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From Public Accounts Committee Transcript of Evidence 24th October

Sadiq Khan MP questioning Mr Mark Haysom, Chief Executive, Learning and Skills Council

Q14 Mr Khan: May I ask you what your views are on the Mayor of London taking over the Learning and Skills Council's remit for London?

Sir David Normington: The first thing to say is that I do not have any views separate from the Government.

Q15 Mr Khan: Yes, I meant the department's views.

Sir David Normington: I am afraid that the answer I have to give you, which is true, is that the Government are going to produce their own consultation document on this in a few weeks' time, when they will be setting out their views in response to the Mayor and the GLA's proposals.

Q16 Mr Khan: So you have no view until the consultation period ends. Is that right?

Sir David Normington: I cannot give you a view yet until the Government opine on the matter.

Q17 Mr Khan: But you can see some of the concerns which are expressed about the various layers and duplication and all the rest of it; you can see the advantages in maybe the Mayor taking over the LSC functions in London.

Sir David Normington: I can see the importance of having a very good coordination of the approach to skills in London because there are some very serious issues about the labour market and skills shortages in London. It is important that the GLA and the Mayor are involved in that. We will have to wait for the Government's own consultation to see whether that means that the Mayor should take it over.

Q18 Mr Khan: That is helpful. One of the problems outlined in this NAO report was the role of governors. I was a governor of my local FE college, South Thames College, for a number of years; I gave up a couple of years ago. Even then there were problems with recruiting governors and retaining them. I see from the report that this problem seems to have got worse rather than better. What is your comment to that?

Sir David Normington: I think it is true. Of course it varies from place to place but there is a constant issue about getting good enough quality governors and finding the next generation of governors and getting enough diversity, getting a good gender balance and so on. All those issues are there.

Q19 Mr Khan: Do you not think that there are categories which colleges are required to fill, that it is too rigid and it suggests that chairs of governors, with the help of the clerks of the committees and the principals, do not have enough common sense or nous to identify skills shortages and fill them up?

Sir David Normington: I do not want to criticise the clerk and chairs particularly. We have just been through a consultation on governance and quite a lot of people out there in colleges are saying that they think the categories are too rigid.

Q20 Mr Khan: I know what they say, but what are you saying?

Sir David Normington: We have not drawn all those comments together yet, but I have a lot of sympathy with the view that actually those categories are too rigid and they cause you to have to search. You might have somebody very suitable from one category, but you could not fit them in because you are above the quota. I do not think that is a very sensible way of doing it. You want very good local people. You do want to ensure that there is a good local representation. You do want a wide spread of local people to be represented. Perhaps the categories are too rigid.

Q21 Mr Khan: What about the time limits, the requirement that you have to get involved for a certain number of terms?

Sir David Normington: We are looking at that too; it may be too rigid but it is important that you do not get a group of people who are on a college governing body for ever, as it were. You need to be bringing new people in; there needs to be a turnover.

Q22 Mr Khan: How often would you expect governors to meet up with LSC members to discuss different roles and that sort of thing? How many times would you expect them to meet up in one year?

Mr Haysom: It is a difficult question, because it varies an awful lot on local circumstances. What I should like to think is that there is a very strong relationship between the chair of governors and the local LSC so that there is a regular coming together there; maybe once a quarter, something like that. Opportunities for the wider governing bodies to come together with the local learning and skills councils ought to be timetabled in.

Q23 Mr Khan: You will have read the report and one of the criticisms it makes is that there seems to be a lack of understanding between governors and council members about their roles and where they see each other's roles. Do you not think frequent meetings might be one way of relieving that tension?

Mr Haysom: More frequent meetings are a good idea if that is what the governors want. Actually giving them information, giving them opportunities to be trained in what our job is and what their job is, is also a very important part of that. Some great stuff has been happening since this report and some stuff in south London in particular is now being rolled out across the whole of London which is very much along those lines.

Q24 Mr Khan: On a separate issue, but probably more important to the students, one of the gripes students and indeed the teachers have is the fact that the informal lessons, the leisure and personal interest type of subjects which were previously taught, are now either not being taught or they are more expensive. Because of lack of public subsidy and because of the numbers who then take it up, that means it is still not available in certain places around the constituency because the priority is towards those courses which lead to a qualification. You will be aware that for out-learners very often the one social event of the week is going to the adult college and doing this course as well as learning the skill. What do you say to that?

Mr Haysom: This is a really difficult area, is it not? One of the things we are trying to do across the country is to deal with this in a sensitive way. The Government have made it very clear that they have certain priorities and those priorities are well publicised: level two, Skills for Life, apprenticeships and 16- to 18-year-olds are the priorities. Because the public purse is finite, that does mean that tough decisions have to be made. What we are trying to do at a local level is to work with colleges and other providers to protect courses wherever possible and to help them through this whole situation of trying to bring more money from individuals where that is possible. There is a kind of re-balancing between what the state pays and what the individual pays. It is difficult stuff, is it not?

Q25 Mr Khan: You have read the report. Can you give us an example of how you are planning to get the mix right between those sorts of people who want to learn - and they tend to be those who are socially deprived or socially excluded - compare and contrast with those 16- to 18-year-olds who obviously want to learn and get a qualification which they can use later on. How are you helping the former category?

Mr Haysom: What we are talking about here is adult learners who are having to make some difficult choices. For 16- to 18-year olds there is quite rightly a guarantee of education; it is the adults we are trying to make those difficult choices about. We are ring-fencing as much as we can in terms of community and personal development learning and then we are working to ensure the provision is maintained at a local level and we try to work with colleges to introduce sensible fees policies where it makes sense to maintain that provision. That is what we are trying to do across the country and there are numerous examples at every college.

Q26 Mr Khan: One of the reasons why you have a three-year budget is presumably to help the colleges plan.

Mr Haysom: What we are trying to get to is a better planning cycle for them, but there is no getting around the situation that they have tough choices to make. What we are trying to do is to work with them, to give them sufficient notice as well so that they can actually plan their future in a sensitive way. There is that tough choice at the heart of all this.

Q27 Mr Khan: What would you say then if I told you that South Thames College not only have not received their forecast for the next three years, but they have not even received next year's preliminary budget?

Mr Haysom: Next year being the academic year 2006-07?

Q28 Mr Khan: Yes.

Mr Haysom: No, they would not have yet. The way that our planning cycle works ---

Q29 Mr Khan: You just said that the certainty will then lead to them being able to plan.

Mr Haysom: Yes. There is a difference between planning and giving them precise allocations. What we are able to do is to talk to them about the direction we want to travel, what we want to achieve over the coming period. We are not in a position at the moment, and we have been very clear to the college sector, to say "And there is the money absolutely guaranteed over a three-year period to go with that". Just last week, on Friday, we have actually given some very, very clear guidance to the whole sector about the way 2006-07 will work. That is the earliest it has ever been given to the sector; so they have more information earlier than ever before.

Q30 Mr Khan: Are there plans to change how you fund ESOL courses?

Mr Haysom: We are examining the whole question of ESOLs, as you may be aware. It is fair to say that the Minister has asked us to look at this in some detail.

Q31 Mr Khan: Time frames?

Mr Haysom: I am not aware of any time frames. I can come back to you.

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