skills to make our country competitive in a global economy, we must loudly and constructively challenge those who are responsible.

Review strategy

Before turning to an examination of the current situation or present plans to change post-16 education I think it is sensible to review the government's strategy in educational reform which they have clearly applied to other sectors in their first three years of government. In so doing I think we will have a much clearer idea of what to expect in the sector that most concerns today's conference delegates. In my view, and I speak today for myself and not for my committee or for my government, I think that the last three years have been characterised by a healthy dose of pragmatism, a rejection of the ideological Punch and Judy politics that used to dominate the political debate on education and also a desire to use first class management techniques that have been proven successful in the private sector.

Keen advocate

However, in some respects there has been a failure to adopt comprehensively the management techniques and methodologies that have proven successful in the private sector. As a keen advocate of the principles associated with the Royal Society of Arts and Manufacturers' Tomorrow's Company model, I have long believed that any successful organisation in the public or private sector will perform and compete better if those who do the work at whatever level share a vision of what the organisation should achieve. Really successful organisations then ensure that all the stakeholders, in this case teachers, students, administrators, managers, employers and politicians, work together in partnership to deliver the strategy and the vision.

It is clear to many of us that, at least in the mainstream secondary schools sector, the government has not been entirely successful in achieving this goal. There can be no doubt that the present government is fully committed to many aspects of efficient management. Indeed only last Friday the Secretary of State's special advisor said that the government had a two-wave strategy to raise standards in response to globalisation and technological change. According to the professor “the first wave involved improving early years and primary education, setting school's standards, making them responsible, giving them the data to monitor their performance, disseminating good practice and holding schools to account.”

Succinct description

This indeed was one of the most succinct descriptions of the Department's strategy and of course one of the themes running through it is the old management mantra “if you can't measure it, you can't manage it”. The pursuit of standards has largely therefore involved setting targets that can be measured.

Alongside of this and integral to it is a system of inspection which rigorously assists in the measurement process and the system of rewards and penalties associated with good or bad performance. None of this do I decry in any way, and indeed much of its application shows early signs of success particularly in the fields of literacy and numeracy but also in the clear determination to use whatever methods, and managers, public or private sector, to sort problems that are extremely serious.

Early learning

Those of you who want to know how this will fit post 16-education would be well advised to consider the government's initiatives in the area of early learning. The Early Learning Partnerships, embracing as they do the state, private and voluntary sector have been, it would seem, for a very large majority in the field, a very great success. However, there must be some caution in the comparison with the post-16 world as this has been accompanied by very generous levels of funding.

But in the mainstream secondary schools sector the Department's activity has been much less warmly welcomed and there have been constant reports of serious levels of stress on staff, reports of initiative burn-out, and a feeling to quote on insider “At this particular moment the capacity of the system is stretched to the limit.” who goes on to say “We have taken a risk by doing that, this is a crucial phase but it will work”.

Evaluating the two sectors

Trying to evaluate the two sectors objectively and then draw lessons for the coming revolution in the post 16 world, I would venture the view that in the Early Years world there was much greater success in actively involving stakeholders in creating or sharing the vision and then moulding them into a successful partnership for change.

In the case of the secondary school system through to 16, whilst new resources and serious funding has certainly been made available there seems to have been much less success in involving the stakeholders in constructing and sharing the vision. Professor Barber, head of the Standards and Effectiveness Unit seemed only too conscious of this when he told his audience at Leeds University Centre for Policy Studies in Education that “the Government was planning a series of Autumn conferences to give ordinary teachers the big picture on its education strategy where they would be able to offer their ideas on the future”.

Here is clear evidence that the Department seems keen to make up for past omissions and hopefully the wise words being uttered by the real experts at this conference will give them excellent advice on the ways in which they can avoid making similar mistakes in the post 16 sector.

Learning lessons

I emphasise the importance of learning lessons because the post-16 sector is the most diverse, complex and difficult of anything so far tackled by the government. Potentially, what is being created is a more coherent and effective system, but the multitude of partners and players have to be persuaded of the “big picture” and the Government's vision. So many of them have been by their own lights making an excellent contribution to the education and training world, to the nurturing of individual talent, and the overall skill and educated workforce that makes the UK a formidable international competitor.

Of course the changes we are discussing today will not come into force until April next year and therefore this makes it extremely difficult to assess this Bill, which is about to become an Act. However, I think we can judge the process by which this Bill has become all but enacted. It started with a manifesto commitment, which began a consultation process with the green paper The Learning Age which then became the white paper Learning to Succeed. All textbook stuff in the development of a piece of legislation. However, in my view some form of pre-legislative enquiry conducted by the select committee might well have made a valuable contribution to the quality of the Bill and avoided some of the problems faced in the later passage of the Bill (although the Select Committee did produce a report last November ‘Access for All: A Survey of Post-16 Education'

Highlight

Part of such an enquiry would certainly have highlighted some fascinating facts about post 16 education. On the one hand, the minister of state, Baroness Blackstone “The current structures and systems for post 16 learning are letting us down. Drop out rates are to high, wasting resources and human potential.” And again “quality of provision is patchy and levels of achievement are too low and too variable.” She also adds that more than 6 million adults in the UK have no formal qualifications, and that one in five adults in England have lower levels of literacy than that we would expect from an 11 year old. But it would also have had to address the strong views of academics such as Tony Travers of the London School of Economics, an expert in Educational Finance, who believes strongly that the performance of the post 16 sector in terms of year on year delivering more and more good education and training on substantially declining units of resource have been one of the outstanding successes of delivery in the whole educational system.

Nevertheless, there are certain themes which have emerged during the debates on the Bill. There have of course been serious challenges to the Government's confidence that there will be a much smaller and less expensive bureaucracy. In my experience Governments are always over optimistic in these things and I would doubt whether all the savings envisaged are achievable. In addition when one adds up all the new players in the system one is not altogether confident that what will emerge will be a smaller bureaucracy. It could be more effective, coherent, energising but at this present moment this remains in the realms of speculation.

Clear impression

Certainly a reading of the Bill gives a clear impression of a system which will be very sensitive to the views of Government and the Secretary of State in particular. It also is very clear that the regional dimension will have particular emphasis and the role of the Regional Development Agencies and the regional focus of much else might suggest a shift of power away from LEAs to the regions and to the LSCs.

I have a particular concern over the much-publicised commitment to binding in the private sector in the Learning and Skills Councils and into the new structure generally. Recent trends might suggest that we should not take for granted the existence of a large number of skilled private sector managers who have the time even if they have the motivation to contribute to executive bodies which will have a great deal of power, major responsibilities and which must demand a great deal of time. There seems no logic to me of attracting people to serve on the board of a small hospital trust and paying them whereas what I would consider a more challenging and demanding role on the LSC and SBS receives no compensation. The structure of British industry has changed and there just aren't enough large companies who can allow senior management time to be devoted to even the most worthwhile of public sector enterprises and so many managers of SMEs cannot afford major commitments of time.

We are therefore facing something of a revolution in post 16 education, and the new system, whatever else it does, must attempt to create a partnership in a ‘Learning Society' of individuals, businesses and communities, equipping individuals for the skills and knowledge based economy of the new century.

In the area of non-compulsory post-16 education, with the introduction of such a far-ranging set of reforms, it is difficult to stand back and see the wood for the trees, to separate general principles from the plethora of programmes.

Key questions

So what then are the key questions that must inform our discussions? I would suggest that they focus around two distinct ways of thinking about our education and training needs. Firstly, is it better to actively create learning markets, where individuals given the necessary relevant information and opportunity can themselves make decisions about the kind of skills they wish to acquire? Once these individual decisions are made, funding follows the trainee.

Alternatively, do we prefer a system based on what used to be called ‘manpower' or ‘person power' planning, a system much favoured by governments in the 1960s. Do we believe that committees containing experts can make much better choices than individuals? My own view would be that I am very doubtful where the decisions on skills and training needs can be better determined by planners, committees and governments. In this case the individual, judging from experience, really does know best and what is even more interesting is that the sum of individuals pursuing their own judgements and interests are better for our situation as a globally competitive society!

Present debate

The question that we must all ask ourselves in the context of the present debate is which of these approaches is facilitated by the new Learning and Skills Councils and the other reforms in the post-16 sector. It is worrying when ministers use so passionately what seems to be the language of the centraliser and the planner when they talk of the overriding importance of ensuring that we can compete globally and consequently that we must educate our work people in relevant skills such as ICT and others useful for the knowledge-based industries. As Peter Robinson of IPPR warns, much of what unravels could herald a return to the belief in the conventional wisdoms of a previous age. It is the responsibility of all of those of us engaged and concerned in the wealth-creating capacity of our country that it is the individual that is seen as the route for success in post 16 provision.