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Workshop A
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Workshop A |
Workshop B |
Workshop C |
Workshop D
Workshop A - Session 2 - Questions and Contributions
Q (Roger Dawe, Director General of Further and Higher Education and Youth Training, DfEE): Jim Sutherland referred to the importance of partnerships. We are trying to encourage colleges and universities to widen access and to lift standards but, importantly for lifelong learning, to get closer to employers and form a kind of partnership that Jim was talking about. I would be quite interested to hear from the speakers how, from their viewpoints, that partnership is developing between the employer, the individual and the provider, whether college, or university or training providers. Q (Matthew Nicholas,DfEE): My question is to you and to Jim. We have heard a lot about UNISON's success. Can you point towards any other unions with a similar capacity and success where their membership is in the private sector and where there is a sense of joint partnership between the union and the employer? Q: (Peter Holmes, Focus Central London) I want to ask about learning in the workplace which is not necessarily directly related to employment, in other words the employee development schemes. What do you think the balance should be in learning organisations between learning that becomes very much orientated to the job in hand, as opposed to the broader concept of learning, and how we might get the balance right? Partnerships Peter Kearns: There are a couple of those questions I would like to address. First of all the issue of partnerships. I think partnerships between providers of training and development of individuals and the organisations, particularly at line manager level, are crucial. At a senior level, with employer organisations, important established partnerships need to relate the planned learning to the business plan. For the business objectives a strategic level of partnership is needed and it also needs an operational level of partnership within individual line managers. I really think without that you are very likely to be incredibly wasteful, to be spending time on things that are not necessary or are not objectives of the organisation. I also think that partnerships between public sector providers and private sector providers are essential to deliver a completely rounded service to the local communities. These are two levels of partnership which I think are really essential to success. Ian Hornby: I was particularly interested in the first point about partnerships with universities and colleges because that is something we are actively looking at at the moment. One of the issues that we have in our organisation is that historically we have recruited most of our people into our sales force. We employ quite a large sales force around the UK, and we have employed people who are good at selling. Many of those people have not necessarily got an academic background. The good people have moved up the organisations into roles where they are now taking on senior management roles, and we now need to provide them with some academic input into that. We are actively now talking to two or three universities and colleges with a view to doing some kind of joint venture operation together in terms of providing them with a broader management qualification. Personal Development Touching on the last issue, where does this sort of personal development fit within a broader development framework? If you are going to develop people, there are about five different areas you should look at. Historically, we would have focused very much on task. We would have focused on getting people to do the job very well, but not actually giving them much information about the organisation in the context in which it is done, nor indeed very much information about the business world generally to give them further context. I think the important point is that you can do all of that, but if you do not actually also work with them personally, on individual development, then actually the work that you do in terms of task will fall down. So we see it that, as long as you do both things together, and not just concentrate on individual development or concentrate on task development, if you do them both, then you actually start getting people rounded and they can contribute fully. Jim Sutherland: I would like to tie all 3 questions together into one omnibus response. I think the issue of partnership is crucial, a genuine partnership between all the stakeholders. What we have found hugely valuable is involving our learner-provider partnerships in the learning needs analysis process. For example, Sheffield Hallam University worked with us in developing a Healthier Practice Framework so that our nurse, midwife, and health visitor members could access University Diplomas and Degrees through a mixture of accreditation of prior learning and distance learning. The result of that process of development is that my department is actually now an associate college of the university. We work like that with learning providers. We involve them directly in examining, exploring precisely what the learning needs. I would actually like to see more universities and FE colleges putting together teams of tutors, experts to go into industry, particularly small and medium enterprises, and assist in that process of identifying the learning needs of those organisations, and then designing mechanisms and methodologies for satisfying those needs. Linking that into the third question about the balance between what I might call task specific learning and personal development, I personally do not see too much of a dichotomy between the two. I think there has been far too much made of the notion of vocational and non- vocational learning. I cannot conceive of a high quality non-vocational course that does not provide the analytical cognitive and communication skills that are of huge value in any employment. This is particularly true when we are talking about a situation where we are not training as operators, but actually trying to create learning skills in individuals, so that they can adapt to the circumstances in which they find themselves. But you can marry the two together. For example, a Return to Learning programme is a generic course. It is not directly occupationally specific. Return to Learn What we are doing with a number of employers is encouraging them to grow their own staff by taking individuals, for example, health care assistants, and giving them the generic Return to Learning programme, adding on what we call occupational specific elements. By taking them into a process of training, the hospital trust can begin to grow their own nurses. We are doing the same with home carers, taking them through a process into social work, and we are doing something similar with classroom assistants. I would just like to take that one stage further and say that it is crucially important that learning at, for and through the workplace is linked very closely to community, family and citizenship learning. It seems to me unreasonable for employers and trade unions to focus specifically only on learning within the workplace. They know the relevance of the communities within which they operate, because there is not much point being a successful company if you have to surround yourself with razor wire, because you operate within a dysfunctional community. There has to be a link there. Finally, to address the second question. I cannot say very much about other trade unions. I can say however that it is not a public-private thing; it is largely resources, style and championing, that kind of thing. My union has put huge resources into learning. I have a department of 40 members of staff to cover active membership and staff learning, as well as education policy. Most of my colleagues and other unions only have two or three colleagues with them and they therefore have to focus inevitably on activist learning. It is partly resources. It is also about style. We say to employers, 'You have got a problem; we have got a solution. We're not making a demand. We are offering you a solution.' And they like that. Thirdly, you need somebody in the organisation that is prepared to put a hell of a lot of time into championing the issue of learning at, for and through the workplace. Sarah Perman: It is about resources and style but it is also about the sector where the trade union is representing people. More and more we see trade unions beginning to really take education and training seriously, because of some crisis within that sector, some real job security threats, which means that they have to get much more involved in either providing courses directly and/or negotiating with employers on provision. I think it is true that Unison is the best known and one of the strongest examples of the way that trade unions can get involved in lifelong learning. Certainly I think they provide some of the best experience around in tackling basic skills needs. But there are other examples from the private sector which are perhaps less well known. Historically, for example, the AWEU, the Engineering and Electrical Union, has always worked in partnership with the sectoral training organisation and with employers on providing training to employees. We are also seeing quite a few new developments with other private sector unions, which are tackling the high level skills end of the spectrum. For example, BIFU, a banking union in the UK, is at the moment entering into quite major agreements with banks in London and with a local university, to provide new technology and computing courses to semi-skilled bank workers. Another union has also launched its own MBA, a management qualification for engineers in that union. That is around the area of unions providing their own courses. The TUC is helping more and more unions, particularly smaller ones, to do that. More and more trade unions in the private sector are also getting involved in negotiating with employers on employer provision. We are seeing a number of new agreements often supported by a programme of Bargaining for Skills projects that we have in the UK, union projects which are run in partnership with local training providers. These projects are leading to quite substantial agreements on Investors in People, and on developing learning centres and making sure the qualifications are available for all people within the workforce. Q: If we are going to meet Kim Howells' calls to treat this learning revolution as a crusade, we have to transform the way we think about learning. We have to start recognising forms of learning that currently are not seen as learning, and also forms of skills which many employers benefit from, and which are gained through non-paid employment or caring activities which are not thought through. A broader question which links to that is around employability. Clearly the whole notion of employability comes from this idea that there are old moral contracts of employment. This has broken down; people do not have secure jobs any more, therefore employers have a responsibility to offer their employees training. This is so that the employees have a greater chance, when they leave, to access the labour market. But I am not clear that where individuals' responsibility for their learning, where employers' responsibilities and where government's responsibilities begin and end and overlap. I think that is potentially a weakness in some of the debates around learning and I would quite like to know what the panel think on that issue. Q: (Liz Smith, TUC) I think everybody here would support the notion and the concept of partnerships in learning. Sometimes it is overlooked in seeking partnerships that developing them actually does take time. One of the problems that sometimes we experience in working with unions to encourage them to engage with this agenda is that actually if you make a genuine partnership that involves the employees, their representatives, employers and providers then people may be working to different time scales. There is often a very understandable problem with providers who have got a very urgent need to get people into classrooms or into workplace learning centres in order to bring the cash in which is very important for them. Employers might have a particular need to solve a problem, and they need training to happen very quickly. The employees may have a longer term agenda, or need a longer term agenda for themselves. So one of the things about partnerships in terms of building learning organisations and the learning culture is that you actually need quite a high degree of patience to build something that may be quite irritating to put together. But if you do engage with those different interests and different objectives you are going to build something that is much deeper and more likely to sustain the inevitable pressures and problems that will impinge from the outside. One of the things that has been clear to us through the work that we have done in the TUC is that the take-up of employee development programmes, particularly those linked to money that individuals can draw down to support their learning, would appear to be better where there is support from the employee representatives and from the unions where they exist. This is especially so if they take on that role of being a learning representative and seeing it as part of their job to encourage people to take up learning. One of the mechanisms in the UK for the future to support learning is the concept of the individual learning account. What kind of mechanisms, tools and support need to be in place to make sure that individual learning accounts actually address these very important issues of extending people's learning? Q: (Maggie Chadwick, Furness College, Barrow-in-Cumbria): I am sure we are all weaving together some pattern here. We have found a pattern of seconding people into industry locally, to work with them on training needs analysis, and indeed bringing trade unions in there has been very helpful. But from evidence that was presented yesterday, it does seem to me that with the very spectacular exception of Unison and their work, we are still helping to educate and re-train people who are already educated and trained to a given level, and we are not meeting the needs of people who are up to NVQ 1 to 2 and possibly up to 3. Brief Opportunity Q: (Tony Webb, Confederation of British Industry): I just saw some research recently which showed that the sort of window of opportunity that exists in the finance sector for businesses, because of huge changes that have taken place, has narrowed from about 20 months to about 8. Within that window if you get in on the first half you can scoop about 80% of the upper profit; if you are in the second half, you are fighting with a lot of others for the 20% that remains. I would like to know whether the Investors in People standard in that context is an adequate vehicle for helping you do whatever you have to do to face the future. If it is not, what ought we to be looking at? Torben Hjuler: I would like to make a point on the responsibility of the employers in this training case. We are saying in my company that we are going into the free markets. We have known that for at least four years, that some of our training programmes have to do with this: we want the people that we have to lay off to be able to get new jobs. That is the responsibility that we have taken on. It means that we have launched a programme that nobody at the power station should be unskilled in the year 2000. It means that everybody should have an education. I always like to comment a little about partnerships, and who will take part in the training and who will take part in the development in the enterprises. In our case, we are in a small society of only about 20,000 people. But we have a high school; we have a technical school; we have some sports clubs; and from all of these and the high school, we can find a lot of resources that we can use to develop new courses, new training activities. Just to put a figure on that, we have absenteeism of 7% last year due to training alone; and it means a lot of training days when you divide it into 600 people. Again it seems to be that observations and comments from at least 3 of the questioners tie very much together around the issue of funding and the individual learning accounts question. When I come to explore the question of who should pay for what, I am first of all driven to consider proportional responsibility for the state we are in, as well as looking at proportional benefit from an improvement in provision. I think it therefore leaves me, in a very crude sense, to say that task-specific, or job-related learning, is the responsibility of the employer to fund. Major elements of parallel and transferable skills training about creating a flexible workforce is largely for the employer to fund. I can recognise the justification in expecting individuals to make a financial contribution to their personal development. But I think there are a number of problems associated with that which we have to address very carefully. First of all somebody said earlier that we cannot allow responsibility for learning to be shifted wholly to the individual. There is a problem particularly with low paid workers, their inability to invest in learning, and the danger is that if we are not careful only those who can afford to invest in learning, or who already have access to learning, will continue so to do. I would argue, and I think the Secretary of State takes the point on board, that individuals, particularly low paid individuals, ought to be able to contribute in kind. They can do this in the sense that I mentioned earlier, where individuals put 120 hours of their own time into a programme and this is recognised as a useful parallel contribution to perhaps the financial contribution by the employer or the state. I think so far as the application of this is concerned I would like to see learning representatives in workplaces building Individual Learning Accounts through the collective bargaining processes. I think nevertheless they have to be easily understood, they have to be easy to operate, they have to be flexible so that they can be open for collective application and not simply used for individual provision. Union Involvement Jim Sutherland: I think it is very difficult to generalise about trade unions, but I think I would ask whether the trade unions have been given the opportunities to be involved. If they had and had not seized that opportunity then I think you have to ask why. Is it because of a history of industrial relations issues within that workplace? Is it maybe because of the history of very substantial change going on and the trade union not being able to be involved in negotiation and discussion around that change? Is it about the trade union not having access to the information that they need to really sit down and talk to their employers about training and the skills? They do need to negotiate. I think there is a lot more probing that we have to do there, but there is also a lot of guidance and support that the TUC and trade unions nationally can give to shop stewards locally about how to get involved. Ian Hornby: As an employer I have a problem with employability, basically in that, if I have 10 really top quality sales people, what I do not want to do is to spend a lot of time and energy developing them, so that they will go and work for our competitors. On the other hand if we do not spend a lot of money training and developing them, they probably will go and work for our competitors. So we have a sort of mental conflict here about how we deal with this as an organisation. Ten years ago it would not have been a problem. We could have spent as much money as we wanted on those people and they would not have gone. We would have got payback on it. and we would have known about that. Now we have to take a leap of faith on the basis that if we train and develop our people effectively then they will continue to contribute for us. Having said that, there are lots of other parts of the equation as well, without which it would not work. Is Investors enough? Well, no, it is not, because what you must then do of course is to make sure that your pay practices, your working environment and all those other things actually tie together. On the issue of competitiveness which I think is the area that you were really talking about, that is a major change because we now find competitors appearing very suddenly and big competitors too. Who would have thought that Tesco would have been one of our major competitors? Who would have thought that Sainsbury's would get into the banking business? Whoever comes along next will not only want to compete for our customers, they are going to want to compete for our staff too and we have to be ready for that. We cannot decide that we are not going to invest in our people in case someone else takes them away. We have to continue to do it. I believe that if we do continue to do it, and we show the people who work for us that we are prepared to invest in them, then they pay us back. They may not pay us back over 40 years any more, but in fact they give us a higher contribution when they are with us. The difficulty we have is not knowing what is around the corner. You can do as much planning and speculation as you want. Things happen that we are not always aware of. I think the issue about the cycles being much quicker is that we are finding people coming into the market place much more quickly. They come in and buy the training and development that we have spent years investing in. It is a problem for us. Responsibility Peter Kearns: Who has responsibility for taking things forward in a partnership? The responsibility is something which is very easy to define, if you get a group of people in partnership who all understand what they are talking about, if you have structures for creating those partnerships. I think employers, trade unions, education providers and private training providers and other organisations, such as the Training and Enterprise Councils, Business Links in the UK and Chambers of Commerce perhaps in other parts of Europe, can help to provide the partnerships that are required to establish where these responsibilities lie. Now a comment about proportional responsibility. The closer you are to the job itself, the more it is the employers' responsibility. But anti-social employers do become damaging. I think what we are talking about is grades of responsibility and how you get people to understand it. That brings me back partly to this concept of things like National Standards, Investors in People and perhaps National Vocational Qualifications, where you can create definitions and understanding of what education is for, what training and development is for, and what the responsibilities of people are. There are some basic structures and frameworks in place. They are not being used effectively. On a personal point, I have had two experiences of employability which I think show that it is not only a matter of the individual but also of the manager. I worked with a group of young people who were graduates of the Feltham Youth Custody Centre. All of them have been through the courts system, several of them for many, many years. We were getting nearly all of them employed at the end of the programme. At the beginning they were all clearly unemployable. What changed were those individuals just to a small extent, but what really changed were the attitudes of local managers and local business. For example, we got them to take young people on work experience. So part of employability is educating managers into getting employers to understand that people are not only made up of their mistakes, but they are also made up of their capabilities. Another very personal point is I have a 5 year old son who has special educational needs. A lot of time and effort was put in during the first couple of years in looking at what was wrong with him. It was only about a year ago we came across a brilliant teacher who had no previous experience of special needs. She contributed greatly by saying, 'Well, let's look at what he can do.' We now have a programme of capability which I think will make him very employable by the time he gets to that age and that can be true of adults. Q: (Lyndsey Jackson, The European Training Foundation) Are there any examples of European partnership in the promotion of learning organisations that the panel could draw our attention to? Ian Hornby: Nothing of any great detail, but when we were looking at our business in Holland, one of the things that encouraged me a great deal was the role of the works council in actually helping the communication and understanding of people's responsibility for learning. It was my first experience of working with the works council. I had read a lot of horror stories about working with works councils, but actually we found them incredibly helpful in giving us an understanding of what was needed and working very closely with the management team there. That has really encouraged us to think that this may be the way we ought to be thinking here in the UK - developing really active relationships with the trade unions, with the employee representatives, to tackle learning and development together. Jim Sutherland: We have actually got four functioning LEONARDO projects. One is with Italian and another with Norwegian partners. So we have a wide range of involvement with EU countries. In addition to that. however, I have a particular interest in central and eastern Europe. I have been working for the last four years with a Russian health workers' union helping them in their transition from operating within a command economy to operating within a market economy. We are developing their capacity to develop their own learning systems. We are also working with a number of Czech unions, one of which is almost an anagram for Unison called Unios. We have a member of staff from my department presently just coming to the end of one year secondment in South Africa, helping South African unions to go forward, and we have just completed a government sponsored project with a Palestinian General Federation on trade unions in helping them to create a Health Workers Union in Palestine. So we do maintain a fairly significant international profile and seek to work with unions who can help us and whom we can help. Torben Hjuler: At the former Project of Force project we made a trainer for trainer programme for the middle manager with Power Stations in UK and in Ireland and in Portugal some 5 years ago. Sarah Perman: I am encouraged by the extent of agreement around some of the issues like employee ownership of lifelong learning and the importance of social partnership and partnership with providers.
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