COMMITTEE FOR EMPLOYMENT AND LEARNING

Report on the Inquiry into Education and Training for Industry (Continued)

3350.

Mr Beggs: How are you proactively chasing areas where there has been no previous expenditure in basic education? How are you proactively helping local communities that are only establishing structures?

3351.

Dr Davison: The strategy that we are preparing for adult basic education will try to ensure that we have full coverage. The main route will be through a combination of statutory and non-statutory provision where we try to link the two closely together. A key part of that will be what comes from the community.

3352.

The Department can try to work the different elements into place, but the community must be willing to engage with it and to ensure that the various com­munity elements are known and can be addressed. Sitting in Adelaide House, it is not easy to know what they are, and who in the community can fulfil the appropriate roles. In working through the strategy we will want to get wide coverage. The figures show that this is a very important issue.

3353.

Mr Dallat: We will try not to shoot the messengers because I have high regard for both of you. There was a meal made of the fact that several of the colleges do not know where their staff are, and that worries me. If they do not know where the staff are, what do they know about the pupils? What do they know about the people who are not the pupils and should be the pupils?

3354.

Your bid to tackle literacy and numeracy was not granted in full. In view of the statistics now available, surely there is an urgent need to increase that. While it may be true that somebody does not buy into literacy and numeracy alone, I know of one company that would be very happy if their employees could add up to nine. I can see you are working with the colleges, coercing them, but is it not time to reel them in and to say to them "There has been a Dark Age during direct rule when nobody asked serious questions about what you were doing, but the whole economy has changed now, and we are near full employment. We have 250,000 people with serious learning difficulties. You can no longer sit on the other side of the table and talk at us because we are in the driving seat - we are the bosses."? Every Department of the Assembly is screaming from the rooftops about the problems. Is it not time to take off the kid gloves?

3355.

I must balance that by saying that over the years, when we had a very divisive education system, the technical schools have been a safety net for many working-class people, and I would never take that away from them. That is why I feel particularly emotional that through incorporation and the independence that they developed, they abused that and ignored the outside world. I know of instances where they would not send courses out to the community to teach women basic skills. I get the impression that you are still having difficulty persuading these people that that world has gone past, that it failed us.

3356.

Mrs C Bell: I would not say that we are having difficulty. The Lifelong Learning strategy set a really clear direction for the colleges for the first time. Certainly when it was written there were two criticisms. Employers said it was a community document and the community said it was too strongly focused on the economy. Therefore I think we got it right because it is incumbent on our colleges to support both. In stretching out to the community, the challenge for the college, and for us, is to ensure that colleges meet this need. It is not just to meet the basic skills need. They will be able to do that, but the big challenge will be to encourage people to progress up the ladder. When we look at community provision outside of the colleges, we find that people are willing to engage initially in learning but few are prepared to go up to level one, two or three - that is the challenge. Rather than talk about a deficit model of 260,000 adults with poor literacy and numeracy skills, which we will have to address, the basic skills strategy is ensuring that we all have our weaknesses addressed through whatever means available. It also takes account of the fact that these skills will always increase as the demands from industry and life increase.

3357.

Part of the difficulty in our colleges has been that basic skills have always had low status. We are now determined to change that, to give it a status so that it is not just going to be the higher education courses that colleges aspire to teach but also to make provision right across the board.

3358.

Mrs Nelis: I want to ask about the collaboration fund. It seems that that is a model to aspire to for the future. I see that you intend to allocate £600,000 over two years to strengthen the concept of partnerships involving the colleges and the major employers, the district councils and the chambers of commerce. Those are certainly the types of partnerships that we want to see established to drive up the demand for local learning and to provide the infrastructure for small and medium-sized enterprises. If you divide the allocation among the 17 colleges, it works out at roughly £30,000 per college. It seems that the programme is very ambitious but that it is not being resourced properly. Perhaps you need to look at that aspect, because the project has great potential.

3359.

How do you intend to evaluate the initiative? You have mentioned some skills, but other skills could be added with the help of the collaboration fund. I am thinking of civic skills.

3360.

Mrs C Bell: The collaboration fund was intended to encourage collaboration, but the students involved are funded as well. The bodies are funded to make the links, but they also get funding for the student places that are generated. The fund was not intended just to forge partnerships with employers. It was a local fund to help to engage chambers of commerce and local councils. There are other funds, such as the access initiative, through which we have given colleges money to look at innovative ways of drawing people into learning.

3361.

You asked about evaluation. We have already started to evaluate the fund. Over the last 18 months, the inspectorate has been working in a number of colleges to look at how they have been making links. Some colleges used the fund to focus on making partnerships with employers. Others looked at developing partnerships with community groups. This year all of them are looking at partnerships in the broader sense, which is what we intend them to do. The collaboration fund and the access initiative have both been successful in forging links among the colleges, the community and local businesses.

3362.

Mr Byrne: The common thread seems to be the lack of a common set of procedures and practices for the further education colleges. The material supplied is very revealing, particularly in respect of the financial performance of colleges. The question must be why some colleges vary so much from the norm. What does the Department do in relation to asking a college to restructure itself to become more financially viable?

3363.

There is a great absence of statistical inform­ation on outcomes of students and trainees. We need performance indicators that show clear outcomes. A college might be successful in recruiting 1,000 students to get its full-time equivalent numbers right. However, by the end of the year only 600 might still be there. The financial position will look very good, but there is a terrible leakage in the numbers. I would like some statistics on that.

3364.

There is another question that the Department must address. Does it want further education colleges to be community colleges, higher education colleges or colleges with a broad mix of training, basic education and professional education? The latter category would include, for example, the Institute of Management and Association of Accounting Technicians courses.

3365.

Does the Department intend to take a common approach to making colleges publicly accountable, because there is a growing need for that? Regardless of how good college governors are they do not see the full picture. There is a need for stronger public account­ability by professionals.

3366.

Dr Davison: Colleges are open to inspection by the Education and Training Inspectorate in everything that they do. Under the Order the inspectorate can carry out efficiency reviews on any college that is experiencing difficulties. The colleges are accountable to the Depart­ment, and the Department monitors their finances on a regular basis. The Department works with colleges to help them overcome their difficulties. That has been done with some colleges since incorporation occurred. The Department brought in support and advice for the colleges and helped them to deal with their difficulties, but ultimately the college and the governing body own the issue and have to deal with it.

3367.

Therefore the colleges are publicly accountable and the Department works with those that are experiencing difficulties. From material that Mr Byrne has sought previously I know that he is aware of at least one of those cases where the Department has done that. Therefore colleges are publicly accountable.

3368.

Mrs C Bell: With regard to key performance indicators, the Department publishes enrolments and success rates. Up until now retention numbers have not been published, and this year there is work going on to look at retention. The inspectorate always looked at retention. It has three key indicators - enrolment, retention and success. That is the benchmark. In many instances, particularly in further education colleges - and it is also true of higher education - people do not finish within the two years or one year of the allotted programme. Depending on their personal circumstances they may take three years.

3369.

There needs to be sophisticated measures to look at retention. However, the Department needs to have indicators of enrolments, retention and success. The Depart­ment receives information from the inspectorate. The inspectorate publishes the information with the inspection reports, but it is hoped that the Department will soon be able to report on the performances of all 17 colleges.

3370.

Dr Davison: We already publish the financial information to the 17 colleges. A previous Minister introduced school league tables but decided not to take that route with further education. Given the complexity of that sector compared to schools, he did not think that it would be helpful.

3371.

Mr Byrne asked about the direction in which we are going. There have been historical differences in the way things have developed. In England there are sixth-form colleges, general further education colleges and adult education colleges. Various kinds of provision make up further education. In the Republic of Ireland in the late 1980s the further education sector was transformed into a higher education sector with the rebadging of institutes of technology. Vocational colleges were developed, and now there is an emerging set of what we would recognise as further education provision. So they have gone down a different route.

3372.

Northern Ireland has chosen the route of general further education colleges, and in the 1990s we added on to that some higher education provision to try to widen access to higher education to a wider range of people across the Province.

3373.

So that is the route we have gone down. Given the scale of Northern Ireland and the resources involved, would we want to disentangle that and set up separate institutions? It is an interesting question which could lead to a debate. These are very big questions.

3374.

The Chairperson: My first question picks up on a point Mr Byrne made. We have tried to examine the 1999-2000 accounts as far as possible without an accountancy background. They are difficult to interpret, so we would be grateful for guidance from the Department on a number of cases, but on two in particular. I understand that the aim is to have a current ratio of 1·5:1 to 2·5: 1. Using the current ratios, Castlereagh has for two years been below that target range, so perhaps that raises issues. Conversely, Newry and Armagh have been well above the 2·5:1 ratio. Are there special circumstances in both cases?

3375.

The other question has come up repeatedly in discussion. This Committee has sought, with difficulty, to acquire from the 17 colleges consistent details on staffing turnover, absenteeism, sick leave, suspension and so forth. As far as you can judge, is your overall impression that staff morale in further education is satisfactory? What would be the Department's feeling about the relevant pay level for further education lecturers? The Minister of Finance referred in his pre-Budget statement to the likelihood of an increase that was higher than that previously expected.

3376.

Dr Davison: Concerning the accounts, I am not sure that I want to discuss in detail the position of any individual college.

3377.

The Chairperson: We could go into closed session.

3378.

Dr Davison: If you wished, we could bring our accountant to go through the accounts on a general basis. It is a complex area. I would wish that to be in closed session, if possible, because individual cases would be discussed, and it is not fair to do that in open session.

3379.

We have moved very quickly in Northern Ireland - unlike in the rest of the UK - to operating the funding mechanism in the same way across the whole sector. Prior to incorporation the mechanism operated differently across the five board areas from a different base. The base and funding mechanisms are now the same across all 17 colleges. The differences are the diversity of provision and the size. Those are factors which play into whether one college picks up more resources than another. One of the two colleges you mentioned is much bigger than average, and the other is much smaller. One of them has a peculiar mix of provision which is unlike most of the others. There are both general and specific reasons in play.

3380.

Mrs C Bell: When the Education and Training Inspectorate carries out inspections, we depend on it to find out about staff morale and staffing, because it gets close to the staff and to what is happening. We are conscious that pay for further education lecturers has fallen behind those in the school sector, and we are aware that the unions and management are discussing a pay increase. They, and we, want to link that increase to performance because we want to continue to promote a professional body. Our lecturers are professional, and until this year ours was the only part of the United Kingdom whose lecturers were professionally trained through the University of Ulster. That training has gone a long way to promote the profession, and we continually look at the needs of the colleges and the lecturers.

3381.

We need to look quickly at professional training for part-time staff so that it is not just full-time staff who benefit. The pay negotiations are going on at the moment, and we hope that there will be an early settlement to report.

3382.

The Chairperson: Thank you very much, and thank you for the written brief. That was extremely useful. We have a lot to reflect on, and that will be important in our overall considerations. We aim to complete that by the autumn.

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