Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee
Oral evidence: Education and careers in land-based sectors, HC 165
Tuesday 16 January 2024
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 16 January 2024.
Members present: Sir Robert Goodwill; Ian Byrne; Rosie Duffield; Barry Gardiner; Dr Neil Hudson; Mrs Sheryll Murray; Cat Smith; Derek Thomas.
Questions 1 - 75
Witnesses
I: Stephen Jacob, Chief Executive, The Institute for Agriculture and Horticulture (TIAH); Dr David Llewellyn CBE, Chair, Lantra; Dr Hannah Pitt, Lecturer in Environmental Geography, Cardiff University.
II: Alex Payne, Chief Executive, Landex; Ros Burnley, Member, Forestry Skills Forum; Dr Navaratnam Partheeban OBE, Vet and Nuffield Scholar.
Written evidence from witnesses:
– The Institute for Agriculture and Horticulture
- Lantra
- Landex
Witnesses: Stephen Jacob, Dr David Llewellyn CBE and Dr Hannah Pitt.
Q1 Chair: Welcome to this session of the EFRA Select Committee, which is the first session that we are running in our new inquiry on education and careers in land-based sectors. We are looking into a number of issues, and we are particularly looking at the offer from colleges and universities. Indeed, our second session will be held at Harper Adams University, as it is now called. When I was at university, it was a college. Most colleges seem to be universities now, which is good news.
We will be looking at the way that people can get into agriculture, particularly people who are not farmers’ sons or daughters, how we can get more urban recruits into land-based industries, how continuous professional development can take place and some of the training that is available for people who are already in the industry. We often look at training for young people, but you never stop learning. As somebody said before the session started, some of the jobs in agriculture, horticulture and forestry are not jobs that have even been invented yet. People starting their careers now may find that they need to adopt a lot of new skills.
This is our first session. Could I ask our witnesses to introduce themselves and give us a brief resume of what their role is? We will then go on to the questions.
Dr Llewellyn: I am Dr David Llewellyn. I am the chair of the board of trustees of Lantra. Lantra is a UK organisation providing skills development right across the land-based sector.
I ought also to add, perhaps, that I am a patron of the Douglas Bomford Trust, which is involved in agriculture engineering support, research and education, and a former vice-chancellor of Harper Adams. I was the one who took it through to university status. I am pleased that you are pleased with that, Sir Robert. I was also on the development board for TIAH, but Stephen will be speaking more about that later.
Chair: I am, in my own farm business, a member of a Lantra group. Most recently, one of my workers went to learn about how to kill rats, which was a very useful course.
Dr Pitt: Prynhawn da, pawb. I am Dr Hannah Pitt, lecturer in environmental geography from Cardiff University. My research most recently has focused on skills and work, particularly in food systems with an emphasis on horticulture and horticultural skills around the UK.
Q2 Chair: Stephen Jacob, we met at the Farmers Weekly debate on Thursday night at the Great Yorkshire Showground.
Stephen Jacob: We did. It was a very good debate. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I am Stephen Jacob, chief executive of the Institute for Agriculture and Horticulture, more commonly referred to as TIAH. We are a new professional body established with Defra funding. It is our purpose to address the skills and labour problems within the UK, develop a professional capability framework, encourage lifelong learning and be the overarching body that brings together training and professional development within the United Kingdom.
Q3 Chair: You are very much the new kids on the block. You have only just really been formulated.
Stephen Jacob: That is correct. We have been in development for a number of years because David was on the board originally. We went live with our membership last week. That was why we were involved with that “Question Time” event up in Harrogate.
Q4 Chair: It is probably best to ask you the first question, which is basically the exam question. How effective is the Government’s strategy to meet labour needs in the land-based sectors? That is probably your job description, is it not?
Stephen Jacob: It is. I would start by saying that I am very encouraged that this event is taking place this afternoon because it shows a real will to make things work and to progress. The strategy about bringing primary producers together in Government is really important. We have to have a really joined-up approach. We have an ideal opportunity to try new things as well. That is what we would like to encourage with the conversation this afternoon and the evidence that we provided prior to this meeting.
We really have to think about new entrants coming into the industry and the language that they are talking. We are not always joined-up from an industry point of view with the new people. We have to be talking less about agriculture and horticulture, necessarily, and more about food production, environmental stewardship and the fact we are using new technology. We have to present a really exciting industry. We all believe that it is an exciting industry and it is a great opportunity for new entrants, both those coming from school and the career-changers who are coming into the industry.
Q5 Chair: Were you set up to fix a problem? Are you standing on the shoulders of giants already?
Stephen Jacob: There are lots of very good organisations in the industry. We have the land-based colleges. We have the awarding bodies, such as Lantra, BASIS and City & Guilds. It looks quite fragmented from the outside. Sometimes it looks fragmented from the inside. It can be confusing to know where to go for training and what those career pathways might be.
By having a body where everybody can go and they can be signposted off to training, we can have some curated career pathways for people so they can develop their careers and think about what their future might look like. It will be hugely valuable to the industry. Promoting potential careers in the industry is something that we really want to do. We want to have one place where career influencers, parents and teachers and young people can go to find really relevant careers information.
From our perspective, it is not about duplicating what we already have; it is about trying to encourage a collaborative approach. That is very much what we want to try to achieve.
Dr Pitt: I would echo what Stephen has pointed to there. I would also say that the Shropshire review, which focused on work and skills in the food industry, highlighted a lot of the issues around strategy, connection and the Government approach, all of which I would echo as well.
What I would really love to see and what might make part of the step change that we would be hoping to see is—
Q6 Chair: This is a recommendation that we might put into our report, is it?
Dr Pitt: That perhaps depends how ambitious you want to be, but it would really add some emphasis and send a signal that this is a really important area of activity and initiative if we were to express a commitment to the importance of producing food domestically in the UK.
If we are talking about land-based careers, many of those are about producing food. Why do we want people to go into this sector? It is to guarantee that we can produce the food that we are going to consume within the UK. That would give a real signal that this is an important area and that everybody needs to work together to build towards that same vision.
Chair: That is music to this Committee’s ears.
Dr Llewellyn: I was a member of the expert panel for the independent review of labour shortages led by John Shropshire. Certainly, we found that, when it came to education, training and skills development within the sector, there was not really a coherent strategy. There were many laudable initiatives at varying scales, looking at different audiences and different regions across the country. Pulling them together was the critical thing that we identified a need for.
We eventually recommended that we needed an organisation that could look across the food chain. We thought the Food and Drink Sector Council might be a reasonable home for pulling things together, with the help of Lantra.
Q7 Chair: Is that because people tend to be in silos, depending on their sector?
Dr Llewellyn: Yes, I think so. It really needed that coherent overview. I know the workforce group has been established by the Food and Drink Sector Council. It has had a couple of sessions. It reported back in October last year. I have not seen the membership of that group, but the Food and Drink Sector Council could probably do with some educational input so that it is better informed about some of the things that are going on in the education realm.
Similarly, there are some sector areas that are absolutely desperately short of labour, such as agricultural engineering. If we are looking at automation for the future, there ought to be some connection with that part of the industry.
Q8 Chair: Are we talking about fixing things that break or working for JCB or Massey Ferguson?
Dr Llewellyn: It is both, in fact. At the technical level, I have certainly talked to businesses that are short of people who can maintain the equipment that they want to put in. We are talking about high-level equipment and modern technologies now.
Certainly, at the engineering development end of the spectrum, at companies such as JCB, as you mentioned, and others, there is certainly a need at apprenticeship level, at technical level, and indeed at the level of development engineers, those who are inventing the new products of the future.
Q9 Chair: I used to be able to not only adjust but change the clutch in a tractor. Now, a guy comes and plugs a laptop into the side and reprogrammes it. It is a different world, is it not?
Dr Llewellyn: You raise another very important point. Certainly, in terms of data, the skills necessary for the analysis of data, the interpretation of that information and the way in which we can then put it back into practice, there is another need for people with those skill sets in the food chain. That is certainly something that the industry is aware of but does not quite know how to fix because those people are in really heavy demand from other parts of the industry and other industry sectors.
Q10 Chair: Going back to Stephen, in terms of Government initiatives, are there initiatives that are working? Do the Government have any initiatives in this area that we could improve on or maybe change course?
Stephen Jacob: We have Defra funding, for which we are very grateful. That seems to be working.
Chair: Do not upset them, then.
Stephen Jacob: Absolutely not, no. The relationship that we have with our project managers is really fantastic. They have opened up access to quite a few of the working groups in Defra. We have less access to the Department for Education. That is perhaps something that we would like to improve. We would like to get better relationships with DfE and see how we can develop that. That is something that we would see as an improvement for the future.
Q11 Chair: My son is a member of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. He and his colleagues go into schools and try to excite people about engineering. Is that something that we do at the moment with farmers?
Stephen Jacob: We have lots of small initiatives and lots of organisations, many of whom have submitted written evidence to this inquiry. They are doing some fantastic work, some really fantastic work, but we need to co-ordinate it.
Again, we need to think a little bit differently. We have been doing the same things for quite a long time and we are still getting the same results. A professional body like TIAH will really help. The next generation wants to be recognised. They want to have their achievements recognised. They want to demonstrate to their peers that they are professionals as well. It is a great initiative from that respect.
We are all about going from recruitment and retention all the way through to retirement. We are thinking about the whole of the industry and making sure that people have that assistance and guidance throughout their careers.
Dr Pitt: In terms of where the Government are doing things that are helpful, the suggestion of having a horticulture strategy was really welcome because it would have given some of this coherence and co-ordination that has been lacking. It was disappointing that that was not pursued.
I have been told repeatedly by various people across the sector that things have not changed. This is an ongoing issue that has been talked about for decades. There have been stop-start initiatives and a lack of co-ordination.
The sector itself, as has already been commented on, is quite bitty. There are lots of actors involved and lots of different forums that connect to certain parts of it. Things where the Government are bringing people together to co-ordinate and collaborate with people across the industry are really helpful. Things like the Edible Horticulture Roundtable, which really brings people together and enables that direct liaison, are also beneficial.
Q12 Chair: There have been some suggestions that the importance of the ornamental horticulture sector has not really been recognised. Is that something with which you would agree?
Dr Pitt: I am sure, yes. Its economic weight is often underestimated. The progress they have made in certain regards around developing training, activities in schools and that kind of thing has been significant. There are probably things to learn from organisations such as the RHS and its work in that area.
Q13 Chair: Certainly, there are a lot of imports from places like Holland that would be quite good to displace with home production, if we have the skills.
Dr Pitt: Yes, certainly.
Q14 Mrs Murray: I have a couple of questions for Stephen and one for David. I am sorry, Hannah; if you have anything to add, please do come in. Stephen, can you outline why the Institute for Agriculture and Horticulture was established, what its remit is and how it works with the industry to ensure a joined-up approach to training and CPD?
Stephen Jacob: Certainly, yes. Originally, the Institute for Agriculture and Horticulture came around from the Swadling report in 2018, which was written by Janet Swadling. I am happy to provide a copy of that report to this Committee following this meeting. That report identified the issues within the industry. It identified the need to professionalise the industry, to ensure that we had that status and that culture of lifelong learning, and, as we have already alluded to, to defragment some of the activity that is currently occurring within the industry.
Through much industry consultation, we have a very strong consultation group. We also have Lord Curry, who leads that on that side for us. That has been incredibly valuable for us because we want to ensure that we have that industry input into what we are going to achieve and we want to make sure that we deliver.
We have also developed our services with industry as well. We have a very agile approach to how we develop our membership and our online service to ensure that we are hearing what farmers and growers require and delivering that. That has been hugely valuable over the last six months.
We are going to continue to work with industry. We have lots of engagement with employers. We have a careers action plan, which is working across all of the industry. For example, Lantra is a member of that and the National Farmers’ Union, LEAF and Landex are joining it as well. That will start to allow us to co-ordinate some of that activity around careers, so that we are stronger together rather than disparate apart.
One of the other roles that we have is around our workplace model, which we can use to model people within the industry. We can put all sorts of parameters into that. We recently demonstrated that to the Migration Advisory Committee, and we would be happy to demonstrate it to this Committee as well. It is helping us to build up a wealth of knowledge around what the future is going to look like.
Some of the other work that we have been doing with industry is around labour market information. That is something that is crucial, again, to determining what the future looks like. Sir Robert mentioned very well that we do not even know what some of the jobs that will be advertised and filled in the future are going to be; they do not exist at this moment.
That labour market information needs to be repeated on a fairly regular basis because we need to start looking at trend data. We have a snapshot of what the industry looks like at the moment, but developing those trends and being able to act on and steer them is going to be crucially important for us.
Q15 Mrs Murray: Do you feel that you are able to work effectively across all sectors? Are there any other areas that you feel would benefit from being included in your scope?
Stephen Jacob: Currently, our remit is agriculture and horticulture. We are not across the whole of the land-based sector. I believe that much of what we experience and much of what we learn can be extrapolated across the land-based sector.
One of the sectors that was mentioned was the ornamental sector. That is currently outside of our remit. We have fairly good representation from the ornamental sector that they would like to be involved. I can see a natural segue into supporting that sector. We are involved in commercial horticulture, as in production, so ornamentals would make a lot of sense.
Chair: That sounds like another recommendation that is gestating.
Mrs Murray: It does.
Stephen Jacob: The other thing I would mention is that we are just England. I think I said “UK” earlier, but we are just England. We possibly could look at cross-nation as well. The strength of having the Institute for Agriculture and Horticulture, including the model we are developing, is great. We have a digital platform, and digital platforms do not respect geographical boundaries. People will join, and people do work cross-border within England. There could be an opportunity in the future to think about how we could export it across the boundaries.
Chair: I am sure that would be very popular with the SNP.
Stephen Jacob: Yes, across Hadrian’s Wall.
Q16 Mrs Murray: David, what role does CPD, including training, have in the land-based sectors? How well co-ordinated is it at present?
Dr Llewellyn: At Lantra, we have certainly found that it is very popular with employers and indeed employees, because a lot of them want short and sharp interventions to get the skills that they need to bring back into the workplace very quickly. Particularly in small businesses, they cannot afford to be away from the workplace for too long.
There are issues around that. Lantra currently trains and certifies about 115,000 learners a year. You can see that it is very popular. It has a network of 500 quality-assured training providers and another 1,000 quality-assured instructors. It runs 148 courses and over 350 additional courses with partners.
There are gaps in that provision, where employers sometimes feel the need to intervene and run their own courses. With the independent review, we have certainly found that some of that provision is not necessarily quality-assured in the same way that you might expect an organisation such as Lantra to provide.
We need to make sure that people can learn from the best individuals. There is an issue here about trying to find individuals who are qualified enough to teach—in the specialist areas, they are certainly short on the ground—and provide end-point assessment as well, where that is necessary through certain qualifications. We talk about labour shortages, but there are shortages in instructors and indeed end-point assessors.
There is another part of this that is really important. We used to have sector skills councils. If we could reinvent the wheel, we would have sector skills councils again, I am sure, who could then work with the likes of TIAH as the professional body. You would then have a joined-up approach to trying to sort out exactly what labour information we need, exactly what the skills pipeline looks like and how we can best go about filling the gaps.
Certainly, Lantra used to do some of that LMI work. That may well be taken elsewhere, but we have done a lot of work recently on apprenticeships and how they might best fit the industry. There is a need for a co-ordination of effort across the sector to try to make sure we are getting the best information that we can.
One of the things that the independent review came up with, though, is that we have a real problem with labour market intelligence and information. We do not know necessarily what skills are required. Even though we have standards through apprentices and so on, it is not really comprehensive. Secondly, getting to the skills pipeline is really very tricky.
Chair: We might be running into that point in the next question.
Dr Llewellyn: I would be happy to speak more about that at that point.
Q17 Derek Thomas: This question is particularly about workforce data and skills, and it is to Stephen. In this good work that you are trying to do to prepare the sector for future skills demands, do you have sufficient data to identify the skills, knowledge and behaviours that land-based industries will require up to and beyond 2030?
Stephen Jacob: We are starting to develop our own data through labour market information. Like I say, we really need to repeat that so we can start to look at the trends. If we look at the data that exists currently, there is a lack of granularity to it.
One of the issues that we see is that, if you are a horticulturalist, you are often put in with agriculturalists or other parts of industry. We just do not have the depth of data that we require. We are also a relatively small industry compared to others. That is something that we could certainly work on. We need to look at the job titles and profiles that we have at the moment. If we want to work on future skills, that is going to be essential.
We are doing some great work with the agri-tech centres, thinking about how we introduce automation and robotics into the industry, but we need the people to make them work. We need the people who can service them and the people who are going to be able to adopt that technology across their farming and growing businesses. That is the challenge for us at the moment.
With that, it is a huge opportunity. We can start to think about how we attract people from other industries into our sector. We can think about diversity and inclusion and how we can open it up to a less traditional work base that we have had previously.
Q18 Derek Thomas: You can see that over time transferable skills may become more relevant than they are today.
Dr Llewellyn: They are absolutely relevant now, very much so.
Q19 Derek Thomas: I am happy for anyone to come in on this one. Do local skills improvement plans sufficiently cover the land-based industries? Are they fit for purpose? David, you are smiling so fire away.
Dr Llewellyn: I have been looking at this. Certainly, when you go through the LSIPs that are available on websites, a few of them mention agriculture, a few mention agriculture and land-based activities in relation to low-carbon growth, and others mention it only a couple of times by way of background. It is patchy.
Some of the ways in which the LSIPs are presented are very much about cross-cutting themes rather than sector shortages in their own areas. There is a recommendation about this in a report that was published just last year called Hungry to Learn by the Lifelong Education Institute. That recommendation talked about the fact there ought to be in each LSIP some element of food and food production so that we know it is being covered across the piece and it could be tied through to the funding support that is available through the LSIP mechanism.
That funding support should be focused much more on people—we need more people to train; we need more people to teach in the FE sector, for example—rather than necessarily just on capital. There is an element of both at the minute, but the balance is much more towards capital.
Q20 Derek Thomas: Can I just pick up on your point about future skills? For children in schools, we know that the jobs that they might do have not yet been invented. We have discussed that a lot in my neck of woods, west Cornwall. At the same time, the agriculture and horticulture sector is desperate to fill vacancies.
As universities and others look at trying to address that challenge, recognising that it might not always be people doing the jobs, what is the ability of the sector to adapt to new technologies and innovation so they can address that piece?
Thinking about the work that Stephen and others have done, what kind of work can you do with an industry that is quite traditional in its approach? We are picking daffodils by hand in Cornwall right now. I am not; I am here in the warm. What is the challenge? Will the sector just catch up?
Stephen Jacob: There are several challenges there. I will try and unpack that question.
First, all children are consumers of food. That is really important. They all have a vested interest in how it is produced and how they consume it. We have to be speaking the right language. We really have to talk to them about food production. We have to talk to them about stewardship of the countryside. We have to talk to them about the exciting technology that we are starting to adopt.
We have a very traditional view of what farming and horticulture look like. That is exaggerated on the television. They are often family businesses and they are quite traditional in their approach to how they are producing food. It is not always like that. We can do an awful lot to try to change that perception.
The way we are going to have to do that is by influencing the influences. If the teachers and the parents do not understand what the industry looks like and how food is produced, how are the children going to?
One of our initiatives was to put an eight-page article in a careers mag that goes to a million parents and teachers. It was an eight-page spread on careers in agriculture and horticulture. It was the first of its type. That is the sort of thing. It is not just about doing it once. We need to keep on doing it. We have to have that sustained approach to how we can change hearts and minds around the jobs and the subject that we are talking about.
Q21 Derek Thomas: I appreciate you do not cover ornamentals and that daffodils are ornamentals, but you cannot go through a Select Committee and not mention daffodils at this time of year. Dr Pitt, will agriculture and horticulture be able to adapt to address the work skills gap caused by modern technology?
Dr Pitt: There are certainly signs that those who are thinking ahead and who may be thought of as sector leaders are already doing so.
I did a bit of work with G’s Fresh, which formerly had a graduate recruitment and training programme. It was not recruiting plant scientists or people who had a particular degree directly tied to agriculture or horticulture. It was taking on people who had broad scientific skills, technical skills or more cross-cutting degrees in areas such as geography, which I have to mention as it is my own subject area.
They were taking on people who had the right aptitude, interest and motivation and young graduates who were interested in producing food and who recognised that as an important area to go into working. They were then giving them experience and training within the company.
Companies like that recognise that they have to flex what they are doing as well. They cannot keep offering the same jobs that they have been struggling to fill. They have to recognise that they can take on people who are fitting jobs around caring hours and that kind of thing. They are tuning in to how they can respond to what people in the job market are looking for.
Dr Llewellyn: The sector is recognising, certainly in terms of food production, that it has to change. We need to take account of environmental land management. We need to think about different ways of doing things in the future. When we look at the independent review, automation was not necessarily the answer right now in all respects, but there are things that are happening around automation that are pretty exciting and could happen in due course.
Part of this is about trying to explain to youngsters that we are competing with other industries to get their attention. To my mind, we need a concerted and continued effort to try to make sure they understand the opportunities that are out there.
It is partly an industry issue about being very transparent about careers, not just jobs, at all levels, what the prospects are for their own development within those careers, what the opportunities are for them living in rural areas and so on. We have not even talked about things like affordable housing for young people living in rural areas. It is really important that we try to tackle that problem.
Part of it is also about Government cohering things and trying to understand the difference between helping the people who want to set up their own business and providing support mechanisms for new entrants around that, broadening the funnel of people who come into the industry—that is a really important one where we can add diversity to the sector—and then what we can do about those already in the industry to train and develop them for the future skills they will need.
Q22 Cat Smith: Leading on from that, David, you were talking about widening the funnel. How do we attract more people to land-based sector work? I am thinking particularly about people from non-traditional backgrounds, as in non-rural backgrounds. How would someone from a more urban background be attracted to a job in the sector?
Dr Llewellyn: Anecdotally, we have found that there is a lot of work going on. In the evidence that has been submitted to you, there are at least 20 examples of activities from industry that are all trying to do the same thing in different audiences.
Part of this is about reaching not just youngsters but influencers and trying to make sure that parents and teachers are aware of the opportunities that exist for jobs and careers within the industry. That is being achieved in various ways. LEAF Education is doing some work on this. The NFU is sending out its 250 farm ambassadors. The Douglas Bomford Trust said to them, “Please talk about agricultural engineering, but talk about modern engineering, not the old stuff”. They need some training and support around that.
That is part of the messaging. I do not know why we are not trying to run a mass-marketing media campaign. It should be part of Government’s responsibility to try to make sure the opportunities that are out there are harnessed so that we can then talk about them right across the piece. This is what is happening with the FE sector. There are TV campaigns around that. There are other campaigns for different sectors to try to get people to work in them. People do not know enough about modern farming practice to be enthused about it. We need that messaging to get across in a big way.
Q23 Cat Smith: When it comes to Government action, is that the only or just one of many things the Government could do to attract people?
Dr Llewellyn: It is one of many things that could be done. It is a bit of a stretch. The industry, I am sure, would want to take part in that if it had the opportunity and it was co-ordinated.
We also need to understand intergenerational following, for example. The UCAS data that you have in your submission suggests that 19% of students in 2020 came from a farming background. 1% was the average across other industry sectors. That is quite important. We have to protect that intergenerational following because those are the people who are really keen to go into the job, but we have to reach out to others and convince them that there are good careers in the industry.
Q24 Cat Smith: I feel like we are talking about young people now, but what about older workers and workers who might be looking for a career change? Is there anything that could be done to attract older workers to seek a career change into the land-based sector?
Dr Llewellyn: It is a case of highlighting what jobs are out there and how they might go about entering them because people are naturally turned off with the stereotyping that goes on, certainly with careers in agriculture, because they do not understand enough about them.
Through the careers initiatives that Lantra is running, we are trying to make sure that career profiles are put out there and routes in are recognised. TIAH and others are doing similar work. Others are doing that work as well to try to make sure that information is there. Having a website is one thing; knowing it is there is another. We need to point people. We need to find ways to signpost people to that information so they can then make up their own minds to see whether it is right for them.
I have one final thing. We need to think about apprenticeships. We may well talk about that in a moment or two, but there is certainly more to be done around the apprenticeship route and some element of pre-apprenticeship training to make sure people are really brought into the apprenticeship world and exposed to what farming is really like before they embark on the apprenticeship so they can then get a taste of it.
Q25 Cat Smith: We might be treading on colleagues’ toes by going down the apprenticeship route. Does any member of the panel have anything to add in terms of recruitment and retention in the sector?
Dr Pitt: First, in response to your question about whether there should be a marketing campaign, by all means yes, but it should be part of a broader package of measures. If we have learned anything from investigating behaviour change and work to change perceptions, you cannot rely on informing people alone to make a difference.
That is particularly important, if we think about why some of these jobs have been so unappealing to young people and others. Part of this has to be about making sure those jobs and career opportunities are good jobs, that they are fairly rewarded, that they are enticing and that they have good conditions attached to them. Again, that is something that the Shropshire review highlighted.
The other reason it is worth being cautious around this point about informing is that we know that there is a wealth of people who want to enter land-based careers, particularly those who are coming from a career change, who are in that older adult-entry stage of life. The opportunities that they are seeking are to do things like market gardening, that kind of smaller-scale environmentally and agri-ecologically-driven food production.
There is demand to enter the sector from that perspective. They encounter the opposite: they cannot find access to the training and opportunities that would enable them to do that. There is a disconnect there. Where that is significant to the work of this Committee is, first, in seeking to understand what is attracting those people to those kinds of jobs that is missing in other parts of land-based work, and, secondly, in making sure there are efforts to offer them what they are seeking. If they have the appetite and they have a positive perception about working in food production, we need to make sure they have access to training, professional development and support to enable them to do that.
I have one more point on broadening the field of people involved, such as people from urban backgrounds with no farming background, etc. The work of Land In Our Names highlighted the perspectives of black people and people of colour who sought to enter the industry and some of the experiences they encountered with racism, stereotyping and the practical issues around cost and accommodation, as David touched on.
There were real practical financial barriers to them. There were things like whether they could get to and from where the training was, but also the perception and cultural barriers that they encountered, both of which need to be addressed. Things such as bursaries for those who do not have the financial means to take on training would be a potential option there.
Q26 Cat Smith: David, do you have anything to add?
Dr Llewellyn: Everything has been said. I would just like to add that myth-busting is really important. We need to make sure we present a very professional image to people who come into the industry. That is why a professional body is essential in that area.
We also need to become better employers. We have to think about work-life balance. We have to think about how the role of technology and machinery is going to change the way that people work on farms. We have to think about health and safety, animal welfare, etc. All of those things will come in by professionalising the industry and moving it forward. It will become a more attractive place to work.
Chair: Jeremy Clarkson has probably done quite a lot to inform people with the contrast between Gerald, who had the old skills, and Kaleb, who is brilliant at everything technological and makes Jeremy look really stupid. People watching that programme hopefully will think, “I would love to drive a big Lamborghini tractor or something even bigger”.
Q27 Ian Byrne: We are going to talk about the schools and the curriculum, but a lot of the messaging is about perception, is it not? Coming from a non-rural background in Liverpool, this is not something that is probably on children’s agenda. It goes back to everything that you have been saying in terms of the offering and the perception.
We are going to talk now from an education point of view. If you are going to start changing perceptions, there is probably no better time than when they are in school to get people thinking about the possible opportunity for a career in this industry. How successfully does the English education system integrate land-based themes into teaching and the curriculum?
Dr Pitt: I would caveat what I am going to say with the comment that quite often when anything is raised about how we make improvements to food and agriculture people say, “We need to do something in schools”. I am certainly not saying, “Do not do it”, but we just need to be cautious about what we expect of it. We should not see it as a non-controversial way to do something. Encouraging children to garden is appealing to everybody. It is an easy way to tick the box and say, “We have done something”. That would be the caveat to what I am going to say.
It is not just about introducing the subject matter; it is not just saying, “Where do we put agriculture and horticulture, etc, into learning and the curriculum?” It is about the ways of learning as well. The types of jobs that we are talking about are vocational; they use a range of bodily and intellectual skills, which need to be embedded in the ways that people learn in school. That is about experiential learning, outdoor learning and education. It has to be about how you do the learning as well as the actual subject matter.
I have worked with programmes like Food Growing Schools London, which sought to make every school in London a food-growing school a few years ago. What became apparent from that work were the challenges at secondary school level. This is well known. It is relatively easy to introduce practical gardening and food skills at the primary level, but, as you get to secondary level, it just gets squeezed out.
Programmes like that have shown that it is about making connections into what is in the curriculum already. This is about things like using the weighing of produce that the garden has produced in maths lessons or connecting it to science lessons, etc. It is about that way to connect the skills around things like horticulture into what schools are already teaching. It is also about having the space and support to enable that kind of outdoor learning.
I know one of the things that has been mooted is the idea of something like a horticulture qualification within the school curriculum. It is worth just bearing in mind some of the discussions I have had with people in New Zealand, where this is an option in their curriculum. From the equivalent of our years 11 to 13 in New Zealand, within the science curriculum there are options to take horticultural science and agricultural science, which connects to their significant industries in those areas.
What I heard from people who have experience of how that works is that, because they have similar issues around the perceptions of the industry, it almost acts as a deterrent because it is not well understood what horticulture is as an enticing forward-looking career. People may be unlikely to take those options. You almost have a need to address the vicious cycle where people do not perceive it as a valuable thing so they do not choose that element of the curriculum and therefore they do not address those perceptions.
The suggestion I heard from people there was about integrating it across what is in other areas of the curriculum around science, design and technology, the areas that are more broadly appealing to pupils and their parents.
Q28 Ian Byrne: That was a really good answer. David and Stephen, would you like to add anything to that?
Dr Llewellyn: We have a new natural history GCSE coming in in 2025. At the moment, though, the content of that is unclear. It would be really good to see a balanced approach taken towards farming within that curriculum rather than one end of the spectrum looking at farming as not very helpful to the environment and natural history more generally.
You mentioned the efficacy of the education system. The T-level routes are rather separated at the moment between crop and livestock.
Ian Byrne: We are coming on to T-levels in the next question.
Dr Llewellyn: That is fine. I keep on getting ahead of the questions. That is an interesting one because we have to make sure it is going to be relevant to regenerative farming, mixed farming, nature-based farming and so on in the future.
Stephen Jacob: I would just say that we are missing opportunities for the curriculum to touch industry at the moment. We really need to make the most of that and build on that experiential learning side. Not everybody is incredibly academic. We have to think about other ways to engage people and we have to think about how we bring them forward.
Q29 Ian Byrne: Yes, absolutely. That is a really good point. David, how can we better connect established educational initiatives such as Open Farm Sunday, Farmers for Schools and NFU Education to career and recruitment opportunities?
Dr Llewellyn: Part of this is about, as I said earlier, trying to get at the influencers of young people as well as the young people themselves. It is about trying to make sure parents understand there are good career prospects.
Q30 Ian Byrne: I do that from a Liverpool perspective because I am fascinated by this. You have this pool of people. I am lucky: I have Myerscough College in West Derby. It is a resource. It is there to influence. I am just thinking about this from the perspective of cities. Youngsters are looking for career progression and career pathways. There is a huge opportunity here. How do we do that? How do we influence them?
Dr Llewellyn: We have to get people out to see what goes on. Seeing is believing. Open Farm Sunday is a fantastic initiative, but it is a one-off hit.
Q31 Ian Byrne: If I am a cash-strapped school in Liverpool, I cannot afford to do anything at the moment. Who has that responsibility?
Dr Llewellyn: The idea is to try to get NFU ambassadors into schools to talk to youngsters about the possibilities. If that is a one-off hit, it is not going to work. As Hannah said, we need a coherent plan around this and a joined-up approach. The bodies that represent the industry, if they are working together on careers promotion, can do things on the web, but they can also try to harness the skills of people going into schools, if they can get into schools in the first place. That is another issue.
We need to try to make sure the modern farming practice story is told rather than the old-style stereotypical view of farming practice. It has to be linked back through to green jobs, nature-friendly farming and so on. These are the things that—
Q32 Ian Byrne: It is a big opportunity, is it not?
Dr Llewellyn: It is huge. It is huge, but it needs constant effort around it. That is why there needs to be more strategy from Government about how this is put together.
Q33 Ian Byrne: You have a fantastic opportunity to nail your colours to the mast within our report and recommendations.
Dr Llewellyn: There is also something to do with different generations. When I was at Harper Adams, we brought teachers into the university to try to give them an introduction to agriculture course because they were uncertain about what they were teaching. These were not just people in geography or other subjects related to nature and natural processes. They were mathematicians and historians. There are various elements of food and farming that could be brought into all aspects of the curriculum.
We found that there was a big gap. There is a lost generation. Some focus needs to be brought into teacher education to say, “These opportunities exist to bring live examples of activity into your classroom and enthuse students who may not be the most academically able or, indeed, even those who are because we need all people with all sorts of capabilities to come into the industry”.
Ian Byrne: We will look forward to your recommendations on that.
Chair: Dr Neil Hudson is the most qualified member of this Committee, I have to say, as a proper veterinary surgeon.
Q34 Dr Hudson: You will be very relieved to hear, David and Hannah, that we are going to get on to some of these subjects that you have been champing at the bit about in terms of T-levels, apprenticeships and that side of things. First, how effectively are the Government supporting employers in the sector who want to try to take on apprentices? I do not know who wants to go with that.
Dr Llewellyn: It is interesting. At the Oxford Farming Conference, a colleague and I gave a presentation about what was needed by employers to take on apprentices. In fact, there is a report that Lantra has produced just now that talks about that, including some of the obstacles to that take-up.
We got 561 responses to a survey of employers, so it is well founded. We had focus groups with 16 farmers to back that up. We found that a lot of employers want to take on an apprentice, for example, but 90% of those who responded want help in doing so because they do not understand the process. It is a bit opaque to them, and they need that assistance.
Those who had taken on apprentices, however, said that 23% of those apprentices had left the business within six months of completing their apprenticeship. There is an issue of retention here, on which we need to focus: 20% of those 26% had left the industry. This is a big issue. We are getting them through and employers want to do more, but we need to try to retain them once they are qualified.
Q35 Dr Hudson: What other barriers are there for the employers? You said there was a lack of information. What are the other barriers that are stopping people?
Dr Llewellyn: We need basic introductory training. Our recommendation would be that we need a pre-apprenticeship programme. Lantra is running one in Scotland with support from Skills Development Scotland, which is very successful at keeping people either going into further education as an apprentice or going straight into a job: 40% of the youngsters on the six-month programme, rather than the 18-month apprenticeship, went into a job immediately.
That sort of training would give people the basis around health and safety, tractor driving skills and the tickets that they need to work on the farm. Prior to starting the apprenticeship, it gives both the employer and the potential employee a bit of an introduction to each other and what working conditions are like. Then you can begin to see what will stick. That is a really important development.
There are initiatives around this that the DfE is talking about. They are talking to us about them. They are piloting different ways of doing things, but we think a pre-apprenticeship model is probably the best approach to take.
Q36 Dr Hudson: Hannah and Stephen, do you have anything to add in terms of what the Government could do to help employers and then potentially what barriers employers are facing? Is some of this about critical mass and the size of the employer? Is there some way of grouping employers together so they can do the health and safety together and that side of things? What can be done? We want to put recommendations in our report.
Dr Pitt: Yes, I am doing some research on this at the moment. I will have some case studies ready for you by the end of March, which I will be happy to share. We are looking at examples of where particularly small-scale growers and farmers have been able to host trainees and apprentices, how it has worked and what barriers they have encountered. We are also trying to understand what those who are not doing it need to know and understand.
We have seen that they just do not have clear information or understanding as to what the pathway is and what it takes for them to host an apprentice, an understanding of the costs and implications and so on.
There are also very practical barriers, as you suggest, around hosting someone for the period involved. That could be to do with the seasonality of the work. Do they have enough for them to do in down times, for example? It could be to do with the location, how far it is from the college where they have to go for day release and the cost of transport, if the apprentices have to go to the college and so on.
For the employer, it could be about the financial cost of hosting a trainee, someone who is a learning grower. In many cases, these are small enterprises that are struggling financially. They are weighing up any cost very carefully. Is it something they are going to invest in, if it is an uncertain outcome and they are not sure about the work they are going to get out of it? There are going to be extra demands on their time, particularly if they are doing it for the first time. Employers would be interested in exploring solutions such as the collaborative hosting of apprentices.
As I mentioned earlier, there is interest and appetite from career-change people looking for opportunities to enter the sector. Programmes like Kickstart, which was offered as part of Covid recovery, had an age limit, which made it prohibitive for people who would have otherwise taken up an opportunity with a grower. We were aware of growers who would have hosted somebody if that age limit had been higher. The financial support that was available for that programme made the difference to them being able to take someone on.
Stephen Jacob: Hannah has made some really good points there. Seasonality is a key one, especially for small farming businesses that are thinking about taking an apprentice on. We have to think about how we are going to support the farmers. Again, that is where a professional body can start to help with how we can mentor them and teach them what it means to have an apprentice come into your business.
We are talking about a challenging workplace where we have to consider health and safety, so we have to make sure people have pre-apprentice training prior to going on to the farm. That is really important. Again, through the professional body we can provide some of that essential skills training for apprentices and host farmers. We can provide ongoing CPD and lifelong learning for apprentices and farmers going forward.
We could perhaps use some of the levy budget for that pre-apprentice training, travel and accommodation. That could break some of those barriers down. If we keep on doing the same thing, we are going to keep on getting the same results. This goes back to where we were previously. We have to think about how we could do things slightly differently to attract more apprentices into the industry.
Q37 Dr Hudson: That is a really interesting suggestion. One of the real barriers to land-based education is the locality, if we are trying to get students from different parts of communities to get there. Currently, we require young people to be in education or training until they are 18, but we fund up until 16. For a lot of land-based systems and apprenticeships, it would be potentially 18 or 19-year-olds starting, but there are many people starting apprenticeships older than that.
Is there a way that we could make recommendations to provide travel allowances to break down those barriers? Do you have any key suggestions or asks we could make? You mentioned taking something from the levy, but are there any key things we could do to make it easier for Government, local authorities and the Department for Education to facilitate younger and older people getting to their training opportunities?
Dr Llewellyn: There are two or three things that we could do. First, as I said, we are in discussion with the Department for Education around the flexi-job apprenticeship agency approach. That is one way in which we might begin to co-ordinate support for smaller businesses in the agricultural sector particularly.
Stephen has mentioned the apprenticeship levy. I noticed in a report by Apprentify, which is an apprenticeship training provider, that £96 million of apprenticeship funding from either the levy or the Department for Education was returned to the Treasury in 2022-23. We know that figure is much bigger across the period from 2017.
Q38 Chair: If I may interrupt, is it not the case that very few farmers pay the apprenticeship levy because they are not big enough? I have met one big business that pays it, but no farmer pays the levy and therefore they are not eligible to draw it down.
Dr Llewellyn: Indeed, yes, but there is this money going back into the system, into general funding, which could be better used for training, if indeed it could be reapplied.
The other thing that we really need to look at is supporting employers to make sure they are confident about taking on an apprentice. That is a critical part of the agenda because a lot of them will not have experience of mentoring an apprentice and they need that support.
Q39 Dr Hudson: Those are very helpful recommendations about making better use of monies. If money is allocated, we should use it rather than sending it back into the pool. If we can identify key needs that are barriers that we can fund and the money is there, we should be doing that.
Dr Llewellyn: Certainly, the larger businesses that we spoke to in the independent review that were paying the levy but could not draw all of it down were very concerned to make sure that it was used for other purposes, including short-course training and perhaps this type of approach as well.
Q40 Dr Hudson: I want to move on to T-levels. What are the pros and cons? Have they worked? Are they fit for purpose? There have been some concerns in the land-based and agricultural sector about the transition into T-levels. There is the new agriculture, environment and animal T-level that is coming in, which has two pathways: agriculture, land management and production from September 2023 and animal care and management from September of this year.
There is some concern that colleges not offering T-levels in September 2023 will be able to continue with BTECs and other level 3 courses, but by 2025 much of the funding for some of the very relevant BTECs in these sectors will be phased out. I have certainly had land-based colleges contact me with concerns about that cliff edge.
I just wonder what your thoughts are. Are there any recommendations that we can make to Government to help the transition to T-levels without compromising the very good work that has been done through BTECs?
Stephen Jacob: There are two areas from my point of view. One is to have that better employer knowledge around it. Employers need to understand what T-levels are and how they are going to work.
Chair: We will be touching on this in the second panel as well.
Stephen Jacob: The second one is to ensure that the T-levels are fit for purpose. There are two areas where I can identify that we have some gaps, which are pigs and poultry. That means we are not able to employ them all across the UK. If we think about the eastern counties, where there are lots of pigs and poultry, we need to make sure those two elements and sectors are supported by the T-levels. There is still some work to do within the development as well.
Dr Llewellyn: The specialisation down either the crop route or the livestock route means we are missing the opportunities around mixed farming. If we are thinking about different farming methods for the future, that has to be something that is addressed. The NFU has mentioned it in their submission. It is an important one that we need to try to get to grips with.
In my experience, when we exposed the students who were trained or grew up in a crop and arable environment to career options around the poultry sector, they did not know anything about it. They knew very little. They knew they could sell their arable crop to a poultry producer. When I was at Harper Adams, we introduced those people to careers in the poultry industry and they flew. They went into that industry and did very well.
Dr Pitt: I would just add that there is good potential with the T-level, in that it addresses the combination of classroom-based and practical learning that those who employ people and those who are looking to enter employment in these careers say that they want and need.
The barriers and concerns echo many of the things I have already highlighted, such as access for career changers, those who are slightly older and looking to enter training, the difficulty of smaller enterprises hosting people for work placements and whether it is flexible enough to accommodate a range of production systems. For example, are you requiring someone to learn about spraying crops when they are looking to go into organic farming? That would be the obvious example.
Q41 Dr Hudson: That is really helpful, thank you. Finally from me, we have taken evidence that there is a potential shortage of teachers and lecturers in the land-based sectors. First, is that something that you recognise from your perspective? If that is the case, why is it the case? What can be done to try to mitigate it and increase the numbers of teachers in this sector?
Dr Llewellyn: Certainly from my perspective, it was getting increasingly difficult to find the right type of lecturer who had industry experience and could talk about food production from an agricultural perspective or indeed an agricultural engineering perspective.
Certainly in the latter case, the pay has had to be increased substantially to try to attract leading people to take on jobs in that particular academic pursuit. Part of this is around pay levels not keeping pace with what people can get in other career paths or industry.
Q42 Dr Hudson: Has there been any work done on where these folk are going? Have there been any academic research projects looking at destinations or retention issues? Certainly in the veterinary profession there is a lot of work done to ask vets what they are doing, whether they are happy, whether they are moving and what their reasons are. Are there similar things going on in in your sector?
Dr Llewellyn: You might hear a little bit more later on in the second evidence session from the further education sector. Certainly in higher education, I am not aware of a substantial amount of work going on, but anecdotally we know that people are prepared to move. Certainly, when the labour review was talking to industry, people at lower skills levels were very clearly willing and able to move so they could get a better job with slightly increased pay. This is a problem that is not just about teaching. It is right through the whole industry, really.
Stephen Jacob: My experience would be anecdotal, really. The salaries are not sufficient to attract the right calibre of person to the roles. We also have to think about how we retain them once we have them. We have touched on that, but that is about making sure they have the right technical CPD. It is not just about the training; it is about making sure they are keeping up with the industry as it progresses and evolves as well. That is a really important thing to follow through.
Q43 Dr Hudson: Going back to what you have said, David and Stephen, it is not just the lecturers that you are short of. It is potentially people working across the sector within the land-based colleges in the farms, the technical sectors and that sort of thing. That is probably going to be a key area that we can focus on as a Committee. If there are shortfalls in people, which is the vital resource there, what can we recommend to Government to do to try to help that?
Hannah, your introductory comment was about it being so pivotal to food security and looking after the environment. If we do not have people to teach this and run it in these colleges, we have some problems. That is something that we can look at.
Dr Pitt: If I could just comment on that, the root of the problem is a long ongoing disinvestment in further education and vocational training. There is a vicious cycle, in that people have not been going through the system and therefore they are not able to become lecturers and teachers.
I have heard from people who work in colleges that what they are able to teach has been driven by whether it is financially viable. A lot of these courses are the more expensive ones to deliver and run, so they are the ones that get cut first. If, as you have highlighted, these are areas that we recognise as nationally important skills bases, it makes sense to make sure they are offered across further education provision in spite of the fact they might be more expensive and perhaps struggle to be financially viable for the first couple of years.
Dr Llewellyn: Can I just add briefly that the Agricultural Universities Council UK has put together a doctoral training programme proposal? If we are looking for future teachers, be they in higher education or even further education, that would be a good thing to support. We have not had something specifically to support agricultural training at that level previously and it is needed.
Q44 Chair: Finally, David, many years ago I was an external examiner at Bishop Burton College. I noticed during the time that I was there that the college was worried about filling its places because agriculture became much less labour-intensive. They were filling it up with other things that they described as “horse courses”. Is that something that is happening across the sector? Are people saying, “We can do other things that might be attractive to students but not necessarily lead into food production”?
Dr Llewellyn: It depends upon what the institution is, how it sees its portfolio of activity and how it tries to keep its books balanced at the end of the day. Institutional leaders will be concerned about that. If something is more appealing to the next generation of students, they may well decide to offer it.
Certainly in my experience, we try to keep things pretty tight to agri-food, but there is always the temptation. We set up a veterinary school. There are other things that institutions could do that are very much tied to the land base and will ultimately support agricultural education through the work that you are doing, such as veterinary practice. We are short of large animal practitioners.
We encourage diversification in farm businesses, do we not? You might expect to see it in education provision. One would not want to see the specialist nature of some institutions disappear as a consequence of that, so you have to think very carefully about your strategy for making sure that you remain relevant to the industry that you support and that you are connected to that industry, even if you are doing things that help balance the books at the end of the day by offering different types of courses.
Q45 Chair: Finally, Stephen, we have referred to many farming businesses being very small businesses. If you are looking to get a job on a farm, you know that you are going to work for Mr Smith who has a son who is going to take over, and you are the third person in that business; you are never going to get promoted above Mr Smith and his son. Is that one of the problems? Unlike in larger companies, people do not think, “I can be a foreman. I can be a manager. I can be a managing director”, because they are family businesses that operate in that way. Is that a disincentive for people to get into the sector?
Stephen Jacob: There is an element of that, but we also have to look at careers and think about jobs in agriculture and horticulture as careers. I worked as a farm manager for a large corporate farming enterprise several years ago. That provided a very good career for me and a great opportunity. It is not always about land ownership. We can get hung up on that.
Times are changing as well. With BPS disappearing by 2028, we are going to see different ways of land management. We have to think again about land matching, new entrants coming into the industry and where the opportunities are to match people up who want to farm or grow with the land that is available.
It is a barrier, but we have to think differently and we have to work around that. If we allow it to be a barrier, it will always be a barrier. We have to think again about how we communicate and bring those new entrants in.
Chair: I suppose there is always a chance that you can marry Mr Smith’s daughter, which might be quite a good way forward. That has been a very helpful evidence session. Thank you very much indeed to our panellists. We will transition to the next panel. Thank you very much.
Examination of witnesses
Witnesses: Alex Payne, Ros Burnley and Dr Navaratnam Partheeban OBE.
Q46 Chair: Welcome to our second panel. Could I ask our witnesses to introduce themselves and give us a brief resume of why they are here and why we invited them?
Dr Partheeban: I am Navaratnam Partheeban. I am a regional head of farm for IVC Evidensia, which is the largest veterinary corporate in the UK. I am also a director of the Oxford Farming Conference. I am recently a Nuffield scholar, and I am an ambassador for the Country Trust.
Ros Burnley: Hello. I am Ros Burnley. I am a longstanding member of the Forestry Skills Forum, which is a group of employers, educators and stakeholders that come together to write the forestry skills plan and co-ordinate on skills actions in forestry. I support the forestry apprenticeship trailblazer group, which is a subgroup of the Forestry Skills Forum and reports into the Forestry Skills Forum. I have also facilitated the development and delivery of the forestry skills plan.
Alex Payne: Good afternoon. My name is Alex Payne. I am the chief executive of Landex. Landex is a membership organisation of 39 colleges and universities across the United Kingdom with 15,000 hectares of land and high-quality resource and an Ofsted profile of 95% good or better, vastly outstripping that of the GFE sector.
In addition to that, we have 7,000 residential beds that serve the sector as well. We manage under contract Land Based Assessment Ltd, in partnership with Lantra, which delivers 27 land-based apprenticeship standards. We also manage under contract the National Land Based College, which is our industry-facing careers side of the business, which looks at promoting careers and linking that with industry and qualification development.
Q47 Chair: I will start with you, Alex. In essence, it is the same question that I asked the previous panel. Do the Government have an effective plan to ensure the labour needs of the land-based sectors are met correctly?
Alex Payne: We believe that we need to recognise food and environmental security as a national priority and in turn land-based education as the key to delivering on that national priority, including green skills and net zero. We believe that can be done by essentially identifying that through the Unit for Future Skills as a priority area. That would mean that, when it was identified, it would then be focused on in every single mandate in every single local skills improvement plan.
We have regional delivery of land-based education across the country. That regional delivery ultimately needs to add together to make national change. We have a fantastic strategy in terms of an employer-led curriculum delivered and mandated through the FE White Paper, which is a fantastic initiative, but we need to ensure that, while we are delivering to that local and regional need, the sum of those local and regional deliveries really drive that national change. If we have that national change identified as a national priority, then at that point it can be mandated down to those local skills improvement plans.
There is definite potential. There are challenges. Because it is employer-led, we have to have the occupational map at the very start of the journey. We have an occupational map for the land-based sector. If an area is not listed on that occupational map, it cannot result in a standard being produced by the trailblazer groups. If the trailblazer groups do not have a standard, we cannot have a T-level produced. We will discuss the issues around mixed farming. We quite rightly have an employer-led, industry-led development of qualifications, but it is slightly sticky and very slow, and therefore it is difficult to be flexible to new and exciting initiatives and emerging technology that exists in the sector as well.
We personally have extremely good relationships with both DfE and Defra. DfE and Government in general have long recognised land-based education as being a priority area. That has also been recognised by successive Governments in terms of the programme cost weighting that has been attached to the delivery of those programmes. We were very pleased to see that recognised again in the summer and it being lifted from 1.75 to 1.97, which is very important for that land-based sector.
Q48 Chair: At the very start, you talked about food production and environmental delivery as well. Some farmers would say those two may be mutually exclusive, but if you talk to the Government, they say they are part of the same thing. Have we erred too much on the side of training people to produce food, and not enough on the skills that we will need in the future to deliver stewardship and ELMs and all these other things?
Alex Payne: I was listening to the radio on the way up. They had brought a group of children together to discuss what the words of this year were. It was supposed to a word but it is two, so forgive me. It was “climate change”. I am very passionate about the sector, but that presents us with a real opportunity when we are talking about careers and informing young people about the opportunities.
Yes, in some instances we have challenges in the sector, and they may be mutually exclusive, but ultimately we have a mandate in this area and we are going to need to move all of our production in a sustainable way forward. Climate and environment represents a real hook and key to try to get young people into the sector longer term as well.
Q49 Chair: Partheeban, could you give me your take on whether we are doing the right things? Are we delivering the right sort of training? What do we need to do better? Are the Government focused on the right things?
Dr Partheeban: My take on it is slightly different. We are forgetting that they are people. We are focusing very much on the technical side of education and on the technical side of trying to attract people. For example, we use terms such as “people from a non-farming background”, with quite homogenous ways of categorising people.
The technical thing will interest people, but how do you inspire people to come into the sector? We invest a lot of money and resources into that technical aspect of how to sell agriculture, how to make a technically good course or anything like that, but if people do not see themselves in that course or in that sector, they will not want to do it. We are missing out on the diversity, equity and inclusion aspect of it all.
Q50 Chair: People occasionally think all farmers are men. It is not just ethnic diversity; it is all diversity.
Dr Partheeban: As a child, what is the first influence you have about farming? It is Old MacDonald. If you look at any Old MacDonald book, what image of a farmer do you see and what image of farming do you see? A very old-school, white, middle-class man driving a tractor.
Chair: That would be me.
Dr Partheeban: A child sees that as their first image of farming, and then that is reinforced in everything they do. As an individual, you cannot be what you cannot see. How are you inspired to become a farmer or to work in agriculture? Again, the image of agriculture is purely farming, but agriculture is so many different things. We are trying to concentrate on all those different aspects of how technically brilliant it is and all that, but, again, people need to see themselves in that sector, so we need to be more culturally aware of people.
The population is changing. We keep assuming that we are trying to appeal to the same sort of people that maybe we were trying to appeal to 20 years ago, but things have evolved; things have changed. For example, if we think about the latest census data, in England 30% of children do not identify as white; they identify as black, Asian or minority ethnic. If we include Scotland and Wales, that is 27%. That is nearly one in three children. We need to think about how we create courses that are culturally appropriate, that involve them and that they can see themselves in, and go forward with that.
Also, it is about women in agriculture. How do we encourage more women in, as well as people with different forms of disabilities and other forms of diversity? We need to take that all into account when we are thinking about how we bring people into the sector and how we invest in programmes to bring people into the sector.
Q51 Chair: Many of our rural communities are very white. You would not believe it. The first time I saw a person of colour was when I was eight, and the first time I spoke to a person of colour was when I went to university. There was nobody at my school and nobody in my village even. There are a few now. That just shows how some of our rural communities are not representative of inner London or inner Bradford or wherever.
Dr Partheeban: Yes, exactly, and it goes both ways. We want to encourage people to come into our sector, and that is the recruitment thing, but also with farmers and with people within the sector, can we help with education? Can we help bridge that gap?
Covid was a positive in one way. The biggest thing we had was social media and the way that we could link people who lived so far away. Maybe it is about utilising social media a bit more or utilising communication media to bring farmers closer to communities that they might not be familiar with but that are all part of our country and are our consumers. They are all food citizens, and they are all our future labour force.
Investing in the courses and in the education is one thing, but inspiring people to be part of the sector is another thing that we probably do not do enough in our sector. If you look at other very un-diverse sectors like the construction sector or engineering, you can see that they have done positive, specific initiatives. For example, in engineering, the Government are involved in Women in STEM week every year, and between 2014 and 2018, in undergraduate courses, women went from 21% to 49% of intake. Women in STEM was part of that because you were focusing on an underrepresented part of society to bring them into the sector, and we know that people of low social backgrounds are less likely to do things like engineering.
It is a similar sort of thing in construction. Construction, again, is a very un-diverse sector, but the Government have invested in hubs to bring in people, and they are looking at diversity efforts within that to bring more people into construction. Again, we can look at other sectors to see how we can do that. We talk about labour shortages. We talk about inner-city people, but even within an inner city, there are so many different barriers for so many different people of different backgrounds, and we need to look at them more individually rather than having a blanket thing going, “All people from non-farming backgrounds have the same barriers”. It is not true.
Q52 Chair: They might only be a couple of generations from being farmers. Back in the Kashmir Valley or wherever their family came from, they probably were very close.
Dr Partheeban: I used to be a trustee of an inner-city farm in St Werburgh’s. There would be up to seven or eight different immigrant communities outside. We talk about the British in general having six degrees of separation from farming, but with a lot of immigrant communities, it is one or two degrees of separation maximum. They are all very keen about growing. They do not feel they are part of the growing sector or the food sector. We need to think about ways of encouraging them to join the food sector and be part of it. It could be anything from allotments to big farms.
What I have found in my time is that people are keen. If I talk about multiethnic backgrounds and low-income households, people are keen to grow and to be part of it, but how do we break down some of the barriers to make them part of the journey?
Q53 Chair: Ros, I remember when I went to Newcastle University and we could specialise, in our final year, in crops or livestock, but we did nothing in the entire three years on forestry, despite the fact that most farms have some forestry and it is quite a big part of the sector. Is forestry the forgotten sector in agriculture? Is it something we really should get on the front foot on because of the way we are needing to look at delivering other goods such as carbon sequestration?
Ros Burnley: The forestry sector is a small industry. It has about 17,000 according to the current ONS data. We are predicting from research in 2021 that we are going to have about a 2,500 shortfall if we are going to hit the Government targets for 2030 for woodland creation and bringing more woodland into management. That is all about meeting our environmental and climate change target, so that is about carbon sequestration.
If we are going to be part of the solution towards climate change that we have been talking about today, we are going to need, from a percentage point of view, a really big shift in the forestry workforce. You need the forestry workforce to support farmers. You need people to write woodland creation plans so that the right trees are grown in the right place so that they have the effect that we want them to.
There is a lot that we are doing to try to address that shortfall, but one of the issues we have is lack of provision. We talk about urban audiences. It is very difficult. If we were to do a big promotional campaign right now, a lot of people might say, “Yes, we want to do forestry”, but they would then struggle to find a way into the sector because of a lack of forestry provision uniformly around the country.
That is particularly an issue in urban areas because it is a rural industry, so both the employers and the providers tend to be located in rural locations. We have examples where we have tried to find placements for people where there is a provider in their area, and if they do not have transport, it is very difficult to get them to their employer. There are lots of barriers there for forestry around developing enough provision so that we can start to drive people to it.
Q54 Dr Hudson: On our Committee, we are passionate about launching this inquiry looking at the land-based educational sector because food security is paramount to our country. It is also about looking after the environment with the whole world climate change side of things, training up the next generation of people to go into these sectors to produce food for our country while also looking after the environment. You can produce food locally and sustainably while also nurturing the environment. The two can and should go hand in hand. We are passionate that we need people to come into those sectors to do that.
What recommendations can we, as a Committee, make to Government so that these key areas for national security and our future are looked at and addressed by policy? What recommendations could we make?
Alex Payne: I was at the Farm to Fork summit at Downing Street, and there was positive mood music around seeing food security as a national priority. If we truly see food security and the environment as a national priority, as I said, so much of the action will fall out of that, because we have a lot of members who have worked extremely hard, are sitting on the LEPs and have been involved in the LSIPs.
Yes, I agree that it is scant in some places, but there have been a large number where agriculture and food have been present, but it has been a hard-won battle to have it in there. By having it as a national priority and then dispersed down to those local skills improvement plans, we can ensure that it is a priority geographically in all areas. If it is a priority geographically in all areas, we have the local skills improvement fund that supports that as well, and it becomes a priority. As we are delivering over this diverse, dispersed area that has varying topography, geography and soils, we need to ensure that the sum of those parts results in that national change.
Certainly, it is about ensuring that there is that priority, but a national strategy for land-based skills shortages, with highly skilled solutions for the future, is what we need. That is all around that careers strategy, but that would fall naturally out of it being a national priority because, when you are looking at the National Careers Service information, that is driven by what are seen as national priority and skills shortage areas. If we are there front and centre as a national priority, we will naturally have more exposure in schools as a result of that. It is about that agenda item of ensuring that it is a national priority.
Q55 Dr Hudson: If we are going to have a national strategy, are there enough data to inform the Government as to where the shortfalls are? Also, has there been work done to forecast what we need moving forward to allow the Government to make those decisions?
Alex Payne: There is absolutely a significant amount of work still to be done here. I have met with Frank Bowley from the Unit for Future Skills, which has been set up to analyse the skills shortage that there is nationally, with data and analysis around that. While he is keen to talk to me and understands how keen we are around the land-based sector, in terms of their workflow for the year, land-based does not exist. However, I did explain to him that we were coming and talking to the Select Committee, and he certainly felt that there was room to be able to prioritise land-based education or the land-based sector and move that up the agenda potentially. If we could get that data from the Unit for Future Skills, that would be fantastic.
Ros Burnley: I will start with policy, because then that leads on to data, so I will take them together. In forestry, although we do not produce food, we produce the pallets that you need to move things around. There is a lot of work going on around environmental policy to deliver those targets for woodland creation.
At the moment, we are looking at a sector skills strategy for forestry. This is in very early stages, but we are working with the Forestry Commission, Defra, industry, stakeholders and the Forestry Skills Forum to develop that strategy. There is some quite good joined-up working going on there, because there are some important policy drivers around forestry.
One of the big barriers that we have is lack of data. In every meeting I have, we talk about data and baseline data about how many people we have and what their skills are, and then using that to do the projections that you need to work out exactly what you need to achieve your targets in terms of production.
More data and more depth of data is important. We have surveys that the Forestry Skills Forum did in 2018 and 2021, but it is difficult to get to the level of depth that you need and to do it as regularly as you need to do that workforce planning. Also around data on the apprenticeship side, annual regular data on each standard and framework on things like retention would be really helpful for trailblazer groups, with a bit more detail than just the starts and achievements data.
Educational policy can create some problems, which we will probably get on to. It is the law of unforeseen consequences. Because we have low volume, sometimes there can be consequences for small programmes. Policy decisions that might look good in the big picture can cause programmes to cease to be viable if cohorts are split.
Dr Partheeban: Sustainability and food security are much more popular among the public. Those are the things that people want to work towards. If we say “beef farming” or “dairy”, it might put off some people, but if we talk about it as part of a sustainable outcome and part of food security, that will help. It is more of a popular thing.
Also, it brings more people together. As a farm vet, I feel closer to the agricultural sector than the veterinary sector because I am part of that food security message. If we have that overall aim of trying to increase food sustainability and food security, then building policy to achieve that is much easier because we have the ultimate aim, and it is about bringing people along.
For example, I was at a conference recently and someone had done a study in the US about people and farming, and what encouraged people to drink dairy and eat meat. When people went on farm and they talked purely about the nutritional benefits of beef or drinking milk, some of them thought, “Maybe it is not for me. Maybe it is not exactly what I want”. However, when the farmer talked about the values, how it is part of a bigger ecosystem and how the farmer is also thinking about the importance of dairy and local milk in food sustainability, people then bought into that side of the story and were more sold with that.
We need to reframe. Talking about food security and sustainability is the way we reframe and talk to the modern population rather than the population before, which was more involved with other aspects of farming. That is a way to drive policy.
Q56 Dr Hudson: If I can come back to the concept that it is part of national security in terms of supporting these sectors moving forward, Alex, Landex represents a number of institutions. What we have seen over recent years is, sadly, a decline in the number of institutions offering these sorts of subjects.
I speak from deeply painful and personal experience at a constituency level. We had the tragic decision by Askham Bryan to close Newton Rigg College in Cumbria. We fought very hard to try to keep it alive, and we have managed to get Myerscough College to work with Ullswater Community College to have some land-based education locally, but as a big county in which food production and looking after the environment are absolutely pivotal, that was a tragic side of things.
If this is a national security issue, do we have enough teaching outlets and colleges in our country to sustain this, or do we need to make a strong recommendation that we need to try to build back up the numbers?
Alex Payne: We absolutely have the capacity. With the 7,000 residential beds and the amazing investment that has taken place in resource, there is the capacity, but we need to value what we have, continue to invest in it, and ensure that we are raising it to be able to meet these strategic objectives that you discuss.
I hear what you are saying certainly around the closure by Askham Bryan, and I know that there is a lot of focus on the independent specialist colleges. The independent specialist colleges are extremely important, but where those independent specialist colleges have merged with a GFE college, the absolute priority for that is that the designated specialist status funding is directly directed into that land-based campus. If that happens, and if it is still seen as a regional priority for the delivery of land-based education in that sector, I could take you to a number of really good examples where a land-based campus is integrated in a large GFE college and it can have a positive impact for the region, because ultimately that has to be the priority.
We have challenges financially across the country in all sorts of sectors. This is just one of them. We need to ensure that, through any merger that takes place, the priority is continuing land-based education and its breadth and depth in terms of subject area and level in that sector, and that it is of a high quality and that the funding goes to the right place.
Q57 Dr Hudson: We had an emergency inquiry session on the Newton Rigg situation. You talk about funding coming into colleges. There is risk involved for further education providers, because these courses are not cheap to run, and there are transport costs and running costs as well. We have now seen innovative models where potentially Kendal College is delivering on individual farms. Maybe we need to be thinking differently as to how we do that, but you still need a critical mass and funding coming into an area to allow folk to then come to these centres of excellence. How do we square that?
Alex Payne: Successive Governments have recognised land-based education as being a higher cost to fund, and 33 out of those 39 land-based colleges that are in membership have designated specialist land-based status. I can send you the detail. It means that they have to deliver over six out of the 12 occupational areas. It means that they need to deliver depth all the way from level 2 into higher education, with progression opportunities within that.
If they deliver that and they have critical mass in terms of volume, then they receive the additional funding as a result of that. That additional funding, exactly as you say, is to represent the 365-day nature of it, the additional staffing requirements, the additional resource requirements, etc. You are absolutely right that the rurality issue in terms of transport, which I am very happy to discuss in more detail, is definitely another significant barrier.
Q58 Dr Hudson: If I can pivot over to Ros, what do you think are some of the strengths and weaknesses of the delivery of land-based education? I speak to your forestry discipline but other disciplines, if you like, as well.
Ros Burnley: With forestry, we had five providers offering the apprenticeship in 2021-22 in England, and none of them was northern. If you look where the forests are, there is forest everywhere, but there are large amounts of forest in Cumbria and Northumberland. We are talking to providers and working really hard to support providers, but the problem that forestry has, and has had for a very long time, is it does not have critical mass locally to make the courses viable. You end up in a position where you cannot drive up demand because you do not have provision, but you do not have the demand so you cannot drive up the provision.
At the moment, we are working really hard with our providers. We have had meetings with providers. The loss of provision in Cumbria was a big blow for the forestry sector, and I am hopeful that we might get some in the future.
Q59 Dr Hudson: Is there work that can be done between the north of England and Scotland, for instance, as well? There are different funding systems, but it makes sense to collaborate on these common issues, does it not?
Ros Burnley: Forestry is a UK industry. The Forestry Skills Forum covers England and Wales, so we work cross-border a lot in forestry, but the skills system is completely different. Particularly when you are looking at apprenticeships, it is quite difficult to work cross-border because of the different skills systems. In terms of the barriers to us and the things that we are doing to try to resolve this lack of provision that we have, one of the things, which we will probably come on to, is that we need many more employers to take on work placements and apprentices.
Dr Hudson: We are going to get on to that.
Ros Burnley: When we get on to that, I have a lot to say on that because that is one of our big barriers. We are also looking at supporting colleges with sites, but some of this would be much more effective if we could do it on a larger scale. For example, we have talked a bit about technology. If colleges are going to have the resources to have top technology that reflects what is being used in the workplace so the students come out and can use the technology that is being used, we need to have a way where they can share it. It is about having a way to share equipment or to buy licences at higher volumes for colleges. More co-ordination might make it more cost-effective for these areas of land-based that are quite costly and not necessarily that reflected within funding mechanisms.
Q60 Dr Hudson: Alex and Ros, what trends are you seeing in terms of applications to land-based courses? What can the sector potentially be doing to improve and increase the application rate? It is also about the viability of these courses. As we keep coming back to, they are sometimes very costly to run and, with locality issues, quite hard to sustain. What trends are you seeing in applications and what can we do to increase the viability?
Ros Burnley: Anecdotally, the providers are telling us that they are needing a lot of the things we have already talked about in other sessions. Regarding sustainability, we need to promote that forestry is an important part of the solution to a lot of the challenges that we face. We need to get away from quite old-fashioned views of forestry that are linked to deforestation and chopping trees down, when it is about managing forests for nature and people, as well as for productive forestry. There are trends around that side.
In higher education, we are seeing fairly stable applications at the one university in England that is offering forestry at degree level. We have a level 6 or degree-level apprenticeship as well. It has only been running for two years. On the full-time courses, we are seeing a younger demographic beginning to come through in the last couple of years. We are not sure whether that is displacement from the apprenticeship or part of national trends. We are watching that, but the numbers are low.
The bottom line is that the numbers on full-time courses are between 15 and 30 a year, but we are getting very strong applications to the apprenticeships. The appetite is there, but there are obviously other things that are causing issues. We get very strong applications for the degree apprenticeship, yes.
Alex Payne: It is good news. It is really good news in terms of numbers, but are those numbers in the right places to meet those national objectives? We have seen significant growth in 16-to-18 learners between 2019 and 2022. I can share all this data, which is extrapolated from the ILR but then split out into the various subject areas.
Dr Hudson: That would be helpful if you could write to the Committee with that, yes.
Alex Payne: I am very happy to share that with the Committee in its full detail. It splits out the varying subject areas where we have seen that growth. It is obviously pleasing from our perspective that 80% of that growth is just going to designated specialist land-based providers, so people are voting in terms of that resource that is there for them to learn with. There has been a really pleasing uptick in 19-plus enrolment as well. Again, I have the breakdown of the exact subject areas there and the way in which that is split.
In terms of apprenticeship starts, obviously we had the frameworks in 2018-19 and we have moved over to the standards. There was a dip as those standards came in and we had a few lagging behind, but we are now outstripping the position that we were in in 2018-19 in terms of those apprenticeships and in terms of numbers. That is some really good news, and that is obviously down to large marketing campaigns by colleges and, as has been alluded to earlier on, some significant influences in terms of TV personalities and others as well.
There is increased interest in the sector. You can split that out and look at how much of that is in the environmental sector versus how much of it is within agriculture, but I can tell you that there is certainly growth within agriculture.
In higher education, there is a small amount of growth, but generally that is fairly flat at the moment. Again, the providers have done outstanding work in terms of their facilities and their results, with many achieving TEF gold and silver.
Q61 Dr Hudson: If I can come to you, Partheeban, in terms of the journeys into these sectors and supporting careers and employability, what is your take on it? You have a very embedded approach to this as a vet working on farms but working in terms of careers and workforces. What is your take on it? How viable and sustainable is it and what can be done to improve it?
Dr Partheeban: I used to be a senior lecturer at the Royal Agricultural University. We looked at recruitment and we looked at students. At the Royal Agricultural University, for example, what we saw was that the requirements of the students changed. Straight ag became less popular, but students were liking ag with business or ag with leadership. Again, within the university, slightly evolving those courses helped with recruitment.
One problem we had at the university was traditional recruitment. It was very easy to keep recruiting the same type of people. It would be through families, so it would be the children and their children and their children within the RAU, for example, but that is quite common. Within the agricultural sector, there is very poor wider participation when it comes to the diversity of people on these courses.
For example, I was talking to Professor Ken Sloan at Harper Adams, and we were talking about the agriculture degree. Again, the undergraduate degree is very un-diverse in many ways. The funny thing is that the postgraduate degree is much more diverse. When it comes to agriculture and agricultural disciplines, it is much more reflective of the general population, but at undergraduate level they suffer as well.
It is not very dissimilar from the veterinary profession. Again, we select a certain type of person that comes into the veterinary profession. There is a lack of diversity. We do not reflect society in general. We can learn a lot in the agricultural sector from what is happening in the veterinary sector. I talk to a lot of different universities like Harper Adams, the new one at Aberdeen, and Liverpool and Bristol. The way that they have tried to become more diverse and widen participation is by looking at different routes into the schools.
For example, at Harper Adams they used to have this thing where to study agriculture you needed to do 10 weeks of agriculture placements before you can study for the degree. Then they reduced it to six, and now they have taken it away, and there is a pre-course that you can do before you do the agriculture degree, which will help with that intake of people into the agricultural sector. People who do that need support, financially and in lots of other ways, so that is where people like the Government and other organisations can support.
It is similar for veterinary as well. The pre-vet course is a way of getting into the veterinary degree if academically you cannot get those grades for lots of different reasons. Different routes of getting into veterinary medicine must be there. Again, you do not need to do A-levels anymore to get into veterinary medicine. You can get in with other qualifications.
In veterinary medicine, for example, we talk about what is required to get on to a course. We say, “You need to have done this many weeks of EMS”, or “this many things”. One vet school let in about 20 students who did not get straight As but their grades were changed based on their background on whatever issues they brought. Those students, in the first year of their degree, were the top 20 in their year grades-wise, because it showed that once you give people opportunities and the right resources, they can perform.
If we can embrace and use those sorts of things more in agriculture, we can get a variety of people on to the courses, which futureproofs us and makes agriculture more sustainable in the future by reflecting the people that we are feeding.
Q62 Dr Hudson: Thank you for mentioning the veterinary sector. I declare an interest as a veterinary surgeon myself. Our Committee is going to be looking very closely in the coming weeks at the veterinary workforce issues facing our country, which feed into food security and national security as well.
We talked about recruitment of students. In terms of recruitment and retention of teachers within the land-based sector, there are some challenges within that. We asked the first panel about this as well. Can you just give us your perspective from the sector? What are the challenges in terms of recruitment and retention, and what, potentially, can be done to mitigate against this if we are losing people or not attracting people?
Alex Payne: Certainly, in some subject areas there are most definitely shortages currently. There is no question about that. Inflationary pressures around pay and pay inflation external to the college and university environment has definitely impacted that. It is important for us to recognise the parts that are pertaining just to land-based and the parts that are generally across the FE and skills sector. There are national campaigns in this area driven by Government as a result, such as the Government Share Your Skills campaign, which is specifically around getting more staff into teaching.
There was some workforce data that I referenced in our submission, which was released in September 2023. Agriculture, horticulture and ag engineering are appearing in the top five in terms of shortages within the sector. There are a number of vacancies. There are a number of innovative ways in which colleges and providers are working to combat that, both in terms of uplift incentive payments in those shortage areas, as well as working with industry in some instances to support those payments.
Ultimately, we want dual professionals. That is what we really want to be within this sector. We want people who are still within industry and then coming into the sector to share their knowledge with young people. It is important that we look at ways in which we can encourage that dual professionalism as well.
In terms of what we are doing on the ground in a very small way, certainly from a Landex perspective, the board has come together and we are launching a campaign in terms of stepping into teaching from industry, which is going to involve trying to break down some of those barriers that people might perceive, and misconceptions around teaching in further and higher education. It is to encourage those with those industry skills to come into our sector. It is not a golden bullet or a fix-all, but it is one example.
We are also offering a 12-hour programme about stepping into teaching and breaking down some of those barriers as well. It is not going to win everything, but it is those kinds of initiatives that we need to specifically do around land-based.
Ros Burnley: Forestry are reporting a lack of lecturers, and it is also being articulated to us as a barrier for starting up provision. I work with other sectors too, and one of the barriers to putting on new provision, new industries and new levels, such as the higher-level apprenticeships, for example, is that they just cannot recruit lecturers to deliver it. The employers that I work with report this.
You have the short tests that you need to do before you can do your end test in an apprenticeship, so there is a lack of assessors for some of the short course provision. There is, in some places and in some industries, a lack of assessors to do the end tests. Also, employers are reporting a churn of lecturers. This is all anecdotal, but it is coming loud and clear from a range of different sources.
Dr Hudson: We are going to get on to the barriers within apprenticeship delivery, but there is an overlap with the staff who are delivering it.
Ros Burnley: There is a lecturer and an assessor shortage, and we are looking at things like working with employers to release people, and mechanisms to release staff as a staff development mechanism to try to address that shortfall, particularly where it is geographical, because our industries are not big. We have four assessors for forestry apprenticeships, but we do not have masses of apprentices. You can see the geographical range.
There is an issue there, but we do not understand what the cause is, and that is something we would welcome, because then we would be able to help address as industries better if we knew what the cause of the shortfall was and whether it is a national trend or whether it is salaries.
Dr Partheeban: Being a lecturer, one of the things is pay. Pay is always going to be something that we need to talk about, but it is not the be all and end all of everything. Pay is one thing, but it is also about flexibility. That is what I find that lecturers want. When I was working, when we did have lecturers who left, the reason was because of a lack of flexibility.
For example, when I was in general practice, in our practice we did a day or two of lecturing, or we would work with the local vet college to do lecturing. When I was teaching at the RAU, for example, some of the lecturers were farmers as well, so they had that flexibility to carry on farming but then came in and did some lecturing.
Also, within the course as well, one of the things was progression within a university as well, and career progression. That is another big thing. For example, I always used to believe that without a PhD there is very little you can do within a higher education institute, but if institutes were willing to support you in other ways—support projects and support you in building up your skillset—that might be a way of encouraging people to know that there are lots of different things that you can do.
I started to see that happening. Whenever I thought, “Could I try this or try that?” and they supported me, it kept me there. In higher education, we need to think about being more flexible and thinking about people’s personal circumstances. Not everyone has the same aspirations in a job, and we need to look at that more.
Dr Hudson: Thank you. That is really helpful in terms of people wanting that flexibility, but then the institutions and the employers have to show some of that flexibility. It is a cycle that can benefit both as well.
Chair: At the start of Dr Hudson’s questions, Alex, you touched on some statistics on numbers of students. It would be helpful if you could share with our Clerk so we can at least put some of that into the annex of our report, which would be a good basis to do that.
Q63 Ian Byrne: Partheeban, I just want to go on to the flexibility element. It is totally separate from the question I was going to ask, but other teachers in that sector talk about insecurity of hours and casualisation of labour. Is that something that you have seen, or is it the flexibility element that you are looking at?
Dr Partheeban: Job security is important and income is important.
Q64 Ian Byrne: Sometimes flexibility is utilised to override that job security element of it.
Dr Partheeban: Yes. The institution has to support its lecturers.
Q65 Ian Byrne: They have to support them in whatever is needed.
Dr Partheeban: Yes, in whatever is needed. For example, it is important to engage regularly and find out what each lecturer wants. If it is just time off, then that is time off, but they might be willing to be involved in projects and things like that that can bring benefits to the university.
For example, I was very keen. Classroom-based teaching is fine for me, but I am quite practical, so the university said to me, “If you want to bring in new courses, as long as you can also bring in a business proposal that will support the sustainability of that course, then we are willing to support you on that”. I had to go away and come up with that proposal, but then I felt like I was doing more things within that job that were of benefit. It comes two ways. It is about giving me that initiative to go out and do it, but then it is about supporting me if I want to do it and they can see the values in it. As an employee, I felt valued and wanted to carry on.
Some people said, “I want to work three days a week and I want to farm two days a week”. If institutions can be a bit more flexible like that and work around people, then with the work-life balance and the way people are nowadays, it gives that option.
Q66 Ian Byrne: I just wanted to raise that. It was just something you said that struck me.
Ros, I am coming to you, because you have a burning desire, rightly so, to speak about apprenticeships. You have started speaking about it on a couple of occasions. The Committee in 2023 highlighted the importance of the apprenticeships. I was struck reading the evidence, certainly from Lantra, about how keen farmers were to have apprenticeships: 52% would consider them as an option in bringing in new staff; 33% are training and upskilling staff, so there is a real appetite; and 70% would consider utilising an apprenticeship. We heard Alex say there was some good news in that sector.
I am now keen to explore how the Government can better support employers to take on apprenticeships, and what the barriers are to doing so.
Ros Burnley: We need to simplify the support that is out there so that they can access it better. They are not finding it or understanding it. It needs to be targeted at those micro and small businesses, because there are lots of them in land-based across the piece, but particularly in forestry. It is difficult for them to find the right support, particularly for small businesses.
Q67 Ian Byrne: Why is that? Is it the complication of it?
Ros Burnley: A lot of it is written, and they have to get as far as getting in touch with their college before they reach that first point. There needs to be a stage and more promotion around apprenticeships to employers, and then that vital support. The colleges need to be properly funded to deal with the fact that small and micro businesses need more support.
You do not get big groups of apprentices in one business. That is more difficult to manage. They will be spread out as well, so there are challenges, but from the business point of view it is about more support. Also, it is reported to us that the transport and accommodation costs, even at level 6, are a barrier when they realise that they have that on top of having to pay a salary and all the other aspects. It is about that rural aspect with accommodation and transport costs.
There is a lot of work going on around this at the moment, and we will probably have more data. There are people going out and talking to employers about this at the moment, and quite a lot of research going on, so we will provide that to the Committee once it is in place.
Q68 Ian Byrne: That is also something so important that we have highlighted, as I said, in a previous report. We touched on it in the earlier session about potential non-rural areas, and having gateways and the ability, from a diversity point of view, for people with my accent to go into that sort of arena.
I am also very keen to think about recommendations for the report, because it is fundamentally important. I would like you to get your thinking caps on as well. From a recommendation point of view, what do we want from the Government and what do we put in our report? Do you have anything off the top of your head now?
Ros Burnley: I would like to see some promotion to employers of the benefits of apprenticeships and what they look like now. There are some really dated perceptions from employers. This would help with recruitment as well, particularly at the higher levels. They are seen as something for a young person only. They do not see the new higher-level apprenticeships and the different kinds of apprenticeships that are out there. There is a real need for promotion across the board.
People think, “That is not what an apprentice looks like. It is not me”. It could be, and it could be amazing for your career progression. It is about more promotion to employers so that they understand and take on apprentices. That would help with recruitment at the higher levels too.
Alex Payne: We need to recognise that it is not a small undertaking for an employer to take on an apprentice. We have now moved to a position where it is only 20% off-the-job training in terms of when they are within those providers. It is a big commitment, so it is about having the right employer with the right apprentice to ensure successful retention and the longevity of that relationship. We heard a bit about that.
In terms of recommendations, we have a workshop with the Minister, Robert Halfon, next week, with a range of land-based principals. To support that, in my usual vein, I have put a range of asks together that involve 10 manifesto asks around this area. I would be delighted either to share those briefly with you now or to write to you and to share those, as you see fit.
Q69 Ian Byrne: If you write, that is fine. That is good. Partheeban, is there anything that you feel could be done from an apprenticeship point of view?
Dr Partheeban: With an apprenticeship, it is about education for the employer and education for the employee. There should be a recommendation that there must be an accessible, simple way of sharing information with the employer about what an apprenticeship is and the support mechanism for that employer, because, again, a lot of them are small businesses and they need that support network, so resources put aside for that. It is also about the expectations and rights of an employee, as well as a central hub where they can get help and support if needed.
Q70 Ian Byrne: A central hub is a good point. Are there any apprenticeships or placements that you have seen that are working well? Could this be replicated as a best-practice model for the report? Is there anything outstanding?
Ros Burnley: We have the level 6 professional forester apprenticeship, which is a new apprenticeship. It is an integrated degree, so they come out with a degree. They come out with chartered status if they want to as well. It has had very large interest in terms of applications. The Forestry Commission committed to taking 15 a year for three years, and that has been the springboard that has allowed it to be economically viable.
I will double-check, but I think we had 25 last year and 26[1] this year, which is really significant for forestry. Those are really significant numbers. The private sector is taking some on, so you have private sector, charitable sector and, through the Forestry Commission, public sector apprentices. Some of the delivery is in industry. Some of the delivery is from the universities, so you have those two, and it has been a positive programme for forestry. It has been a good example, and the combination of academic and industry delivery makes it a really powerful programme.
Alex Payne: It would be remiss of me not to talk about funding. There are some real challenges around some areas, particularly around agricultural apprenticeships where funding is not sufficient to run those apprenticeship standards, which will eventually result in a reduction in numbers.
We have discussed the rurality issues. They cost a huge amount to service. We are not going into Salford with our apprentices within a four-mile radius. No, we are travelling into dispersed areas, and there is a blunt tool in terms of on-cost that is applied to the funding methodology. The on-costs, ultimately, are greater in this area. That needs some considerable attention. Unfortunately, because of the cycle of review, which takes a number of years, once you have something applied in terms of funding, it is there with you in that band for a while.
Q71 Ian Byrne: Is that going to be part of your recommendations to the Minister next week?
Alex Payne: It absolutely is, yes.
Q72 Barry Gardiner: Ros, you said that you were not sure why recruitment was becoming more difficult within the forestry sector. I wondered if you had any reflections on the way in which our understanding of the forestry sector has changed over the years.
It was always a great outdoors career, with the sense that you were producing something that was of value for industry and for commerce. Now, with the overtones of environmental management, perhaps the commodification of timber is no longer as attractive as it once was, but yet there are other ways in which you could be attracting people into the profession, such as land management, the opportunities in forestry for leisure and enjoyment of the environment, and wider environmental management. I just wondered if you felt that was playing a role in the public’s perception of it as a career.
Ros Burnley: You are absolutely right. We also feel that within schools, among careers teachers and teachers of geography and things like that, the perception of forestry can be a bit dated.
Barry Gardiner: “Do not cut down trees”.
Ros Burnley: Yes, exactly. Materials in textbooks are detrimental to us being able to recruit people because of the perceptions that they are reinforcing of the sector. With the UK forest standard, modern forestry is very much about the environment. It is about people as well as production. We need help to get that message across. There is also the perception that it is very practical. It is, but it is also scientific and managerial, and it needs all sorts of different people.
When we run careers events, the teachers will bring students who they think fit their perceptions of the industry. They will say, “But forest research is here, and we have the University of Cumbria with a degree programme. We should have brought a wider range of learners”. That perception makes it more difficult to engage with the educators and with the careers advisers. The dated perception of the industry is something that we want to at least move forward in terms of the formal materials that are being provided to young people, so that they can see that it is part of the solution, not the problem.
Q73 Cat Smith: I have a few questions on T-levels. Ros, if I start with you just because we were talking about forestry, there is a huge problem with the uptake of the T-level in forestry. I just wondered if you could share with the Committee why you thought that might be.
Ros Burnley: I understand that we have not had any starts this year. It is the first year that it has been running. We are not that surprised, to be honest, because, just like it is difficult for our structure of employers to take on apprentices, it is difficult for them to take on work placements. Also, we did not have many offering it, because the T-level is just 16-to-19.
Most of the cohorts in forestry are very marginal, so we only have a handful of training providers, and most of those are quite marginal in terms of their numbers. If you have a product that is for 16 to 19-year-olds, and you were putting together your adult learners with your younger learners, it becomes unviable to run two programmes, so then they have to decide which way to go. This is an example of where policy is creating massive problems for us. We are already having to work hard at this, and it is sending us backwards, not forwards, in terms of being able to develop viable cohorts of learners.
We are really keen to make sure that we have a forestry offer. We are talking not just about T-levels, but about BTECs and City & Guilds technical. The T-level is now the level 2 or 3 offer for forestry. We need it to work as an offer for different ages, different ability levels and different starting points. At the moment, we do not have it right.
Q74 Cat Smith: With the 16-to-19 age restriction, does that mean that it would not be possible, without that changing, to rectify the problem that this year we have had no uptake on the forestry T-level?
Ros Burnley: No, not without lots of promotion. If we had promotion, that might help. I am not sure it would be appealing to adults, though, because it is a long, full-time course, so it is not so flexible. It would be useful to look at that, because it would need to appeal to the adult audience.
The ideal thing would be to do more promotion to get past some of these misconceptions about forestry and to have healthy numbers. Then we could get much bigger cohorts of younger people coming through, and run lots of courses of lots of different types. At the moment, we need an offer that is going to be viable. Whether that is T-levels, City & Guilds technical or BTECs, we need it to be there. At the moment, somebody comes to a provider and says, “I want to do forestry”, and they will say, “Unless you are going to move 200 miles away, I am afraid you are going to have to do something else”. That is a real shame when we have a 2,500 shortfall to deliver targets.
Q75 Cat Smith: I have a broader question on T-levels. Alex, you might be well placed to pick this up. Are you finding that T-levels are flexible enough for learners and providers? Do you have any good or bad examples of how it is working in the land-based sector?
Alex Payne: We have nine providers delivering the first pilot of the 2023 agriculture and land management pathway. They will be covering a large number of OSs but, as you heard, some of those might not be covered this year.
The good news, again, is that, certainly in terms of curriculum planning for next year, we are hearing about a lot of providers who will be delivering for next year, but there is a train coming down the track in terms of defunding as well that is pushing on that. Unfortunately, in land-based, we are wave 4. We are one of the last adopters of the T-level, but we all get defunded. We have not had as much of a long lead-in, but I have had Government assurances that we will certainly have a minimum of a year overlap for the animal one. We do not know whether we will have equine yet at this moment anyway.
We are strongly behind T-levels in terms of what they are supporting and trying to do in the development of that T-level-shaped learner. Critical thinking, analytical skills, problem-solving and thinking on their feet are all things that we know that employers want. The truth of it is that the technical qualifications we had previously had an element of flexibility in them, which allowed us to change delivery and modules in terms of the topographical, geographical, soil and livestock-based approach that happens in different areas of the country.
It is ironic that the FE White Paper is absolutely right in terms of meeting that local and regional need. Ofsted has a judgment in this area now, and the land-based colleges are performing particularly well in this area and having strong outcomes, but it is now a blunt tool in terms of the T-level, because it is, “That is the content and you are delivering that”. It is the same in every single area of the country.
I would support a 10% flexibility in the content. If we are trusting colleges and providers to deliver to local and regional need, let us trust them to deliver an element of the programme to local and regional need. Let us support emerging technologies. Let us support sustainability. Let us support new legislation and enable us to be able to show that these are constantly forward-thinking.
One of the challenges we have here is that, by the time we change the occupational map, we have the trailblazer group coming together and we have a standard and then we move on, you are looking at seven years between the conception of an idea and when it is going to end up in a T-level being taught. That is the challenge when it comes to that mixed farming picture.
While we realise, in terms of integrated farming and best practice, that we need to have that mixed farming, there is no mixed farming standard. IfATE are very much in listening mode around this, but the challenge is that there is no standard for it to be based on. The options are that you have to go back and develop that standard to allow that T-level to be created.
The feedback from lecturers and young people who are on that T-level—I absolutely accept that this is a small number—is very positive so far, so there are great kernels for us to base it on. It is seldom perfect first time, but there is work to do. It is industry-led and there is an annual review process with IfATE, and it is important that we get industry to come together and to feed into that.
Chair: Thank you very much. I was particularly pleased that we have not missed out forestry, because it often is overlooked in terms of land use. As far as veterinary surgeons are concerned, we are planning a future session talking about provision, particularly encouraging people to go into large animal work rather than small animal work, and also about the need to have veterinary surgeons working in our slaughterhouses; the majority of them at the moment come from overseas. Thank you very much indeed, everyone.