Business, Innovation and Skills Committee
Oral evidence: Adult Literacy and Numeracy, HC 1073
Tuesday 18 March 2014
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 18 March 2014.
Witnesses and written evidence where submitted:
At 10.15am:
At 11.00am:
Members present: Adrian Bailey (Chair); Mr Brian Binley; Paul Blomfield; Katy Clark; Mike Crockart; Caroline Dineage; Rebecca Harris; Ann McKechin; Nadhim Zahawi
Questions 96-192
Witnesses: Brigadier Gary Morris, Director of Educational Capability, the Army, Nina Champion, Head of Policy, Prisoners Education Trust, Anna Page, Policy, Public Affairs & Research Manager, St Mungo’s, and Audrey Mitchell, Director of North London and Outreach Services, Thames Reach, gave evidence.
Q96 Chair: Good morning and, first of all, welcome. Thank you for agreeing to assist us with our inquiry. I will, first of all, just ask you to introduce yourselves. We know who you are but it would be helpful for voice transcription purposes if you could. I will start with you, brigadier.
Gary Morris: Good morning. I am Brigadier Gary Morris. I am the Army’s Director of Educational Capability. That means that amongst other things, I am responsible for the development of literacy and numeracy.
Nina Champion: Good morning, Nina Champion. I am the Head of Policy at Prisoners Education Trust.
Anna Page: I am Anna Page. I am Policy, Public Affairs and Research Manager at St Mungo’s, which is a homelessness charity working in London and the South.
Audrey Mitchell: I am Audrey Mitchell, one of the directors of operations at Thames Reach and we are also a homelessness charity. I wrote the basic skills strategy for Thames Reach.
Q97 Chair: There will be some general questions to you and some that will be person-specific, obviously relevant to the particular organisations that you work for. Could I stress that we have a lot of questions in not much time to get through them, so if you have a general question and you really have nothing to add to the person who speaks before you do not feel obliged to do so. We will not count it against you if you do not. Equally, if you need to either add or subtract to what a previous person has said then your views would be welcome.
I am going to start with a very general question: we have heard that one-in-six adults in the UK have poor literacy skills. Do you think GCSEs or vocational programmes better equip adults in these basic numeracy and literacy skills or do you think there should be courses that are specially focused on those with poor literacy skills? It is a general question; who would like to lead on it?
Gary Morris: We take people who have left school with, in some cases, poor levels of attainment. They are then in employment and what really works for us is that we take people and put them on a functional programme. Their ability for us to embed it in the workplace and make it relevant to what they are doing in their training and then subsequent employment really works for us. We are very much in the camp that a functional approach works very well.
Q98 Chair: Effectively would it be a vocational programme, but specifically related to the skill sets they need in your job?
Gary Morris: Absolutely. It is the things that they need to be trainable and to operate as a member of the armed forces.
Q99 Chair: How would those skills be portable? Presumably there would be a basic level there that would be useful for other jobs as well.
Gary Morris: Absolutely. We have done an analysis of what levels we think we need at various ranks and we work towards those as our targets. We try to equip all soldiers up front with a base level as quickly as we can, given that they come in with a very varied spectrum.
Q100 Chair: You may not be able to answer this. How many of your recruits would you describe as broadly illiterate—without a functional level of literacy and numeracy?
Gary Morris: It depends how you define literacy and I would be very cautious about doing so. We have provided you with statistics of the levels they come in at on entry. Broadly, 40% are below GCSE-level in both literacy and numeracy on entry. That is our starting point, so we take them from there.
Q101 Chair: Does anybody have any desire to add to that?
Nina Champion: In prisons it is very similar. There is obviously a broad spectrum of learning needs with prisoners and there is also a spectrum of the amount of time they are going to be in custody. It is important to look at their learning journey as a whole, not just within custody but where they progress on after custody, particularly if they have a short sentence. Echoing what the brigadier said, we have found in prisons that an embedded approach is really key to engage prisoners in learning. Ultimately, the aim within prisons is to start a change of attitude in the mentality about learning and to develop a love of learning. Then if you can attach the basic literacy and numeracy to that, that is fantastic. It is about developing a culture of learning within a prison, so that education does not just happen in the classroom in the education department, but it happens in the gyms, kitchens, on the wings, in the workshops and there is a broad culture that anywhere you go in the prison there should be some element of learning and embedded learning attached to it to really hook somebody in and engage them.
The personalisation of the approach is really important as well—developing that individual learning plan. We were talking earlier about the understanding of the individual and their earlier experiences of education; many prisoners have had poor or negative experiences of education. Often in prisons, the only induction they will have is a half an hour literacy and numeracy assessment, be told their level and a referral to the education department. Where there is good practice, they have week-long education inductions, where they really start to understand, “What were your early experiences of learning?”; “What are your fears and concerns?”; “What are your strengths and what are your interests?”. Then you start to plan forward, but that is only by understanding where that individual is. It is also looking at, as I was saying, the amount of time you have in that establishment, looking at through-the-gate and how they can progress through the gate.
Q102 Chair: Nina, as you said, some may have had very negative experiences of schools. How do you break through what I would expect to be a barrier in terms of you being seen as a representative of an authoritarian establishment that perhaps, in the past, they had always kicked against and change that attitude to one of a love of learning? How can you do that?
Nina Champion: There are a number of ways. One is the use of learning champions and peer mentors: other prisoners. There is nothing stronger than a prisoner being able to say to another prisoner, “I was in your position. I could not read and write when I first came in and now I am doing this; this is what it has done for me”, and having them do that sales pitch to the prisoner on the wing. That happens in a number of prisons with the Shannon Trust Reading Plan, but also with other examples. There is also a maths mentoring scheme that is being piloted at the moment with that same peer-to-peer approach.
It is also about capturing people in other parts of the establishment. I was in Swaleside Prison on Friday, where they have branded their gym a “college”. They get a list from education of those who have not engaged and they have recognised have learning needs. About 70% of the prison population will go through the gym, and so they work in partnership with the education department to use their peer mentors to go and speak to the prisoners in the gym. They have an outreach literacy and numeracy teacher working in the gym. They have a classroom attached to the gym where they can do an hour or so of literacy and numeracy, all embedded and related to sports-type activities and then they can go and do an hour in the gym. They are in small groups. The prisoners were saying to me that this was a great approach because if they became frustrated they could go and work some of that off, but they can come back and look at it again; they can work in smaller groups. Just the idea of going to a classroom fills them with dread, but they have realised, “I am not thick; I am not stupid after all. I can succeed. I can do this”, but it is the approach that is important.
Anna Page: We see similar levels of literacy and numeracy amongst our clients, where our previous best-estimate was around about one-third. We are currently doing some new primary research and early findings are suggesting it is more like 50% of our clients who do not have literacy and numeracy skills.
Embedding learning is very much our approach across the organisation and the points around motivation is really key. The approach with which we might support clients would really depend on which stage they were at in their recovery. The impact of not having literacy and numeracy skills can affect every part of your life. Particularly for people who are trying to sort out their housing situation, they may have trouble with filling in a benefits claim form, looking for accommodation online, or working out how much rent they can afford to pay. Project workers might work with clients to think about how they might use their literacy to achieve these goals. It is also about working with people to find other motivations, so it might be around being able to read a story to your child.
We run a number of vocational training courses, from bricklaying to a music studio, and these can be very popular with clients who might not have yet thought about how they might address their literacy and numeracy. Interestingly, these projects were also really helpful for addressing other issues like drug and alcohol use. People might engage with the bricklaying course while they were still using, but by having the motivation of working, it really encourages people to address those issues.
It is the same with literacy and numeracy. We have basic skills tutors. We both train up the staff working on those vocational courses and will have literacy tutors who go and work with clients in those courses to help them with their book work that they need to complete for work they are doing for the vocational course. In bricklaying, it might be about working out which quantities people might need to measure to make up the cement, or in the music studio about writing lyrics for a song that they might have composed. It is very much about finding something that is relevant to people and working there.
Again, the range of ways in which we engage is really important. We have the literacy tutors who might do one-to-one support in projects or on the vocational courses, but then we have a range of other informal techniques around learning clubs, reading clubs and peer-to-peer learning as well.
Q103 Chair: I was going to ask you next how you targeted people below Level 1 and 2 in terms of literacy and numeracy, but you have probably pretty well covered that. Could I just move on? It does appear that a lot of money is focused on levels one and two. Identifying those at pre-Level 1 and providing a funding and educational process to deal with it is much more difficult. What do you think the Government could do to target such people? Can you think of a governmental process that would both identify and address this issue?
Audrey Mitchell: It has been said that it is really important to look at basic skills in the round. Certainly, in my experience, we have to use every opportunity through the voluntary sector, charities and organisations based here to include basic skills assessments when we are also looking at mental health needs, substance misuse or that kind of thing. It has to be part of everyday life. When we discover that somebody has a weakness in literacy or numeracy, the key workers and the support workers have a massive role to play in giving them the confidence to talk about it, identifying what the level might be and then sourcing some kind of support. There is a real lack of one-to-one support. Many of our clients have no self-esteem and very little confidence. Because they have weak literacy and perhaps weak life management skills in general, there is no motivation or route through unless they are supported through key working and one-to-one support. It has to be specialist. We think that about half of our clients have difficulty writing, so any job, or any college course even, needs some kind of enrolment or application process. It is very important that we invest in that earlier level and identify what the needs are, but then have the resources. Even if our staff identify the needs, we need that one-to-one specialist support, otherwise people are lost. They have so many other problems that it is so easy for them to give up or even not get to the facility. We have to help them with their organisation, planning and confidence.
Q104 Chair: Does anybody wish to add to that?
Nina Champion: We welcome the recent Government announcement of the roll out of literacy and numeracy assessments for all prisoners, but this must be done, as I was talking about earlier, in a way that is going to engage that learning—not just assess them, but look at them as a whole person. The timing of the assessment is also really important. If it is done within the first couple of days of coming into prison, often someone is not in that right frame of mind; they might have been still using drugs or it might be their first time in custody. In some prisons they do two lots of testing and the second test tends to be more reliable in terms of their actual ability. That should be borne in mind. Joining up is important. A lot of the time they will have a number of different plans, so they might have a learning plan through education; they might have a National Careers Service plan and they might have a sentence plan. More often than not, those plans are not actually joined up together. We would like to see is much more joined-up working across departments to formulate one single plan for that prisoner for their time in prison. I echo what Anna was saying about informal learning, particularly for that entry level, being really important and crucial. You will hear later from the Reading Agency who do the six book challenge. Libraries in prisons are really important, as well as reading groups and arts-based interventions that come into prisons through different charities. In terms of engaging those with that entry-level need, that informal learning as a route to more formal learning is really vital as well.
Q105 Caroline Dinenage: I want to press you a little further on this because both Nina and Anna have spoken about the benefits of informal learning. Audrey, you have spoken about it having to be specialist. How do you—
Audrey Mitchell: It is both. In terms of teaching, it should be specialist.
Q106 Caroline Dinenage: Why?
Audrey Mitchell: Because it is a skill. In terms of dyslexia, you have to understand the learning methods and the problems that people have. It is a real skill and, certainly, we have volunteers who are specialists in that area and do one-to-one teaching. Other peer mentors or volunteers do not have the knowledge or learning skills to do that, but they can help with other things. They can help with homework and practice.
Q107 Caroline Dinenage: Surely if we are talking about giving people really basic skills, any kind of progress is valuable. In my constituency, we heard in our last session from a charity that did peer-based reading coaching. They have had staggering results from people with no literacy skills at all. I find there is a huge snobbishness amongst the teaching community that it has to be teaching rather than coaching. Bearing in mind the results in recent decades have been so dreadful, surely any form of learning—be it informal or formal—is beneficial to that individual?
Anna Page: I cannot speak for other organisations, but the key thing about what we might mean about specialist is that the specialism that is really important, particularly working with homeless people and other vulnerable groups, is about an understanding of where people are coming from, their situation and the fact that they may have had bad experiences of school. That might be reinforced by other experiences of failure in other parts of their lives. One of the challenges with mainstream education providers is that people may not understand these barriers and how they might work with them. That understanding is where the value of peer support is really important and you can encourage volunteers to develop that specialist understanding. It might be that we need to look at what the specialism is and the real importance is about understanding people’s background and barriers.
Gary Morris: We use the whole spectrum and that has got to be the way forward. At one end, we do have some specialists and we do target them at the guys who are struggling at the lowest levels who might need a one-to-one and a particular programme developed. Around that, we wrap soldiers supporting other soldiers. They may have gone through the same learning themselves and they are great instructors who have learnt quite recently, as adults, how to get through this. We are supporting that with more generalist teaching staff. We take every opportunity to build into them specialist support where they need it, and a lot of them can get through without that one-to-one support. There is a spectrum, though, that does need that sort of support. In terms of what the Government can do, it is recognising that we need to be flexible in how we support those people, as opposed to presuming how we might get to that end-point because some of them take a lot longer than others.
Q108 Chair: I want to move on, but could I just ask this question? This is perhaps less relevant to the Army than the other witnesses. Do you think there is a case for the Government funding suitably accredited organisations that have demonstrated that they can deliver this level of education separate from the existing educational funding streams?
Nina Champion: In prisons, currently there is the Offenders’ Learning and Skills Service, OLASS, who provide the education and they have different providers. Often they will work in partnership with the voluntary sector or other organisations. This joining up needs to happen; it is really crucial.
Q109 Chair: It is perhaps less relevant for you than Anna or Audrey.
Anna Page: Yes, definitely. We generally find it very hard to access any Government funding for our skills provision. We actually fund it almost entirely from charitable donations, which we do not think should be happening, in recognition of the Government’s commitment, both across Government papers and different Departments to recognise and address the low skill levels amongst homeless people. We find that the adult skills budget is very much focused on providers needing to prove they can get people to have qualifications and complete courses. That is not how our clients tend to succeed in learning. It might be quite difficult to attend a set number of courses regularly and people are not always motivated to get formal qualifications. This means that it does not make financial sense to further education colleges, and the more formal, to work with our clients. It is not that they do not want to, but it is just that it does not make financial sense for them to do so. There is clearly a need to look at how some more flexibility can be introduced within that adult skills budget.
Chair: I would like to pursue this further, but I am conscious that we have a lot of other questions. If we could write to you afterwards, you could give us some ideas because I think we need to develop this. I want to bring in Brian now. I have inadvertently strayed into his questions, but I am sure he is adaptable enough.
Q110 Mr Binley: Never mind, Mr Chairman, I want to get back to the very basics. I must tell you that I have been really quite horrified—and I am a secondary modern schoolboy—with some of the stuff I have heard this morning. Ms Page talked about clients and that reminds us that education, like anything else, is a business. Let us look at its record. If you look at the fact that the UK is the only country in the developed western world whose pensioners are more numerate and literate than the age group of 18 to 24, it is a disgraceful record for a business. Secondly, one in six adults have a reading age no greater than the age of 11. That is a disgraceful record for a business. Thirdly, one-quarter of our adults have numeracy skills of age 11 or less. That is an appalling record for a business and any other business without the massive support this business has had would have gone bankrupt and out-of-business a long time ago with that record. Let us start from that position. I want to know, first of all, whether you genuinely recognise just how badly the educational establishment has let people down in this country. Secondly, I want to know how we put that right, right from the very beginning.
Audrey Mitchell: I am not an educational specialist.
Q111 Mr Binley: I did not say you were, but I heard a defence of the educational system, so let’s start from there.
Audrey Mitchell: I just want to say that Thames Reach works with about 8,000 people every year.
Mr Binley: I admire what you do. That is not the point.
Audrey Mitchell: My point is that probably about half of those have difficulty writing and probably one-third have difficulty understanding anything that you read.
Mr Binley: I am sure.
Audrey Mitchell: Your point is well made. But we have to deal with adults who, because of that, are never going to think about a job, probably never have a home and have all the problems that we have been talking about.
Q112 Mr Binley: I understand that situation totally. I have put the position to you where you should be made redundant, quite frankly. You should not be in the position you are in in dealing with so many people with poor literacy and numeracy skills. They are forced upon you by the very fact that our educational system has failed those people. That is why you are dealing with it. I want to know how we can change that situation from your perspective first of all.
Chair: Can I make it clear that I do not think you are being criticised. The system is. We recognise the work you are doing.
Anna Page: We are currently doing some research exploring the reasons behind these very statistics that you have highlighted. Yes, I agree that they are really shocking. We have been interviewing people who are currently working with us. They are adults now, so their experience at school was a little while ago and the situation has changed, but I imagine some of the points are still the case. A lot of the people who we work with have had really disruptive and traumatic childhoods. They might have moved around a lot; many might have experienced abuse as a child.
Q113 Mr Binley: That was the same in other countries; we are not unique in that respect.
Anna Page: No, I agree completely, but this obviously has a really big impact on people’s stability of education at the time. This happens in adulthood as well: when you are moving around and you are constantly moving house, it is very difficult to engage with school and learning, and you may be less motivated to do so. One of the recommendations to address this would be—and I know there has been progress on this since some Committee members were children—to recognise the impact of childhood trauma in schools and the impact that this can have on people’s ability to learn.
Q114 Mr Binley: Are you saying that other countries do not have these traumas then? I do not understand why you are not answering my question. I wonder how we get down to the very basics of this problem, which is ensuring that the educational establishment, particularly primary school education, does its job.
Anna Page: One important step would be to ensure that there is support for all children in schools to identify where children have disruptive home lives.
Mr Binley: Thank you, now we are getting somewhere. I am grateful.
Anna Page: There has been some recent good investment in parental support to address it. The Troubled Families agenda is a really good example. It is more initiatives like this where we can work with children to look at disruptive childhoods and the longer-term impact that would have.
Q115 Mr Binley: Could you drop us a line on your views in that respect?
Anna Page: Certainly, yes.
Nina Champion: I would like to follow on from that. Obviously there are a large number of children with parents who are imprisoned, and I believe it would be useful in Troubled Families to have criteria to be brought into that net if they have a parent in prison. It is likely that that inter-generational impact will carry on. There are some pockets of good practice about working with parents of imprisoned children and parents. If you can also empower the parents in prison to become learners and have a positive attitude to learning, that will pass on to their children, whether it is through particular initiatives like Storybook Dads or family learning, but also, just more generally, that they value learning and then they will pass that on to their children. That inter-generational impact and looking at children in troubled families is really important.
Another good example is where they have been able to use ICT to maintain those family ties. In one example at one prison, they have been able to use Skype-type technology to link up teachers and parents in prison for parent-teacher conferences and get that sort of involvement to really encourage the parents in prison to take an interest in their children’s learning. It is bringing teachers into schools for that sort of thing and really looking at the person in prison as a member of the family with children who could also then be affected, and working with the schools together. There are some pockets of good practice.
Gary Morris: I am not an expert on the school-end of the system, but what I get are the products of it. It is from there that we take them forward. I can tell you what we do positively to try and turn down that underperformance that you described in as short a period of time as possible. First of all, when they come in our organisation, it is expected of them that they will address this upfront. It is inescapable. What’s more, we will link it to their progression in their career so they are motivated from the start. Everybody who works with them, from the corporal who is supervising their training through to the wider instructional staff, will understand that if they are going to operate alongside their colleagues they need to be as good as their maths and English in order to be able to operate.
Q116 Mr Binley: Can I interject? Are you making the point that these people are motivated and they are motivated by a bigger challenge that they wish to succeed in? Is that what you are telling us?
Gary Morris: I think that is the switch. We have moved from school to an environment where, “You need to do this to be able to do your job well, to support your colleagues and to be successful in your career.” That motivation is key.
Q117 Mr Binley: Do we have to, in some way, transfer that to the people I have been talking about who have been totally let down by our educational establishment?
Gary Morris: Yes. There is role-modelling at all levels. We have people who have been through this.
Mr Binley: Thank you. That helps us tackle the most basic problem. Your work is excellent—I promise you I am not knocking that in any sense at all, Ms Mitchell—but you should be redundant if our educational system did the job it should do.
Chair: I need to move on and the next one is for Rebecca to ask the Prisoners Education Trust, but we have partly gone in to this, so there is no need to repeat it.
Q118 Rebecca Harris: Yes, I have a couple of questions for Nina. I should say that I helped set up the Cascade Foundation and went to see their work as a patron in Doncaster Prison recently. You can imagine that I am a convert to peer-to-peer support, as the name “Cascade” implies. I was very struck, from talking to the prisoners, by what you have said about how, frankly, they had an appalling school experience. The whole idea of being brought into a classroom environment horrified them. The way they were talked through Cascade was a revelation for them. A lot of them had been in and out of the prison service and this was the first time they had had this approach. Could you give us an idea of what is happening across the whole of the prison estate, what level of good practice there is, how patchy it is and how often people risk being taken into a classroom setting and not succeeding?
Nina Champion: The majority is based in the classroom setting. That is the norm of how literacy and numeracy is provided. The big exception to that is the Shannon Trust Reading Plan, Toe by Toe, where they train prisoners to work with literacy. I am aware of the Cascade Foundation and some of its work is fantastic. The other thing that they do is use laptops or some specific assistive technology equipment to work with prisoners with learning difficulties which, again, is fantastic. They use all the tools and the resources, but they do that up in the wings. They take them up to the wing; they take it to where the prisoner is. It is not about someone being hard to reach; it is finding them and going out and engaging and motivating them. That is a great approach.
With the mentoring, it is supporting those that are mentors. It is really important. That is such a vital role and we need to give them the skills and the support to do that role properly, supervise them and give them the training. At the Prisoners Education Trust we fund distance learning courses for prisoners and often they are prisoners who might have started out without literacy and numeracy, who have got some skills and now want to give back. Redemption and giving back is a really important part of the assistance process and it can be beneficial, not just for the learner, but also for that mentor or person giving the help. They do need some specialist support, though, to enable to do that, like they receive from Cascade and like they receive from the Shannon Trust. We can provide courses for those prisoners like the PETLLS course––Preparing to Teach in the Lifelong Learning Sector. We know that the St Giles Trust uses that qualification. They train that up to a level 3 to ensure that what they are getting is quality peer-to-peer support. It is having all those things together.
Q119 Rebecca Harris: Given that we have got a lot of prison estate with traditional classroom settings to which some people are just phobic, people will not go in there because they have had an appalling time from the age of three in the classroom. What are the obstacles to trying to roll this out more? I know that when we set up Cascade—they are working now with quality accreditation through NOMS and Manchester College and what-have-you––that there seems to be an obstacle to bringing in new ideas: you have to be accredited. It seems there is a bureaucratic backlog in trying to improve the service we are offering. What do you see there as the obstacles or things we could do to try and speed this up?
Nina Champion: There is definitely how the contracts and funding are arranged. That could be done better to incentivise that outreach learning. There is a culture change that needs to happen in terms of different Departments working together and seeing it as their business to be interested in learning, not just in the Department for Education. There is rebranding of education and it being seen as learning and happening everywhere. There is also continuing professional development—enabling teachers to get the confidence that they can go out and deliver in different parts of the prison, whereas they may be used to just teaching in a more traditional, formal way in a classroom. They need support to be able to go out to different parts of the prison. There is also a culture around empowering prisoners somehow and enabling some of that power to go over to them, because it is a strange concept within a prison to give that power over to someone else. Working in partnership with the prisoners and learners themselves is the key to making it happen. They understand what works and they have been there. A lot of it is around cultural change, but there are things that could be done within the contracts and the funding.
Q120 Rebecca Harris: Is there an obstacle to getting new providers in to get them started?
Nina Champion: No, they should be encouraged to work in partnership with those charitable organisations to enable them to fit their different populations. There are other barriers in prison, particularly around prisons that have a high churn. With functional skills in prisons at the moment, there is an exam every month, so they cannot necessarily do the exam at the point at which they are ready to do it. They have to wait and we have come across a lot of prisoner learners who have finished, are ready to take the exam, but are then transferred to a different prison before they do their exam. It is madness that they cannot be held or the exam be moved and be more flexible so they can get that qualification. Otherwise, when they go to the new prison, often the paperwork does not follow them so they have to start all over again. That can really de-motivate them.
Chair: That is a very interesting point and, again, if you could send us some supplementary evidence to reinforce that.
Q121 Caroline Dinenage: Nina, we always hear about the revolving door in prisons and that people come back. Is there any evidence from your organisation to show that people who have been through the literacy and numeracy courses are less likely to come back?
Nina Champion: We do not have evidence on the literacy and numeracy, but we do have evidence on distance learning, which is what we provide. The Ministry of Justice set up a justice Data Lab, which means that you can compare them against a control group. Last year we submitted data on over 8,000 prisoner learners who had done some sort of progression learning. The results against a matched control group were that there was a reduction of one‑quarter in their level of reoffending that we were really pleased to see. We see it on a daily basis in letters that we get from prisoners, but it was nice to have that data. We are going to be doing more work to investigate what it is about that process. We would welcome the OLASS providers, who provide the majority of literacy and numeracy, going through a similar sort of process to work out what works for different types of populations. There is a lot more that could be done to build the evidence base on what types of provision work.
Q122 Caroline Dinenage: Would you send us anything you have on that?
Nina Champion: Yes.
Q123 Caroline Dinenage: Have we finished the days now where education is being used as a stick and a carrot—for bad behaviour you do not get your classes? Have we stopped that now or is it still being used that way?
Nina Champion: There is a culture change happening around seeing learning as a right rather than a privilege. That is still an ongoing process and much more needs to be done from all aspects of prison to see learning as a right rather than a privilege. That is about engaging officers on the wings so they really understand the value of learning and are engaged. It is about the gym instructors; it is about the workshops. It is getting all those people on board and helping them understand that it is part of everyone’s business and every contact counts.
Chair: We understand the point.
Q124 Nadhim Zahawi: Along the same theme of learning and incentives to learn, you say it is class-based in prison.
Nina Champion: Yes, the majority.
Q125 Nadhim Zahawi: Prisoners can also opt to do other work that is paid. Is that a disincentive? Should we be looking at options where you provide bigger a incentive to learn—go to the library and be recompensed like doing manual work.
Nina Champion: Yes. Several prisons now are looking at pay structures and are flipping them from what they would have normally been. In many prisons where you are doing some learning you are paid at a much lower level then doing unskilled work.
Nadhim Zahawi: That is my point.
Nina Champion: In the more progressive prisons they are addressing that and flipping it. They are saying, “If are you a wing cleaner for five years and not doing any qualifications, why should you be paid more than someone who is actually trying to better themselves and address it?”
Q126 Nadhim Zahawi: Could you send us some numbers on that? I understand that that is one of the real issues. Human behaviour being what it is, you move towards something that earns you more.
Nina Champion: With the work in prisons, with that core day, if someone is working there needs to be opportunities for them to do learning outside of that core day. That is like you would do in the community, whether it is evenings and weekends. Often that time is just locked up in your cells, so if you are working and not doing learning attached, it is about trying to fit in learning elsewhere.
Q127 Mr Binley: I want to put a point to Brigadier Morris. It is about apprenticeships, which seem to me to be one of the ways of at least attempting to support these people to catch up a bit, quite frankly. In relation to literacy and numeracy skills, what is your involvement with apprenticeships and how does the lack of those skills hinder you in doing more?
Gary Morris: We run the biggest apprenticeship programme in the country. It is over 40 schemes across nearly all the trade groups now. There is one tiny one that we have not reached and those guys tend to be better qualified anyway, so I think we have hit the majority. It is a really practical way of getting adults to learn literacy and numeracy because it is embedded in the workplace. It is making them practically apply what they are doing. That is the key; it makes it tangible and real to them, so whether they are an infantry man, a signaller or a gunner, they have to apply what they are learning in those subjects to real-life problems that which can be contextualised for their workplace.
Q128 Mr Binley: Do you use their greater view of opportunity to embed greater literacy and numeracy skills within the very process of the apprenticeship situation?
Gary Morris: Yes. As part of all apprenticeships they do receive specific literacy and numeracy lessons and support, but when they are assessed in the workplace, there is an implicit assessment of their literacy and numeracy. They may be asked to demonstrate problem solving. That might for an engineer, for example, involve mathematics. They will have to write reports on their work. That is all part of the process. What apprenticeships do really well is to reinforce the learning out of the classroom and make it transferable. That makes it stick. Overlaying an apprenticeship on the normal military training that we will do really helps to embed that literacy and numeracy provision. It helps them to apply themselves better to their job as well because everything they have done in training then has to be demonstrated in the workplace in order to gain an apprenticeship.
Q129 Mr Binley: How many of the people who you have as recruits will come out, as a result of those apprenticeship schemes, with a trade that can take them further on in life?
Gary Morris: Some of the apprenticeships have more utility than others. The engineer/vocational-type ones—chefs and so on—are obviously very transferable to other civilian employments. The combat infantryman’s course does not have a civilian parallel, but in public service, as a basis, it will give very transferable skills in a more general sense. The pass rate is over 80%. In fact, it is nearer to 85% or 86%. Of the ones that do fall off‑programme it is normally because they either leave training or they transfer cap badges.
Q130 Mr Binley: What percentage of a given intake would you expect to come out with skills of that kind?
Gary Morris: Of that pass rate—
Mr Binley: Of 80%—that’s excellent.
Gary Morris: Of over 80%. It is nearer to 85%. If you took the fullness of time, so you took the soldiers who decide to transfer to another cap badge, you will probably take it higher. As a base measure, that is—
Chair: Sorry to intervene there. Could you give us the figures in writing? That would be very helpful.
Gary Morris: Yes, we could do.
Chair: We are almost at the end of the session and we have only reached halfway through our questions. I am going to allow time to run on, but I am going to ask both questioners and witnesses to be as brief as they can.
Q131 Rebecca Harris: This is a question for Audrey Mitchell. I understand that Thames Reach has developed a literacy toolkit and I wondered whether you could briefly describe what that is and what the methodology is. I am also wondering whether it is something that might be applicable for our schools, which are not picking up on dyslexics early enough in the first place.
Audrey Mitchell: It is part of this, which I am happy to leave, which was some research that was done by Julia Olisa and others in 2010 into some of our service users. For all the reasons we have been talking about, we recognised that we needed to empower our staff to use all the opportunities in their interactions with clients to assess what the literacy or numeracy needs might be and then also how to work through them. It is very much about a one-on-one approach, embedding it with a support plan so it is part of everything else that is going on. If we take a simple example like rent—if somebody is paying their rent that is an opportunity to practice counting and giving change.
It is about one-to-one, specialised, tailored support for every individual. Every member of staff then has access to our tutors and volunteers to get some specialist support around it. It is a simple toolkit that is all about assessment and one-to-one support, with a view to establishing where somebody is at in terms of their level and whether they want to go to college or work, and then tailoring the interventions for that. If there are other issues going on for people, and there will be with mental health or housing, it is making sure that they are part of the solution as well.
Q132 Ann McKechin: I have a couple of questions for Anna. You referred earlier to the fact that the current adult skills budget system used by the Government is very much course driven and that presents great difficulties for the client group that you have to assist. Do you think the Government have considered adequately how they are going to help those with the lowest needs, such as the people your charity comes across?
Anna Page: Our experience on the ground, as I mentioned earlier, is that it is very difficult for us to access any Government funding to provide basic skills services for our clients. In the community learning budget and similar funding streams, which are specifically targeted at the most disadvantaged, we have had some engagement and we have run some courses thorough that. However, generally, it is very difficult. When we are trying to engage with organisations that might be able to provide that community learning they either do not want to or not able to engage with us. We are currently looking at ways in which we can address this and we will be publishing our report in June when we will have some more ideas on that.
Q133 Ann McKechin: I understand that, in partnership with Crisis, you are formulating a pre-employment project. I just wondered whether you can briefly describe that project to the committee and just how many people you think it will help to support.
Anna Page: Certainly. The programme is funded by the Department for Communities and Local Government, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and DWP. It is going to be operational from 1 April and it will work with 50 people per year. It is designed to be pre-work programme support and it came out of some research that we did in 2012 where we found that for people engaged in the work programme, the work programme was failing them. That was for a number of reasons, including the fact that both their homelessness and the literacy and numeracy support were not identified by Welfare to Work providers or the Jobcentre Plus.
What this programme aims to do is to provide people with support to improve those basic literacy and numeracy skills before they engage with the work programme. People will be identified by Crisis, St Mungo’s and the Job Centre as people who are homeless and have not yet engaged with the work programme, but have low functional skills. Then they will have an assessment to assess their literacy and numeracy, and then check with Job Centre Plus to ensure they are not on, or about to go on, the work programme. Then we will provide support both within Crisis and St Mungo’s training centres and later on to be within our project within our hostels as well to provide the kind of support we outlined earlier to address those basic skills. The idea is that we prepare people to go on to the work programme so that they can take advantage of the support that work programme providers are offering.
Q134 Ann McKechin: Is that to get them up to the level?
Anna Page: Yes. At the moment, they are so below that the work programme providers are unable to engage with them to a level to address those issues.
Q135 Paul Blomfield: I have a question to everybody. I just wanted to explore how far you ensure that the adults you work with to develop skills maintain that skill level and take those skills further?
Anna Page: Integrating the range of different approaches we have all talked about is really important in maintaining momentum. While people may be engaged in a formal course, there will also be advice and guidance given throughout that course to think about how people might develop their skills later on—careers advice and identification of other opportunities outside the organisation, so referring them to local authorities or further education colleges where appropriate. The whole element of the peer support and the community is really important for building momentum and maintaining interest. Like with a lot of other things we have said, it is a package of different support.
Nina Champion: You have raised a really good point in terms of progression in relation to prisons because what learners tell us is that once they have those basic skills they often hit a brick wall in terms of what to do next. One of the ways that they continue learning is through what we offer at the Prisoners Education Trust through distance learning, which is not suitable for all people, but is for some. That means they can then practice their literacy and numeracy in other ways. They can perhaps do academic writing or develop creative writing. They are building and working up to higher levels.
We would also like to see that being used much wider within the prisons, enabling prisons to, once they have that literacy and numeracy and thirst for learning—they have realised, “I am not stupid; I can do it”—not to then hit a brick wall and to really see that learning plan as not something that just happens at the beginning, but that is then reviewed over time. If that establishment cannot offer what they want to do, then it can point them in the right direction. As Anna was saying, through the gate is really important for prisoners, particularly on short sentences to enable them, when they go out to organisations on the outside, to be able to access continuing education and further education. It might be that they are not necessarily ready to go into employment. They might need to take that next level, to get a Level 3 qualification, for example, to go into that work. It is about having those opportunities to progress both in custody and through the gate. That needs a lot of improvement.
Gary Morris: The approach we take is to set progressive targets for advancement for literacy and numeracy up to Level 2. We do have a target for everybody eventually getting to that level. Then, beyond that, we provide developmental routes for people to go more broadly than literacy and numeracy because it does not stop there, of course. That is really important because some of our people do come in at that level anyway if you are going into the technical trades. What is important is that we have pathways in each of their career groups where they can build on opportunities to either embed or further their technical skills, or their more general education right up to degree and post-graduate level.
Q136 Caroline Dinenage: What one Government action would you say would be most valuable in tackling this issue?
Gary Morris: For us, the shift to functional skills, which we wholeheartedly endorse, really works for us. It is rigorous now and it makes them apply it properly. It is something that gives us confidence, that they have literacy and numeracy abilities that have utility to them and to us. I would really say that you have hit the mark with that. Hold your nerve with it.
Nina Champion: We welcome the Government’s emphasis on learning and education in the youth estate in prisons—for under-18s—but we would like to see that also for the adult estate because many of them have missed out on that education when they were younger. We think putting learning at the centre of prisons and what people are trying to achieve in prison is relevant to the adult estate as well as the youth estate. We have formed an alliance in 2012 called the Prisoner Learning Alliance and we published a report called Smart Rehabilitation last year. There are recommendations in there on things we would like the Government to look at about developing that learning culture and how to put learning at the heart—
Q137 Caroline Dinenage: Can you send that to us?
Nina Champion: Yes, we can send that to you.
Anna Page: In its 2012 vision to end rough sleeping, the Government committed to prioritising access to further education and skills for homeless people. We are very pleased with some of the progress that has been made and the pre-employment programme that we are working on at the moment is great. It is really important for the Government to consider how to establish long term solutions around this. There are various funds that are looking at how funding can be targeted at the most disadvantaged learners and there is a real role for BIS in playing a strategic role to ensure that funding really does reach the most disadvantaged on a permanent basis.
Q138 Mike Crockart: I just have a very quick question on exactly that point. I was going to aim it at Nina. Having a look at the MoJ Data Lab details, there is a very interesting table showing what types of courses have what types of effects. The worrying part I can see in there is that courses are by funded BIS but, versus unaccredited courses, the accredited ones do not seem to be doing very much good. The unaccredited ones seem to have a great effect. I do not want not go into it now because we do not have time, but would you be able to send us links to those other reports looking at the BIS-funded part of the equation?
Nina Champion: Yes, absolutely. As a result of that there is more flexibility in the types of courses that we do between accredited and unaccredited. We have recently appointed a PhD student to look at some of these issues about why that is. What I would say about that data is that they are due to renew, potentially in the next few years, the OLASS contracts and this data and evidence about what works needs to be not just for the voluntary sector to do, but also for the providers that provide that mainstream education in prisons. It is really just to work out what works because there are some interesting findings that can come from that.
Q139 Chair: Audrey, this will be the last word.
Audrey Mitchell: In terms of the most vulnerable in society, it is about making sure that we have a wide spectrum of opportunity and teaching, and some funding for one‑to‑one support. There is a layer of people in society who are always overlooked in terms of strategies of getting people into work. They have many steps before they even can think about getting into work and they are the ones we concentrate on.
Chair: Thank you. We managed to do the second batch of questions rather quicker. I would stress that we realise that there are issues that perhaps you might have liked to have given longer or fuller responses to. We would very much welcome your supplementary evidence on that. Written evidence has just as much weight as verbal evidence. Similarly, when we look at the transcript, we may feel that there were some questions that we should have asked and did not and we may well contact you to ask you if you could respond to them. Can I thank you for your contribution here today? Perhaps I also ought to thank you for the work that you do because it is one of the most challenging areas and you obviously feel passionately about it. It is reflected in your answers, so thank you on two scores. Thanks very much.
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Heather Akehurst, Chief Executive, Open Awards, Professor John Field, Chair, Scotland’s Learning Partnership, Mike Ellicock, Chief Executive, National Numeracy, Jonathan Douglas, Director, National Literacy Trust, and Genevieve Clarke, Adult Literacy Specialist, Reading Agency, gave evidence.
Q140 Chair: Good morning and thanks for agreeing to help us with our inquiry today. You may or may not have been present when the first panel started. I will just ask you to introduce yourselves for voice transcription purposes, starting with you Heather.
Heather Akehurst: Heather Akehurst from Open Awards.
Professor Field: John Field from Scotland’s Learning Partnership.
Mike Ellicock: I am Mike Ellicock. I am Chief Executive of National Numeracy, bringing in an unrelenting spotlight onto the importance of numeracy in the UK.
Jonathan Douglas: I am Jonathan Douglas. I am Director of the National Literacy Trust, which is a charity working with the one-in-six who have literacy problems, but focusing in particular on young people and families.
Genevieve Clarke: I am Genevieve Clarke, a programme manager from the Reading Agency. We are a national charity that runs a range of Reading for Pleasure programmes.
Q141 Chair: Thank you very much. Again, I am not sure if you were there at the start but I will repeat it: some of the questions will be general questions. Please do not feel that you have to speak on every question if your predecessor has already covered the points you have made. We will not think ill of you or the organisations you represent if you decide that you have nothing to add. To demonstrate this I am going to start off with a very general question, which is pitched to all of you: how would you define basic skills? If your predecessor has defined it adequately just say so. Who is going to lead on it?
Mike Ellicock: I would like to focus on numeracy of course and I assumed that you might ask the same question that you asked at the start about one in six with low literacy skills. I would like to emphasise the point on the numeracy side that the equivalent number is one in two, so the statistics that Brian used were wrong. It is one in two who are working at entry levels on numeracy and it is 78% of the population working below Level 2. One of the big things for us, in terms of defining basic skills and when we talk about literacy and numeracy, is, “Let’s look at those statistics and then address those issues and the particular issues that there are around the respective areas.” Numeracy means to be able to use quantitative information to make good decisions in everyday life. It is very much a life skill. From those statistics we can see that lots of people are not necessarily able to do that and some of the points Brian made about the system are interesting. We think that numeracy is hidden behind literacy. We think that we are measuring the wrong things in numeracy, so I passed around the Essentials of Numeracy for All around that. We think that when Brian was talking about the educational establishment, we need to look at the way in which the political system—
Q142 Chair: You are covering this very widely. I would not necessarily disagree with what you are saying but, at this point, can I just get a get your view—?
Mike Ellicock: A one line answer on numeracy is that it is using quantitative information to help people make good decisions in their everyday life.
Jonathan Douglas: Last year, we undertook a piece of research looking at the relative definitions of literacy and one of the keys things that came through is that the business community has a very different understanding about what literacy means to the academic and education community. As you are aware, the CBI registers about 32% of businesses feeling frustrated with the levels of school leavers’ literacy and 15% of employers giving remedial training. What we discovered was that that was a mismatch with the education community’s attainment levels. The themes that seem to be particularly underrated in terms of the education community’s work around literacy, but highly rated by the business community, are speech, language and communication skills and also digital literacy.
Q143 Chair: Others are nodding—have you anything to add or subtract?
Professor Field: We are a national organisation representing learners and providers in adult learning. The broad approach we take is that, while we absolutely understand the type of things Mike was talking about, first, we take a broad approach to literacies—multiple—and secondly a very strong focus on how people use them. The emphasis is on what might be called in the trade functionality.
Genevieve Clarke: It is also the perception of learners themselves about where they feel they are on that spectrum. One observation is, for instance, if you ask somebody whether they are a reader, very often they will say no because they will have a very fixed view of what a reader is. The work that we are all trying to do is actually engage people in a community of people who can call themselves readers, writers and learners. That is fundamental.
Q144 Paul Blomfield: I have a couple of specific questions for Mike. Firstly, to explore the relationship between literacy and numeracy, at a previous evidence session we were told by Libby Coleman that until you can read for meaning you cannot use a computer and you cannot start looking at maths. Would you agree?
Mike Ellicock: I am not a literacy expert, but if you look at pre-school children playing with shapes and objects, they are doing maths, so I do not necessarily buy that. One of the problems in terms of the way that we teach maths in this country is that we do move into the abstract way too early. We have this definition of maths as abstract stuff. A much better approach—and this is what we are learning from high performing jurisdictions—is to use concrete objects, which kids are already using, move into the pictorial representations and then go on into the abstract in a much more structured, scaffolded way. That is very important. That is what we are learning from places like Shanghai and Singapore.
Q145 Paul Blomfield: Is that how you think you will succeed where other attempts at improving numeracy have failed?
Mike Ellicock: That is one of the ways. There are a huge number of different aspects to this.
Q146 Paul Blomfield: You said in your written evidence that improving the quality and the supply of the adult numeracy workforce is a key role for Government and you urged it to give this greater attention.
Mike Ellicock: Yes.
Paul Blomfield: What more do you think the Government should be doing?
Mike Ellicock: Certainly, workforce development generally is very important. We agree with the continuation of maths to 18. That is appropriate and is what higher‑performing countries do. There is a big conflict going on within FE colleges around the functional skills and some of your previous witnesses addressed the functional skills versus GCSE. We think we need to change GCSE to address more of what we are talking about—this base of numeracy or everyday maths skills, which 78% of the population, it would appear from BIS assessments, do not have. There is a big shift that we think we need. Functional skills are a way forward and we think the Essentials that we have produced is a way forward. We launched the National Numeracy Challenge last week as a way of supporting those working in the system, but also those outside the system who want to improve their numeracy.
Q147 Paul Blomfield: Can I follow up on that? You have very helpfully circulated the stuff about the Challenge, which I have not had time to read yet in the last five minutes.
Mike Ellicock: You can have a go at it later.
Paul Blomfield: Could you just summarise for us the key points of the challenge – what it is all about?
Mike Ellicock: Yes, I would love to. We are a relatively new charity looking at the issue of numeracy in the UK. We have produced the Challenge because we want to be able to support those that want to improve their numeracy. We launched a YouGov survey last week. 31% of the population said they wanted to improve their numeracy levels. That rose to 40% amongst the unemployed, part time workers and those with children in the household. For those who rated their skills as poor, it was 50%. For lots of those people who have been through an education system and have not necessarily succeeded, they do not necessarily want to engage within further education immediately. We have created a web-based platform—we talk a lot about attitudes and attitudinal approaches, and trying to get rid of this idea that there is a maths gene—and then you can go and do a short assessment. It takes about 25 minutes; you get what level you are working at then get routed into a lot of learning resources; then you take the assessment again. The key thing is a distance-travelled measure so we are working with the behavioural insights team and the Nudge unit from the Cabinet Office to analyse that data and look at more effective ways of supporting learners.
Q148 Rebecca Harris: I have a quick question for Heather. In your submission you stated that the Government made basic skills a priority and provides training free for those under the age of 24, but funding for this is currently provided by the Skills Funding Agency and that presents a barrier immediately. Can you explain how that barrier works and what you would do in relation to funding for basic skills? How would you change it?
Heather Akehurst: I think funding for basic skills at any age should be free at the point of entry because people choose to address the gaps that they have at different times. They have different triggers to do that. That trigger might not come along until you are in your 40s and you have children who are in primary school moving up into secondary school. I am currently struggling with my son’s maths homework at the moment, so I can relate to that. It is about the way the funding is currently being moved. It has a very strong focus on getting people into employment and I do not think many people would argue with that. People are starting at different levels and if you are starting at entry level you have a much bigger journey.
One of the things that Open Awards has a heritage of has been within unit-based qualifications so that people are taking smaller steps rather than having to commit to 12 months’ study. The funding is very much moving away from that. The funding is very much towards whole qualifications and so that, for instance, particularly with a lot of that we do, where we are providing qualifications within prisons, prisons are stopping to use it because they are unwilling, for lots of different reasons, to commit to funding a full qualification. Whereas before prisoners used to commit to individual units—as somebody moved around of the prison system and out of the prison system they could take those units with them—there is an increased barrier right at the start for people to allow people to take units that they are not getting funded for.
Q149 Caroline Dinenage: My question is for Genevieve. Could you talk us through a little bit about your Six Book Challenge and how it helps adults improve their literacy skills first of all?
Genevieve Clarke: Certainly. The context is that we are a charity that runs a whole range of programmes for different ages and abilities. That encompasses children as well. It is based on the premise that Reading for Pleasure really does have impact on attainment, whether it is children’s progression and, with adults, once you have engaged people in reading and they see the point of it they want to go on doing more and they improve their skills at the same time.
We introduced a challenge. It is a very simple thing of being invited to read six things; they do not have to be books. We were talking about people who, in some cases, cannot manage the Quick Reads books, which are very short. It is reading material and they log it in a reading diary; they have to write a few words about it, so it involves writing as well. At the end they receive a certificate. In many cases, that is the first certificate they have ever had. It is motivation and reward along the way: 90% of those surveyed say that taking part gives them more confidence.
We deliberate on a partnership model at a local level and with public libraries at the heart of it. Then libraries in other settings such as colleges and prison libraries so that people have access to free books. We have worked for a whole manner of different partners, some of whom you have heard from. We work with about 60% of public library services, who work with local adult learning/family learning/WEA etc. We work in well‑over 100 FE and sixth form colleges, around 100 prisons. I would also very much echo what Nina said there. It is the prison library working with education, but across other parts of the prison as well. Then we work in a lot of workplaces, working through trade union learning representatives, like you heard about from Unionlearn. That is working in places like logistics depots, supermarkets and transport companies. We also work with workforces in hospitals and the Army as well. That is just to give you a picture of the scale.
We have been doing this for seven years now. 35,000 people registered last year and it is all about engaging them in the enjoyment of reading and developing a reading habit. That is what we are finding. The key point is that it supplements what everybody else is talking about because, with the best will in the world, if somebody is going to a class for two hours a week they cannot make that much progress. Studies that have looked into effective provision have said that people do not need to do self-study; they need to do active reading, and so you need to practice your skills. This is borne out. We have a lot of ESOL learners using it and we also have bilingual materials in Wales where adults learning Welsh are using the Six Book Challenge. It is completely obvious that if you are learning something new, you need to practise it and that is even better if you are enjoying how you are practising it.
Q150 Caroline Dinenage: How is it that you find the most success of galvanising people into action and attracting them to want to do this? One of the big issues that we have found as a study on this is that there are a lot of organisations who want to help people to learn to read but there is a stigma about admitting that you cannot read and looking for help. Often people have become very resourceful at hiding their literacy problems. What is your key? What is your hook? How do you get those readers to admit that they have a problem and want to move forward?
Genevieve Clarke: We coordinate it nationally, so we work with a lot of different agencies. I completely support the idea that you have to have voluntary agents working at the coalface, quite literally. That might be through places like housing or health where people are coming forward for other reasons. If those frontline workers are aware enough they will be spot the fact that there are real literacy problems there. Then it is the skill of people like librarians, for instance, who have got better at this and can find something that will really engage somebody.
One of the easiest questions to ask somebody is, “What are your favourite things in life? What makes you feel happy?” You then begin to ease out that they love fishing so you ask, “Why not read a bit of a fishing magazine?” We take a really broad definition of reading and that includes digital as well. These days there are so many different ways for people to get into reading. There was an example of a 17-year-old with their feet up on the desk in a college library and the librarian showed him that he could download books on to his phone. Then he read six books for the Six Book Challenge and now has a completely different view of what a library can offer him.
Q151 Caroline Dinenage: Fantastic. What do you think the Government can do to help with this?
Genevieve Clarke: It is recognising that it is practice, as John said. Only 12% to 15% of pupils’ time is spent in school and this is far less for adult learners, so it has to seep into all parts of life. From our point of view, we would love recognition that reading for enjoyment is part of it and, certainly, that is a requirement now for schools. It would be lovely if that were clearly in this kind of policy and that it supplements the kind of more formal work everyone else is doing. You have to practise your skills to get better at them.
Q152 Ann McKechin: Could I ask a question to John? I wonder if you could briefly explain to the Committee the work of Scotland’s Learning Partnership and where you think it might differ from provision in the rest of the UK.
Professor Field: The partnership, as I have said, represents both learners and providers. It organises itself between two forums. One is a providers’ forum and one is a learners’ forum. That is how the work is structured. Broadly speaking, in Scotland there is a general acceptance, which is certainly accepted by the Scottish Government, of what in the trade is called the social practices model of literacies. That means that a lot of the work does have a slightly different shape. It is much less likely to be driven by formal qualifications and target‑setting than appears to be the case, or one hears to be the case south of the border. It is much more likely to take place in an embedded fashion. That is to say, literacy is provisionally embedded in a range of other learning activities, which may take place in the private sector, private training organisations, firms, workplaces, voluntary organisations of various kinds, sporting associations, or in formal education settings. The largest of the formal education settings will be the council and the colleges. In recent years, the colleges and the councils have had to reduce provision very significantly but they have operated historically on a partnership pattern. That is very much the approach that SLP exists to promote and advance.
Q153 Ann McKechin: Are literacy and numeracy levels different in Scotland from the rest of the UK?
Professor Field: That is a good question, to which I think some of us wish we knew the answer and some of us are very apparently glad that we do not know the answer. There was a separate survey of literacy in Scotland in 2009. It used different very strongly tweaked questions and was analysed differently from the OECD survey that England and Northern Ireland have just taken part in. The broad pattern in Scotland does not appear to be a million miles away from the rest of the UK and the Republic of Ireland, in that in the 1997 International Adult Literacy Survey the profile was very similar. Some people will emphasise the differences, but they are within the boundaries of error.
Q154 Ann McKechin: Despite the different educational systems—that is quite interesting.
Professor Field: It is extremely interesting. The same, incidentally, is true of school attainment in PISA. The differences are within the margins of error.
Q155 Ann McKechin: Thank you for that. Do you have any direct link with the Department for Work and Pensions? We have heard from our earlier panel today about referrals made from JSA claimants? I would be interested to know whether there was any particular link. Secondly, one of the other issues, which is linked to literacy and numeracy skills, that I know is apparent in my own city in Glasgow is a lack of digital skills. We have the lowest usage of digital in the whole of the United Kingdom by a significant factor. I just wondered to what extent your partnership was covering either of those issues.
Professor Field: On the digital skills, that clearly is a major issue that also has to do with the availability of infrastructure, of course. That is particularly if fast broadband is less available in certain parts of the UK. That is going to have a significant impact on the take up of digital skills. Most people have learnt digital skills through using them and making a lot of mistakes along the way. You can improve those and there are a number of projects with which SLP is associated that involve digital skills, but again, they are largely embedded within other activities. Things like “Give them a sporting chance”, for example, would include digital skills, but among many other skills. What was the first question?
Q156 Ann McKechin: The first question was about your links with the Department for Work and Pensions.
Professor Field: Yes, DWP—not really. The DWP largely liaises with Skills Development Scotland. While we do have links with Skills Development Scotland, they essentially plough a different furrow. We do have links with workplace learning through the trade unions, employers, the Chambers of Commerce, the network of family businesses in Scotland and so on. There are links with workplace learning, particularly with SMEs, but not so much with DWP. There is also the Scottish Prison Service. That has educational activity and has just this year introduced literacies into its assessment of new prisoners as they arrive. Within a few years, we will start seeing whether that has made a difference, but that is very new.
Q157 Chair: I have a few questions to finish off with and then I am going to come to Caroline to ask the final question. First of all, monitoring and evaluation: how does your organisation do that? We will start with you Heather, if that is okay.
Heather Akehurst: We provide the qualifications that other centres use, so probably our monitoring and evaluation is not going to be tremendously useful within this discussion because we do not deal with the end-learner. We provide the tools that other people use to deliver.
Professor Field: I have just a couple of things to say from a Scottish perspective. There is an evaluation tool that has been developed by Edinburgh City Council. It has been widely used across Scotland and is highly regarded. We also have HMIE, of course, which is a rather different relationship. I know you are seeing Ofsted later, but the relationship with HMIE tends to be rather different than the relationship that Ofsted has become in England. HMIE has produced self-assessment materials through Education Scotland for the community-learning sector. Those cover literacies, and learning and teaching.
Q158 Chair: We might want to follow this up.
Professor Field: I would be happy to do that.
Mike Ellicock: One of the important things about the National Numeracy Challenge and why we developed it is because there is a potential for a rich source of data. This is the data of the people who have gone through it since last Wednesday in terms of their breakdown. It is about the distance travelled that those learners make. On the point about funding qualifications, something like £300 million a year goes on adult numeracy qualifications, but adult numeracy has been getting worse. We think it is very important to reorient towards actual improvement in numeracy. That is what we hope to do through the challenge. We have lots of data there and we are looked to share that and work with the Behavioural Insights Team on that.
Jonathan Douglas: We have a four-point narrative. The first is around prioritisation of literacy. We know that an awful lot of frontline workers have strong awareness that their clients have people in housing associations and the criminal justice system with low levels of literacy, but very few do something about it. One of the key things we look for is that prioritisation. The second thing is shifts in attitudes. From the PIAAC data and so forth we know that people with low levels of literacy frequently do not look to improve those. If we can shift their attitudes that is important. The third thing is behaviours, exactly as Genevieve was saying. Public library membership, attitudes to reading and behaviour around that are important. Then the fourth thing is skills themselves. There is a narrative from awareness to skills.
Genevieve Clarke: As far as knowing whether our scheme works, as a charity we have to sell our materials. We do sell them and people are finding them valuable and we get feedback from them. I wanted to be able to tell your Committee member who is no longer here, Brian Binley, that one of the most successful places happens to be Northampton College, with 283 completers last year, and they have made it obligatory for students up to Level 2 English to take part in the challenge. Ofsted remarked on the growth in male students taking part in it. They have also said that they have had a 12% increase in their GCSE results and they feel Reading for Pleasure is part of that. We are receiving feedback from the people who run our scheme all of the time.
Q159 Chair: If he does not know it, we will bring it to his attention. I have a very quick question. If you could demand one thing from the Government to do to support you to make your work more effective, what would it be? Who wants to volunteer to open on this?
Heather Akehurst: It is about recognising that adult literacy is not something that you can look at on its own. There has to be joined-up thinking. There have to be different ways of people being able to identify that people may have an issue and be able to deal with it in lots of different ways. I do not think you can just sit and look at adult literacy.
Q160 Chair: If others have the same priority you can say so, but I will take each one individually. Professor?
Professor Field: It is what in the trade would be called the ladder of provision. That is, making sure that you have frontline activities that are engaging with people from the most disadvantaged and neglected parts of our society and moving them along. They then have to be able to go somewhere. That is the part of the problem, certainly within Scotland. The ladder of provision has been broken in many respects. That is a development since about 2007/08 that is starting to create difficulties in terms of a lifelong learning system. What happens to people who have gone through prison, taken a literacies programme and succeeded? What do they do when they leave? That is an issue whether they are ex-prisoners or elsewhere.
The only other thing I would add is that it seems to me that for the group Mr Binley was rightly very concerned about—and I do not think anybody yet has fully answered his question; I would love to have a debate with him about that—there is a lot more in the data that could be looked at within the OECD data. England and Northern Ireland are real standout outliers. There is some evidence from the 2009 survey that Scotland, incidentally, might have a similar challenge with that age group. If that is the case, there really needs to be some bottoming out of those data. BIS is very well placed either to do it or to secure it, and to publish it.
Mike Ellicock: Linked to that, when we look at those young people, Government, employers and all of us involved in this need to do better job on three things. The first one is around value and the importance of numeracy. We have put this £20 billion figure out of the cost to the UK economy. The OECD said that good numeracy is the best protection against unemployment, low wages and poor health, so that is valuing it. We need to do a better job of convincing people that there is not a maths gene that they do not have. Everybody can do this stuff; everybody in the UK can become functionally numerate, but that is not where we are at the moment. The third part is that we need to do a better job of selling effort as the way to success. We think maths and numeracy is at the frontline of a battle we are having in the UK about whether success comes from talent or whether it comes effort. We believe very strongly that if you try at something—if you practise, as Genevieve said—if you read a lot you get better at reading; if you do some maths and numeracy, you get better at it. There is not a maths gene and we can all do this. Government and everyone else need to try and support that message.
Jonathan Douglas: I have two things. First, BIS holds a really important key, which has not been talked about yet this morning. That is the relationship between education and business, in terms of raising aspiration. We have established 25 local partnerships between businesses and schools and we are seeing fantastic results in terms of young people’s attainment because they have been given role models and support, which drive aspirations, which drive literacy.
Q161 Chair: If you have not already done so, could you send us some supplementary evidence?
Jonathan Douglas: I will, yes. The second thing is shifting the analysis so it is not simply about the supply of learning opportunities, but that we also look much more clearly at levels of demand. That means a deep understanding of engagement. Personal aspiration, particularly around parenthood, is a strong driver for people returning to formal learning. It is the use of initiatives, as Mike was saying, like social marketing to drive awareness of the opportunities the individuals have to improve their skills.
Genevieve Clarke: Key to all of this is remembering these words, “motivation” and “relevance”. As Heather has said, we cannot look at this in isolation. It has such an impact on people’s health and wellbeing. I was rather encouraged that in the BIS evidence it mentioned health and wellbeing in the second line or something. All of this is fundamental and it is really important that we work together to join up the links because we all have the will and the expertise to make it work. It is helping us to work together.
Q162 Chair: Before I bring in Caroline, there is just one final question from me. Does your organisation receive any funding either directly or indirectly from Government?
Genevieve Clarke: We have put our application into the Arts Council for our charity. At times we have had funding from BIS to promote Reading for Pleasure. Sadly there is none at the moment. We would love to be able to, but we have to sell our materials.
Jonathan Douglas: We have project funding from the Department for Education, but no core funding from Government and no funding from BIS.
Mike Ellicock: We have project funding from BIS for the Challenge that we have just recently received, which is fantastic, but no core funding from Government.
Professor Field: Our organisation receives a grant from the Scottish Government. Last year it was slightly over £39,000. The rest of the income comes from projects and sale of services.
Heather Akehurst: We have no core funding from Government-direct but our centres will receive funding through the Skills Funding Agency, Ofqual and QAA.
Q163 Chair: Thanks, that is very helpful. A final question from me is to Heather. This is really culled from your submission. You said that greater employer education programmes should target SMEs. Could you tell us a little bit more about that fairly shortly?
Heather Akehurst: My view is that if somebody leaves school having managed to get through the education system and you still have poor reading and numeracy skills, and you have managed to duck it and get into employment, then you have an employer who does not need reading or maths for you to do that job. There are lots of different examples out there. I think then to try and incentivise an employer to persuade them that they may need to give up some time—and I know the panel has heard some really good examples, particularly through Unionlearn, but to give up some time or provide the funding—is difficult for them to do. They tend to be smaller employers; there is less incentive; there is no Government financial incentive for them to do it, if they can get their jobs done without it.
Q164 Chair: The Government does provide help for Unionlearn.
Heather Akehurst: Yes, it does, but I am not sure how much that is getting down to SME-level. What I am talking about is, perhaps, Joe Bloggs, who has a garage; he employs five people. They do not particularly need to read; they do not need maths. How do we incentivise people like that to be picking up the issue? If you have been working five or six days a week, where is your incentive to then go and partake of an adult learning course, if you can get one that is still funded by your local authority?
Mike Ellicock: We created the challenge to try and reach out to SMEs and to individuals who want to improve their skills, but the bigger point is that jobs which do not need reading, writing or basic numeracy are disappearing. Those people need to get these skills. We, collectively, including the SME employers, need to get the message out that everybody needs this stuff.
Q165 Chair: I have a final question, possibly to Heather, but also to others. How do you get from this point to signposting somebody to an apprenticeship? Is there anything that you think that could be done to assist that process?
Heather Akehurst: There is a lot around apprenticeships at the moment and certainly schools are doing an increasing job of looking at it. That brings into question the quality of careers advice in schools sometimes.
Q166 Chair: The problem is of course that schools often fail the cohort that we have and they are unlikely to get to that point.
Heather Akehurst: Yes and, of course, apprenticeships are actively considering at the moment whether they are going to make GCSEs a requirement of doing an apprenticeship. That could wipe out a whole cohort of young people who are very well-served by apprenticeships at the moment. That is a big worry looking forward. I think that is where Local Enterprise Partnerships and Chambers of Commerce need to do a bit more, but it is very difficult to get to SMEs who are so busy just making their businesses run. I accept that.
Q167 Chair: It is part and parcel of the problem that we are well aware of.
Jonathan Douglas: With reference to access to apprenticeships, we are just about to launch a partnership with British Telecom for young people who have literacy levels that are currently barring them from access to apprenticeships. They will be identified through Job Centre Plus and volunteers from British Telecom will work with adult basic skills tutors over a two-month period to raise their literacy levels and finally to give access to the apprenticeship application activity for those young people. That kind of partnership approach between the third sector, Job Centre Plus and business, perhaps, holds an important key there.
Chair: That concludes our questions. Thank you very much. As I said to the others, please do feel free to send any further evidence. Indeed, we have asked you on one or two occasions to do so. Thank you. That is incredibly helpful and we will incorporate your observations into our recommendations to the Government. Thank you very much.
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Karen Adriaanse, HMI Specialist adviser, National Adviser for careers guidance and employability, Ofsted, Keith Smith, Executive Director, Skills Funding Agency, and Lesley Giles, Deputy Director, UK Commission of Employment and Skills, gave evidence.
Q168 Chair: Good morning and welcome. You may well have been sitting patiently there, so you will probably have heard my comments to the previous panels. Notwithstanding that, I will repeat them anyway. Some of our questions will be general questions for all of you to answer, but please do not feel that you need to repeat what somebody else has said. If I could just ask you to introduce yourselves, starting with you Karen?
Karen Adriaanse: Karen Adriaanse; I am an HMI from Ofsted and I am Ofsted’s Special Adviser for Improvement for Further Education and Skills.
Keith Smith: I am Keith Smith and I work in the Skills Funding Agency. Some of my responsibilities are leading on the issue of implementation and funding of the learning system.
Lesley Giles: My name is Lesley Giles and I am one of the deputy directors at the UK Commission for Employment and Skills. I have lead responsibility for our research and analytical programme there.
Q169 Chair: I will start a question that is to all. It costs an adult £165 per course for English and maths GCSEs. How do you think adults can afford to pay that?
Keith Smith: The position on funding is that all adults below that Level 2 have entitlement to free English and maths, so there are no tuition costs or charges that get levered through the funding system. We are very clear that for all of our key programmes, whether they be apprenticeships, traineeships or those funded by colleges in other classroom settings, English and maths are free at the point of access.
Q170 Chair: Are you saying unequivocally that it is effectively free up to GCSE?
Keith Smith: We fully fund all learners, of any age, who have not obtained a Level 2 English or maths and we provide full funding for every application regardless of their employment status, whether they are unemployed or employed. If they are assessed by the learning provider as not having the Level 2 standard, we provide full funding for those courses and qualifications.
Chair: We have heard differently, but we will explore the sources of that information and, obviously, you have given us this commitment today. We will make an assessment. If necessary we might come back to you.
Q171 Paul Blomfield: I wonder if I could ask a question to Karen arising from her written evidence. It highlighted the results of your inspections of foundation English and maths providers between 2012 and 2013. Could you just draw out for us the key findings from that?
Karen Adriaanse: Certainly. On inspection, we look to see the quality of learning and development of skills. We look at the quality of teaching and learning and we also see how well it is managed. Over the last 18 months or so, out of 83 inspections 42 were judged to be either “good” or “better”. That is a concern that we have had and certainly the Chief Inspector mentioned that in his report. That is in comparison to one of the better performing subjects, like engineering for example, where 70% of it is “good” or “better”.
In the very best provision, leaders and managers take responsibility for the quality of English and maths in their institution across the board. They are committed to it; they have a strong strategy to be able to make sure that they understand what the need is and how well they are meeting the need, and take responsibility for the quality of teaching and learning. In particular, the very effective teachers have a very good understanding of language and skills and make sure that they know where the starting point is for their learners.
In maths, it is not only getting the answer right, which a lot of learners think it is; it is really making sure that the teachers work with their students to ensure they are not only relying on their memory to be able to carry something out, but that they understand the concepts so they can do it for life. That is why our inspections show that when the learning is in context—which the previous witnesses have said—it is much more beneficial to them because they can reinforce it in their everyday lives. We do have some excellent examples of purposeful, stimulating and inspirational teaching and learning that works. On the other hand, where the learning is dull and demotivates, it does not help anybody at all and it is not a good use of public funds either.
Q172 Paul Blomfield: Thanks very much and obviously we share your concerns, hence this inquiry. I wonder whether you could develop it a little bit more. You talked about leadership and other things. What do you think needs to change and, in particular, what more could the Government be doing to make that change happen?
Karen Adriaanse: There are various levels that the Government need to do. Something that the previous witnesses talked about was a change in culture and raising aspirations where possible, because where learning does not work—and certainly in schools where it does not work—is where teachers have low expectations, and where they are not checking who is falling behind and the leaders are not taking responsibility.
Where you can change the culture and one of the things Government could do—and certainly started to do in the past—is to raise the profile nationally of English and maths across the board. I think talking about basic skills, literacy and numeracy, is not necessarily helpful. Talking about English and maths will almost instantly raise the profile. There needs to be things to diminish the stigma. It is how it is promoted through everyday lives, whether it is received in things like soap operas or films so people understand that this is a problem that everybody has, and also then celebrating when it makes a difference. That brings me to the teaching. There still is not a strong culture in this country that teaching English and maths to adults who have not been able to succeed in the past is a difficult thing to do, and it needs to be recognised as a high professional career with post‑graduate qualifications and support to ensure they really have the expertise to motivate them.
The other thing is, certainly on GCSE levels that again was talked about in the past—and I know the Government are revising the GCSE qualifications in English and Mathematics—is that is important that this is not seen as only a qualification for school children; it is an adult qualification. There needs to be flexibility and functionality—flexibility in the assessment procedures and functionality in the content. Finally, I would just say family learning. I know that was mentioned in the past and it has been very successful. It helps the children as well so there is a win-win situation there.
Q173 Mike Crockart: Your written evidence stated that the take up of English and maths is especially low in prisons compared with the level of need assessed at induction. That is certainly borne out by the evidence we have already heard this morning from the Prisoners Education Trust. How do you think that that can be tackled?
Karen Adriaanse: One of the main issues is the separation of the education and training provision and the prison system. There is not currently clear accountability. The governors of a prison do not currently have clear accountability for the quality of the education, the teaching the literacy and numeracy, or the English and maths provision in a prison. We would expect that the governors would know what the need is, would know how well they are meeting the needs and support that. There needs to be much greater accountability for governors, particularly as that should surely be part of their overall agenda for reducing reoffending. We know that if people have better skills in English and maths they are more employable. We also know that if people get jobs as they come out of prison they are less likely to reoffend. That is certainly one thing that we would consider.
I support what the previous people have said, particularly I think by minimising the amount of discrete English and maths that takes place in the classroom and by taking it out into all aspects of the prison it is much more effective. You are not only relying on how to learn rules of where an apostrophe is or how to work out percentages, you are then being able to understand the purpose of maths. That is often why people fail in the past: they do not know why they are doing it. For example, in schools, children will go, “Why do we do Pythagoras’ Theorem?” but when you are in a construction workshop, you need to know Pythagoras so you can measure the gable end of the building so you know how many bricks and how much wood you need. Finally, I know that Matthew Coffey, the director in Ofsted’s directive for FE and skills, has criticised the judiciary for not identifying English and maths as a need as part of a sentence. That would be another way of ensuring it is more systemic that people are identified if they have a need and that need is then supported.
Q174 Mike Crockart: Which is the most important one there? Is it giving someone responsibility—the governor—first and making sure that the quality is sufficient?
Karen Adriaanse: Absolutely, as part of their overall goal for reducing reoffending. Particularly now that we have the resettlement prisons coming in and that is very much aimed at the whole system going in from a remand prison, going through a training prison and then to a resettlement to make sure that they have the skills they need to leave prison, get into a job and turn their lives around. So governors’ accountability would be number one.
Q175 Mike Crockart: You seem to making the case that it is about professionals delivering this and we should be trying to make sure there is continuing professional development in teachers and prisons, so that is the way it is going to be delivered. We have also heard evidence that that is a barrier because it stops innovation and new charities, for example, being able to come in and deliver training in different ways. Is there a barrier there?
Karen Adriaanse: There is very much room for both. It all depends on the individual learners. Some will benefit. There are systems, and I know the Select Committee has heard about two systems now, where it is based on volunteers. That can really be invaluable for starting people. Peer support, which I know people have already promoted, can be absolutely invaluable as a start and then it may be that to develop those initial skills and build on those skills, they may need the professional support to learn the skills that employers need and be in charge of their own learning. On the other hand, there may be some learners who need more professional support first and then will need mentors or volunteers to help them reinforce or maintain their skills in the future.
Q176 Mike Crockart: I think we have probably already covered this in talking about the need to recognise those delivering this sort of quality training is a specialist job. Is there a need for a greater emphasis on career structure for people delivering that type of training?
Karen Adriaanse: There used to be. I am now going back to the early 1990s when the qualification stopped. There used to be a post-graduate qualification that was very demanding in assessment. There was one for English and one for maths and it made sure that the assessment made sure they understood the specific issues; they did research and there was quite an intensive programme of observed training and learning to really make sure they had the expertise that they need. That has disappeared at the moment and that is where I feel—we have found this in inspection—that there is not that in-depth understanding of conceptual language to be able to analyse why it is that somebody who is 29 cannot read and write properly. Why is it that they can write this word, but not the other? What support do they need?
Where we find teaching tends to fail is where teachers are teaching the learners something in the way they use themselves as adults. If I taught to you to do percentages my way, it might not be right for you. By having the full and in-depth understanding of what maths and English are, you have a greater repertoire of different methods and strategies for teaching. You are likely to help the learners support themselves, because that is what we are looking for. I would not want to teach anybody to spell or to read. What I want to do is to help them understand how they do it and give them support so they, in the future and the rest of their lives, can teach themselves to spell and to read.
Q177 Nadhim Zahawi: Keith, the written evidence from Open Awards states that the Government made basic skills a priority and, indeed, provides training free to those under the age of 24. Funding for this is currently provided by the Skills Funding Agency and this presents barriers almost immediately. How do you react to that assertion?
Keith Smith: I would be interested to know what the barriers are that they are citing. The position in terms of the funding for 19 to 24 year olds is the same for all ages. We fund all adult further education in the same way, so there are no differences either structurally or in any accountability way that would create those barriers. The situation is very much, as you have heard, that we rely on really high-performing and high-quality training providers and colleges to make the right assessments and to have rigour in that initial assessment, so that we can be confident that the funding going through institutions down to learners is best-placed. As I said earlier, our funding commitment is that we fully fund the tuition costs for every English and maths qualification for those that providers assess are below that level.
Over the last two years, since 2012, we have doubled the funding level that was going in for English and maths. That was partly in recognition as we moved away from the stepping-stone qualifications, from key skills into functional skills. We are now doubling the investment at a qualification level. We are encouraging the system to use that money wisely, to do that on the back of robust assessment so that individuals can progress through functional skills to a full GCSE over time.
Chair: I think there is some informal advice going on here. I will bring in Caroline.
Q178 Caroline Dinenage: The issue is that they feel that if people are homeless, vulnerable or have substance-abuse problems, they will not engage in formal teaching methods through a formal organisation, particularly people who have had a bad experience of formal education providers when they were school. If school was a bad experience for them first time round, wild horses are not going to drag them back through the doors of formal education. The criticism is that the funding needs to be a little more flexible. It needs to be provided through voluntary organisations, and have more informal learning organisations that people feel more comfortable accessing. That is the criticism being levelled. I would like to know your thoughts on whether there could be more flexibility about how the funding is delivered to access those people who a) do not want to admit they have a problem, c) do not want to address that problem and c) are petrified of doing any of it through the formal education providers.
Secondly, you talk about qualifications a lot and I do not know whether there is too much emphasis on the qualifications rather than skills, learning and getting people to achieve what they need to raise their aspirations, self-respect, self-confidence and allow them to access more opportunities in life, which is what this is really all about. This is about letting people fulfil their abilities rather than necessarily having a bit of paper with a qualification on it.
Chair: Just before you answer that very full question—we could have had a seminar while you were giving that one. Could I just say that some of the members have left? You may not be aware, since they introduced the so called family-friendly hours in the House of Commons, our session overlaps with Parliamentary Questions and some members will have questions and have to leave. Accept my apologies, but it is the way business is organised in this place. I will say no more. Now feel free to answer Caroline’s question.
Caroline Dinenage: I am sorry. I just feel I have to make up for Brian Binley not being here.
Keith Smith: I will try and do the question justice. In terms of the two points you raised around access and qualifications, first: access is critical. If the provision is not there, then with all the work that happens to stimulate that demand, if there is no access to that demand, then obviously that is a key problem. The current position is that we fund employer funding to around 1,000 providers, colleges and employers. There are a further 2,000 institutions that they work with so currently there are around 3,000 or so access points for people wanting to do FE programmes. Alongside the main further education budgets, we have a community learning budget, which is deployed through community learning partnerships. All of those things have to come together locally to provide coherent structures for provision to be offered and for the right access points.
It is absolutely fair to say that charitable organisations do find it difficult to hold direct accountability because of the requirements on them, but that is different from saying that charity and voluntary organisations are not part of the FE skills system, because they absolutely are. I am happy to send some information to you about how the voluntary and community sector are actively participating in the supply of skills at the present time.
The second point was around the emphasis on qualifications. What is important when you are putting investment into such an important area is that we need to be clear about the standards we expect to be achieved. Qualifications are a measure of that, so it is vitally important that the qualifications people study are the right ones. That has very much been the discussion over the last couple of years. That was certainly the debate around all the investment that went into adult literacy and numeracy; pre-functional skills were not making people progress. Therefore, the qualifications were made more rigorous through functional skills. That is obviously being looked at again as part of the GCSE reforms. We are clear about making sure we achieve the right outcome for the investment of the funding. It is absolutely right and proper that we do have that.
The other thing I should mention though is that around 43% of adults doing English and maths are doing other things as well. Almost half of those doing English and maths are doing wider study programmes. It is not true that they will come into the system and just do that and go through a qualification machine. They will actually come in, do a broad package of learning and some of that is about supporting and contextualising the main English and maths qualifications. To support that, we provide extra funding for disadvantaged students and extra funding for where learners have additional learning supports and learning needs. So, in addition to fully funding the qualification, we provide that wrap-around support, but it is for providers and colleges to determine how best to employ that package of funding. We provide them the facility to be able to do that. The actual decision on what is needed and invested locally is for providers and colleges to make.
Chair: I might come back to you on one or two angles but I know Nadhim, having had the benefit of Jo’s research—
Q179 Nadhim Zahawi: You have touched upon it already, Keith. You have 3,000 access points, or 3,000 to come up on stream in total. One of the barriers that was highlighted was that previously—and we have moved away from that—it was local authorities, through grants, who were able to provide that provision. I would like you to just address or compare and contrast how that has changed. Is it really a barrier? Obviously, now it is only agencies that are awarded funding by the Skills Funding Agency and the second barrier they were highlighting is that it is only awarded to people under the age of 24. Could you address those two issues it would be very useful for the Committee.
Keith Smith: If I start with the latter one first. It is not the case that funding stops at 24. Funding, as I said, for English and maths for an adult of any age is supportable. On the first question around the changes, it is fair to say, going back to the late 1980s when colleges were managed under local authorities, colleges were then corporated; they were set free to work as independent institutions. That has been very much the case over the last 20 years or so. We have seen many more private training organisations, particularly on the back of apprenticeships, come into the delivery space. As we have consolidated more of an emphasis of English and maths into apprenticeships that has begun to get traction as well. In terms of local authorities, from a funding point of view, we currently fund directly or indirectly all local authorities. From memory—but I am happy to confirm this in writing—around £150 million of funding goes through local authorities for FE skills. There is additional funding that they control around the community learning budgets. Of course, what is also important is, as part of the Local Enterprise Partnerships work and how they dovetail with local authorities, they will now have control over £1 billion-plus funding for European Social Fund. I do not think that has been mentioned to date, but in addition to the direct Government contributions to English and maths, the European Social Fund provides another important line of investment into the system to support English and maths learners. From this point forward, LEPs will have complete control and authority over that European Social Fund and how that is best deployed. We are trying to encourage LEPs through their strategic planning and to be focusing on these types of skills needs, particularly where they present barriers to employment.
Q180 Nadhim Zahawi: Lesley, from your research, can you describe the different challenges surrounding the provision of basic literacy and numeracy skills?
Lesley Giles: The first element about the challenge is the scale of the challenge. There is some really good labour market intelligence, which I know the Committee has already heard about it in terms of some of the international adult surveys and so on that show that whilst across the economy our people with high skills are as good as countries, we have a long tail of adults with low skills. Basic skills—numeracy and literacy—are clearly a part of that, so that is an element of the challenge. It is people who are adults—so they have come out of the education system; it is a legacy problem—but also young people coming through. There are questions around their skill levels as well relative to other countries and whether they are sufficiently improving. That is a dimension of it.
From the Commission’s point of view, we are an industry-led agency so we are representing the needs of business. Therefore, we have our own dedicated business intelligence which we collect from a series of employer surveys. Our Employer Skills Survey, for example, is a survey of 90,000 businesses so that we can get in to understanding these skills issues at a local level and contribute to some of the debates we have just been having. The survey shows that whilst we start to see positive green shoots in the economy and growth and recruitment activities increasing, we are also seeing that the proportion of skill shortages are increasing as well. The increase in the last couple of years has been by 60% and a significant proportion of those skill shortages are related to basic skills issues. That is when employers are looking to the external labour market. However, we also find, unsurprisingly, given some of the results from the international survey, employers are reporting significant levels of deficiencies amongst their existing workforce; about a quarter of skills gaps are in this area as well.
Another dimension to this is that we have evidence that whilst employers are making significant investments in some of the skills of their people to try to tackle some of these issues, perhaps there is a certain degree of dampening down of their expectations as well. A significant proportion of businesses are operating what we call a “low skill equilibrium” where they are accepting the scale of the skill deficiency because it is quite a significant issue to overcome.
Those are some of the dimensions in terms of the challenge. What can be done about it? Drawing a line under some of the comments you have already heard, the Commission feels that the way we have to think about these things is how basic skills provision sits within a broader career pathway or vocational pathway for people. Employers have a key role to work with Government to strengthen some of those pathways and to make sure that basic skills provision is not something that just happens in isolation in its own right; it leads on to something else. An individual can, therefore, see an end-to-end in terms of lifelong learning, how they progress from schools through colleges, through universities and work‑based learning.
The Commission, in particular, is doing a lot of work with employers to try to make sure that the work‑based learning aspect is emphasised and this picks up some of the things that the other contributors were speaking about earlier. By doing that, you can then make sure that when basic skills solutions are selected by employers, they are context‑specific, so you are not just then putting somebody through a training course in isolation; they can see the benefit of the applied basic skills that they are developing to that particular context.
Q181 Chair: Just before I move on to the next question, can I come back to Keith. The evidence that we had for the assertion that there was no funding for those over 24 came from the organisation, Open Awards. You are saying that, quite categorically, there is. Let me rephrase what I have said: is not free for over 24‑year‑olds. Have you any idea if this is, in fact, correct and, if so, how this shall we say confusion has arisen?
Keith Smith: They may be confusing that with a statutory entitlement for all those people below a Level 2 to receive full funding to the age of 24. The English and maths commitment is separate to that. Obviously, English and maths is one dimension of someone reaching a broader Level 2 standard. If you gain your English and maths qualifications and you achieve two GCSEs in both, then you have your English and maths GCSEs, but it does not give you the standard that you would expect a broader Level 2 to have, which is the equivalent of five GCSEs A* to C. The funding entitlement for up to 24 says that there is free access to learning that gives you the equivalent of the five GCSEs. In addition to that, for adults of any age, if they are below the standard for English and maths we provide full funding for those qualifications. I think they are getting confused between English and maths and the specific commitment to fund people up to the age of 24 for the wider standard of a Level 2.
Q182 Chair: I have to say it is confusing and, if it is confusing to us, it may well be confusing to not just the general public, but any other organisation. What do you think could be done to make it rather simpler and clearer to people?
Keith Smith: I think it is fairly simple in the fact that English and maths is fully funded regardless of age. I am not sure how we can be much clearer about that.
Q183 Chair: Are you saying that the headline should be that English and maths up to GCSE standard is fully funded for post‑24‑year‑olds?
Keith Smith: Absolutely.
Q184 Chair: Okay. Well, there is possibly a marketing message that needs to go out, but we will have a look at that. There are just one or two things that I would like to pick up from this point. Earlier on, I think it was you, Keith, talked about the different sources of funding for organisations. Is there anything over and above that that could be done to help employers support adult learners in acquiring these basic skills?
Keith Smith: That is a very difficult question. As much as we have touched upon, we have to get a few things really clear. The first is what we think the right standards are for an English and maths learner. Your challenge back to me is the right one: we have to try to make sure all employers of different sizes and businesses understand what sort of English and maths issues there might be and how they can best engage in that. As Lesley said, it is difficult, because many businesses do not currently necessarily engage with the system or do not necessarily know how to engage with the system. It is important around awareness and information.
One of the key thrusts that are helping us to do that is apprenticeships, because as we start to drive the message into businesses of all sizes what benefits an apprenticeship brings, we are saying English and maths is a pivotal part of that offer and that sort of support. One of the things we can do and we are looking at is, as we reform apprenticeships to be owned more by employers and that they can set the proper standards of what an apprentice is, that English and maths is placed at the heart of that. That is a key strategy for getting employers, particularly SMEs, in tune with what English and maths is required.
The second bit, and the key part that currently we are all challenging ourselves over, is how we get learning provision in a way that is going to support a business to also do the day job. Many businesses, particularly small businesses, cannot afford to have people away from the workplace for days on end whilst they go into the classroom. Therefore, we are doing some work to look at how current qualifications or the current offer can be developed to be more online, how we can use new technology to try to take this learning directly into the workplace. All those things feel really important areas to try to help businesses. Obviously, they all recognise the issues and barriers that people with low English and maths bring, but it is about then providing proper solutions to go to those businesses, which say there is a package, there is an arrangement and access for people to be able to study that that does not mean they will necessarily be worrying about lost time in productivity and those other things, because people are having to go to learning providers that are two or three miles down the road. It is about how we take learning to them.
Q185 Chair: There are some examples of trade associations engaging in this particular agenda and that may well be a way forward. I understand what you are saying.
Keith Smith: And Unionlearn, of course.
Q186 Chair: Yes, Unionlearn. I was going to comment that the problems you have outlined are very similar to those we hear about introducing apprenticeships, but you have covered that. However, I think there is a feeling amongst a lot of small businesses that they are being asked to do something that the education system should do, so effectively they have to devote time and money to something that they have already paid their taxes to get done. What do you think the answer is to that dilemma?
Keith Smith: The obvious answer is to try to ensure more school leavers do not have those issues. From our point of view, we would want to talk to employers and businesses and say, “Regardless of the circumstances that have led that individual to be where they are, we think it is vitally important and provides massive benefits to the business if we can work in a proper partnership to invest in the skills of every adult, of any age, because too many, as we have talked about, do not have that basic level of English and maths”. If businesses make that criticism, in some cases it may be a fair one, but our job is to focus on the solutions of how we can support those adults rather than saying why the education system did not do that at an earlier point. In adult education, we are focusing on providing the right structures and the right offer. However, what is also important is the reforms that are being made, particularly on the pre‑19 side, to focus on English and maths in the study programmes and to make it a really core part of the offer that young people are given is obviously important around the flow of young people leaving school. However, we have to take that challenge to all those adults who are in the workforce now and focus on the solutions, not necessarily focusing on the issues or reasons why they have ended up where they are.
Q187 Chair: Yes. Looking at it slightly broader, how do you think providers of adult literacy and numeracy in schools should be rewarded and how do you think they should be held to account?
Keith Smith: There are lots of dimensions to that. Clearly, my aspect to this is around the funding systems and the funding incentives. As I have said, we doubled the funding level for English and maths learners and we think that does two things: it recognises the robustness of the new qualifications; it also recognises the importance that we are placing on providers investing properly in that area of activity. It has been vitally important that we have made more robust the requirements around initial assessment. In my view, one of the areas where adults were not progressing was because a stretching or rigorous assessment was not done at entry and that was not then repeated when the learner achieved a particular qualification. That often led to, when it was measured, that there was not a distance travelled made. Therefore, we have done more to regulate and prescribe to all providers and colleges in receipt of the funding what they should be doing in relation to that assessment and that support over time.
What is also important is that we continue to raise the level, particularly around and similar to your point about the offender learning, but how we get governing bodies of colleges and boards of private providers to look at the information and evidence about their own performance in English and maths. It is fair to say that not all providers are particularly great at systematically collecting that assessment information and seeing how that has been progressed and how those students have developed over time.
Therefore, once we can create the right incentives for funding, funding is not necessarily the only answer. It has to be looked at in terms of how funding can provide, as I said, the right level of support so that funding follows the learner, as it does at the moment, we provide incentives around paying some on achievement, so we do not pay for everything unless the student does achieve, then we are relying on other mechanisms to deal with the quality of people going through study programmes.
Q188 Chair: Do you think some of these problems could be addressed through an employer ownership approach?
Keith Smith: Employer ownership is critical, going to your point earlier, to get employers to engage with the system and start to own, drive and shape the solutions. If we are being fair to many businesses, the skills system has not always been perhaps the most responsive to looking at the way provision is delivered to employers. Employer ownership starts to drive and challenge that and, as I said before, starts to drive through new ways that businesses can engage with learning programmes and activity. It is not the only solution or the whole solution, because there has to be a strong partnership between employers trying to make sure that they can drive through their workforce the priority for English and maths and wider skills outside of those subjects, but obviously many employers will always rely on a training organisation or college to support them in the delivery of the skills that their workforce needs.
Q189 Caroline Dinenage: Sorry Keith, it is you again. Do you have the total cost of provision for adult literacy and numeracy in 2012/2013?
Keith Smith: We funded around £350 million in 2012/2013 and that is broadly going into learners studying English and maths. As I said, that is a growing proportion of the total adult skills budget that is going through the system. It is around that sort of level at the moment.
Q190 Caroline Dinenage: Do you know what proportion of that funding goes to achieving Level 1 and 2 qualifications compared to the entry‑level qualification?
Keith Smith: I have those figures, but I will put them to you in writing if that is okay.
Q191 Caroline Dinenage: That would be helpful; thank you very much. Do you scope actual and potential demand for English and maths skills for benefit claimants? Do you scope the potential demand for English and maths skills provision for benefit claimants? When people go to claim benefits do you, in some way, scope their need and the provision for them as well?
Keith Smith: Absolutely. The work that we have done linked to the Work Programme, but also with Jobcentre Plus around looking at the issue that I think has failed many unemployed people accessing the skills provision that they have needed comes back to that assessment. We have had some issues that funding is often cited as a barrier, but in fact it is that the individuals are not being assessed at the right time, in a timely manner, to access the necessary provision. Regarding unemployed people, therefore, we have stronger and developing by the day links between colleges, particularly, and Jobcentre Plus. We have new commitments working with Jobcentre Plus for them to make referrals and, in some cases, mandatory referrals to English and maths provision where the Jobcentre identifies those qualifications as the key thing that is going to help those people into jobs. What we also continue to do around the offer for the unemployed is we provide wider flexibilities. We talked about units and the issue of why do we only fund four qualifications. For an unemployed person the system does fund units, because we recognise for unemployed people getting into jobs more flexibility is needed to create a package of activity that is going to get that unemployed person into a job. Therefore, there are wider flexibilities that are tailored for the unemployed.
Q192 Caroline Dinenage: It sounds like you are doing an awful lot, but do you think there is any way the Skills Funding Agency could take a more proactive and outreach‑focused approach to adult literacy and numeracy?
Keith Smith: That is a question we need to explore across the Department more broadly and across Government. The Skills Funding Agency’s job is to make sure the funding systems and the access to funding is right, proper, well administered and those types of things. We do not have a wider PR/communications function in relation to those sorts of things. However, what we do do through the National Apprenticeship Service and through the Careers Service is we provide those access points into those services where we promote clearly the requirements, the need and the benefits, etc, around English and maths. However, in answer to your question, as the previous group gave evidence to you, there needs to be a cross‑Government view about how we communicate and talk to individuals about English and maths, because your point earlier is very important. My experience is many adults see it as an embarrassment to come out and talk about their needs, because basic skills feels like “I cannot do the most basic of things”, so there is a lot still to be done around how we message and communicate those things.
Chair: That concludes our questioning. Thank you very much for your contribution. We have asked you to provide some supplementary evidence. I am sorry I cannot take questions from the audience. However, any individual can submit supplementary evidence, so if you have a contribution to make you can submit it to us. I am sure the staff will give you the address for where to send it.
Oral evidence: Adult Literacy and Numeracy, HC 1073-ii 2