T2G: "supply driven" not "demand led"

What more fitting a tribute could there be in the first ever National Colleges Week (last week) than to be told you are succeeding where the employers have failed? I refer of course to the Train to Gain initiative and the damning report from Ofsted on its progress after the first two years.
The most telling statement at the heart of the critical report reads: “Most of the employees were recruited as a result of promotional work carried out by providers, suggesting that provision was supply driven, rather than demand-led.”

The inspectors’ report also reveals that the brokerage service – which colleges and other training providers argued all along was costly and unnecessary – is having minimal impact in engaging “harder-to-reach” employers and those with little recent involvement in training.

Where employers have adopted Train to Gain, which compensates them for money spent on training staff in basic skills, there is clear evidence that both businesses and individuals gain. But at what price? Fewer than one in 45 companies entitled to cash have taken it up. Around £200m unclaimed cash was siphoned off by ministers to bail themselves out of an embarrassing shortfall in university student funding. Meanwhile, 1.5 million adult learners have been lost to general state-funded courses.

This latter point is worth dwelling on. Ministers, rather than accept the consequences of misjudged policies, argue that the benefits of Train to Gain are greater than from what is euphemistically dismissed as “other” learning. Unfortunately, there is little evidence to support this claim. However, pretty solid evidence to the contrary has emerged from research by Professors Alison Wolf and Frank Coffield, from London University Institute of education and the Teaching and Learning Research Programme. This will be debated at the final conference of TLRP at the QEII Centre in London on November 24-25.

And, if we look at evidence from the Government’s own advisory and strategic funding body, the Learning and Skills Council, again we find overwhelming evidence in support of the generalist approach to learning adopted by FE colleges. General education and skills development do not conflict for attention but are mutually supportive.

Three reports from the LSC London region – on the impact of FE before Train to Gain had any role – show that learning gives both employers and learners skills of value to the economy and gets people into work and up the career ladder. Interviews with 2,400 learners in 2006 reveal a marked increase in their employment and participation in FE, increased confidence, skills such as team working and communication, greater enthusiasm for learning and a clearer idea of what they want to do. Three quarters reported improved literacy skills and two thirds said their numeracy skills were better as a result of their FE course. Indeed, an impact analysis of FE by Warwickshire Colleges, around the same time, showed a £4 return to the Treasury and local community for every £1 “invested” in colleges.

This all begs an alarming question: to what extent are those colleges which are identified as failing doing so because they are dutifully pursuing government policy? When employers were asked why they snubbed Train to Gain, the overwhelming answer was that the refusal to be tied down by red tape and bureaucracy. Colleges do not have the luxury of being able to refuse.

Nor should they have such a luxury. What they should have is the “trust” of ministers to get on with it. And that, while not stated explicitly, is the central message of the Ofsted report. As ever, where ministers make policy on whim and tell colleges to knuckle down to the new agenda, they do so. They are, after all “the adaptive layer” of education as Ruth Silver, principal of Lewisham College and chair of the Learning and Skills Improvement Service, often says.

Train to Gain was built on shoddy foundations from the Leitch review of skills for the Year 2020. While they will not say so publicly – as yet – John Denham, Secretary of State for the department of Innovation, Universities and Skills, has some serious doubts about Leitch, as do other minsters and advisers in DIUS.

We can expect to see quite radical reform as colleges enjoy more of the cash and greater flexibility in the name of Train to Gain. And, as one DIUS source said: “Provided they call it ‘demand-led’, everyone will be happy, even though we know it’s supply driven.”

Not that the spoils will be great. How could it be after the credit crunch and looming recession? But it is worth remembering that the sector has long been expecting a downturn anyway, with an FE funding squeeze on top. While FE never got the riches it deserved over the past decade, it was better than before. Now, macro-economic trends, the tact that the country is reaching a peak of tax-take, demographics, pensions and new spending demands elsewhere, all point to relatively less for colleges.

But the signal success of colleges, as reflected in the Ofsted, LSC and TLRP reports, suggests that money that is around for Train to Gain and other skills initiatives should be directed towards colleges.

And so, the colleges – recovering from National Colleges Week and on the eve of the Association of Colleges annual conference – should be making their demands for three things: greater autonomy, more flexibility over how to meet individual learner and employer needs and greater control over quality and professional standards.