 I welcome everyone to the 11th meeting of the Education and Skills Committee in 2017, and can I please remind everyone present to turn on mobile phones and other devices on to silent for the duration of the meeting? We've had a change in membership to the committee since the last meeting. I was sorry to see Richard Lochhead and Philip McGregor go, but I warmly welcome Claire Hawke and Ruth Maguire to the committee. Item 1 is an opportunity for those members to declare any interests relevant to the remit of this committee. Claire Hawke. Thank you for your welcome, convener, and I'm looking forward to working with the committee. I have no interest to declare. Thank you very much. I would refer members to my register of interest. I was formerly a North Ayrshire councillor. I love that. Thank you very much. The second item of business is the decision on whether to take a number of items in private. Items 4 and 5 of this meeting are consideration of evidence and then consideration of a draft report on the children's hearing system, respectively. Are members content that we take items 4 and 5 in private? The committee plans to consider further reports on additional support needs and personal and social education in the coming weeks. Are members agreed that we consider those reports and any future consideration of the children's hearings report in private? We now move on to agenda item 3, which is an evidence session on the IPPR's reporting, a report equipping Scotland for the future, key challenges for the Scottish skills system. The purpose of this session is to receive an overview of the skills system to inform the committee's work in this area. I welcome to the meeting Russell Gunson, director of IPPR Scotland, who now presents the key themes and findings of the report. Thank you so much for the invitation to come and speak with you today. As you say, my name is Russell Gunson. I'm director of IPPR Scotland, and just for those who don't know, IPPR Scotland is a cross-party think tank based up here in Edinburgh for the last 18 months, part of IPPR across the UK, which has a history of over 30 years. Where this report comes in—we have undertaken two reports on skills, and we will be undertaking a third over this next month. I want to talk through this equipping Scotland for the future report, our findings, our process and the next steps for it. You have a handout in front of you that will help to follow as I speak. We worked with the Further Education Trust for Leadership, which is a cross-UK trust that is interested in further education and skills in developing and equipping Scotland for the future. What we wanted to do was consider the skills system in Scotland and the future challenges that it faces as far as we can see and as far as the skills system can see. We also outlined some potential priorities for action, so action now that will equip Scotland for the future over the longer term. This was built on our June 2016 report last year called Jobs and Skills in Scotland, which considered Scotland's labour market from a skills point of view—the labour market and the economy, particularly since the crash of 07-8. For context, in a way, that's the quantitative report, the numbers report, that partners up with this more qualitative work in terms of equipping Scotland for the future. What did the Jobs and Skills in Scotland find? It found that the labour market has performed well in Scotland since 2008. We've had a large jobs recovery. Our employment rate in Scotland has reached almost unprecedented levels, almost back up to where it was. In particular, youth employment in Scotland is a success story compared to the rest of the UK. However, we have problems around pay, productivity and progression, so we're beneath the UK averages on all of those, whilst catching up on pay and productivity. We also had some innovative data in terms of skills supply and skills demand. We worked with a multinational US company called Burning Glass to get real-time data from the labour market in terms of the skills demanded, and we matched that up to the supply from the skills system. We found that there was a big gap between what the labour market is demanding and what the skills system is supplying. Equally over time, if you look ahead to projections based on a few things like demographic change, technological change, that gap may well increase. That's the Jobs and Skills in Scotland report in terms of equipping Scotland for the future. As I say, we've built on that numbers report because we wanted to get an insight into what the skills system saw as the challenges it faces and equally some of those priorities in terms of action. We undertook interviews, research events, focus groups all under Chatham house rules with employers, with employees and learners, with the college system itself and with the learning and training system too. That gave us a really qualitative understanding of what we saw as the challenges facing Scotland. Slide 4, I'm not going to talk through all 10, but what we do is outline, as far as the skills system is concerned, the 10 future challenges facing the skills system. Included in there is funding, inclusive growth, the high-skill business model, how do we develop that, how do we get employers to focus on that. Equally, demographic change and technological change and automation is there too. I won't talk through all 10, but we can, by all means, belly down into more detail in any that you find of interest. Then we outline six priorities for action. If those are the future challenges, those 10, what do we need to do now? What areas do we need to work in now in order to ready ourselves for that future? I will talk through all six of these. What we find from the skills system is that an outcome approach and a clear national purpose seems to be missing. Why do we have a skills system? What purpose is it for and can we much better measure the outcomes that it's trying to achieve? Secondly, regional integration. There's a cluttered landscape in terms of a number of different regional entities across the skills system. There's regional colleges, there's regional skills assessments, there's skills investment plans, there's potentially educational regions over on the school side, there's youth employment regions and so on and so forth, all with different boundaries and potentially overlaps with people, but equally potentially not overlaps with people. How do we better integrate the system at the regional level? Equally clarifying the roles of the system. We have seen a drift in terms of the role, for example, of further education. It used to be very much a work-focused route. Now 75% at least of 16 to 24-year-olds are going on to further study on the back of further education and that is a really positive thing. That's not in any way argue the opposite, but that does lead to a gap in terms of some of those work-focused routes. That's just an example. What are more than apprenticeships for? That's maybe clearer. However, the new graduate apprenticeships, the new technical apprenticeships might begin to blur whether that's an early or a pre-career route or whether that's a topping up mid-career route. Co-designing a responsive skills system, how do we get learners and employers much more involved at that very micro level? We have seen governance changes, particularly in the college side of things, that bring the learner to the centre of the system and the employer and employees of the system there too, but how do we get that right down to the local level so that what people are learning, how people are learning, is co-designed by learners and employers? Then flexibility was a key one. How we have seen, and again, there's some positives in this, but a reduction in part-time, particularly the most informal parts of FE. We've seen a reduction in non-recognised qualification courses, but in doing so we've seen a much greater focus on full-time learning and that perhaps made sense on the back of our financial crash with higher levels of unemployment, but as we look ahead, does that make sense? Do we want to restrict learning opportunities down to much more full-time or do we want to see a much more flexible approach so that people can study at their own pace based on their circumstances? Lastly, the sixth one was around transferability. How can we improve the transferability of the system across learning setting? The one that is most often talked about is articulation between HE and college and university as a clear problem in terms of recognition of prior learning in the college setting when it comes to applying to university. However, that's as much of a problem between FE college and university or between a workplace and the college setting or between actually employer to employer. If we look ahead to the future with demographic change and technological change, we're very likely to see people working for longer in many more roles, many more employers, many more careers. How do we make sure people don't go back to the start, go back to scratch when it comes to their learning as they move through that journey? That transferability of learning is crucial and how do you in essence build a career of learning rather than simply again going back to square one as you move? Those six, an outcome approach, regional integration, clarifying roles of the learning routes, co-design, flexibility and transferability, were the key areas that we saw as priorities for action and that's where equipping Scotland for the future stops in essence. It sets that challenge. For us, we take up our own challenge if you like in our next report. The first two I'd talk through jobs and skills in Scotland, equipping Scotland for the future. They set out the problem, but the next report due early May up until yesterday's announcement at the very least was and will talk through the solutions as we see it, so we can start to get into some of those in discussion. In short though, I've mentioned some of these already, but the mid-career learning gap I think we can focus on and begin to look through some solutions there. That regional integration point, we'll see what comes out of the skills and enterprise agency review, but I think there's things to pick up on the back of that review once we see what does come out, focusing the skill system on outcomes and what should those outcomes be. For us it's around productivity, pay and progression and we should clearly focus it on that. Lastly, around the architecture of the system and again the learner journey review, the enterprise and skills agency review will have things to say. On the back of that there will be more thinking and more work to do. So I'll stop there in terms of 10 minutes, but I'm more than happy to take this wherever you wish to take it. Russell, thanks very much for that. Gillian Martin and I were fortunate enough to hear some of that before at the cross-party group on skills. It was very useful, which is probably part of the reason why you invited here today. I've got a question around the regional integration of the skills system. Had you heard suggestions in your evidence gathering about how that ought to be taken forward and particularly the role of the regional developing young workforce groups in leading a coherent regional approach? Yes. In the evidence gathering we did for the Equipment Scotland for the future, the big feedback was that there was a clutter. There was all those new regional groups in and of themselves. They make a lot of sense, but when you look across the system they maybe make less sense, so that was the feedback. There were solutions from the skills system themselves, depending on who you spoke to. I'm sure that you get it here too, but you can speak to one part of the system and they think that they've got it right and everyone else needs to adapt around it. There were fewer solutions that came from the people we spoke to on that. In terms of our thinking, looking at how you can much better align the skills agencies at that regional level, such as SDS and SFC, they are at the moment funding provision that overlaps and that equally should at least be aligned with each other. How we can, at that regional level, get much better alignment between those two agencies and in terms of funding so that national priorities can be converted to regional need so that that can in turn be converted into meeting that local employer and learner demand? Supposes that the role of colleges as well in the whole developing, young workforce and the original system. How have you found that? Yeah, in a way the colleges have faced reform that other parts of the system haven't. So you've seen margers, you've seen college regions created, you've seen outcome agreements between the SFC and college regions and universities do face those too, but other parts of the skills system haven't seen that I suppose that attention in terms of governance change, in terms of structural change. Now you can argue that that's for the goods in some respects, but equally I think there is a point and that's why I think the enterprise and skills agency reviews is good time, well timed. There is a point when you need to say okay take a breath, let's look at the system in the round and work out whether it's coherent or not across. So to me bringing much more alignment between college regions, between some of those other regional groupings including the developing Scotland young workforce ones and see what makes sense to be brought together. I'd add city deals, city region deals into that mix too because what we want to do here is not increase the number of regional bodies but we want to reduce and bring coherence or at least if not reduce allow them to work better together. Okay thank you. I was going to work through the six priorities in terms of questions but what I think I'll do is I'll just open it to my colleagues and then if there's any areas I haven't been covered either I can ask you a question that you can maybe cover at the end, Liz. Thank you. Mr Gunson could I ask you very specifically about outcomes because I think you're right to focus on that as being a real priority. Could I ask you in terms of the way in which outcomes are agreed? Do you believe that there is any evidence to suggest that the process by which outcome agreements are made whether that's in a college or a university or interaction between the skills agencies is not functioning particularly well or do you think it's not necessarily the right outcomes that are being agreed because there are two very separate things and I think they would help us to understand a bit better where the issues are? I think so just for context so there are outcome agreements as you know in place for colleges and universities there's fewer or less of a focus on outcomes in the rest of the skill system so part of this is bringing that culture or at least that attempt to bring that culture across the skill system in our view so if you're focusing on outcomes you should focus on outcomes across the skill system not just in part of it. More directly though in terms of process and in terms of the outcomes the process itself I think they came the statutory basis for outcome agreements is actually the widening access or the fair access elements and as you grow the breadth of outcome agreements the focus arguably is at least at risk of being lost so I think it's clear for outcome agreements are they too wide I think that's the question or do we need to narrow them get back to what we see as the biggest priorities for those that we're bringing underneath the outcome regime to me I think fair access absolutely has to be there but for us and this brings on to the more outcome focused positive destinations are no longer enough it's not ambitious enough in our view so any job or any learning or training or education place isn't enough to us what screams out from the evidence is that we need to get underneath what we're hoping to achieve through that supposedly positive destination so a school leaver that goes out into a low skilled low paid job whilst we have progression rates in Scotland that are very likely to leave that person in that low skilled job for the rest of their career isn't a success as far as we're concerned a school leaver that goes out into a low skilled job with wraparound training provision or out into a modern apprenticeship that to me is success because it is beginning to achieve those outcomes around progression pay or productivity so for us narrowing them down I think the process you know would be tested by then it's hard to judge just now and narrowing them down onto those three p's of pay progression and productivity with a cross-cutting winding access seems to me to be a sensible approach and that's all very very helpful I think the key issue though in determining what the right outcomes have to be is a matter about defining where the issues are and you're very clear in your paper that it's not always easy to get good engagement with the groups that need to be involved in that process and I just wonder if you feel that more has to be done to ensure that we're actually identifying the problems you said in your introduction for example that there is a big gap between the demand and the supply in terms not just of numbers but in terms of what is that demand and what is that supply in other words there's a bit of a mismatch of the skills and you also flagged up the fact that you know there are concerns that sometimes we don't have enough flexibility within some of the provision that we're not responding necessarily to local needs could you be a bit more specific maybe this is something for your paper that's coming in may or maybe a bit later could you be a bit more specific about how you think we address that because I don't think we're going to solve any of these issues unless we are very clear indeed about what the outcomes need to be in terms of the delivery of the skills and where the issues are yes and I think so we've the question the original question was around outcome agreements I think there's there's almost layers to this in my view so there's a national objective that needs to be much clearer as far as the skills agencies are concerned so what are we hoping to achieve in terms of outcomes for the skill system as a whole you can translate that down to a regional level through outcome agreements and yes better engagement with learners employers more generally the economy would be useful in that but in answer directly to that sort of secondary question around demand and supply and flexibility I don't think you crack it at that national and that regional level I think you crack it at the very micro level it's how do you bring those outcomes right down to the learner choices or indeed how do you bring tests of demand from employers right down into those decisions as to who gets a place and who doesn't and what provision the college or training provider puts on so to give you a very tangible example modern apprenticeships bring that right down to you know you have to have a job in order to be to go on a modern apprenticeship course in Scotland there was a test of demand there in the sense that the employers happy to engage and support you through that course so there's an example of how you can bring in that route tests of demand and flexibility into that very local level how can we do the same or an equivalent thing across the skill system and for me I think there are options there around testing that demand at the point of entry so we've so this is a little bit for the next report but we've talked through the idea of a progression agreement so the idea that in taking up a course you agree through the three a tripartite agreement between provider learner and employer on the basis that the learner will achieve certain outcomes in their learning the employer in turn will progress them in their career if they do and in return for those two the provider will provide the course for free so you can see how building it right into that local level could be a way to bring tests of demand and supply to that local level and actually focus on outcomes right down at that micro level too if I know my final point would be one that was raised in your event I think it was in September that you ran your conference when some of the employers who were present raised the issue about the supply side namely that while younger people have some qualities that previous generations perhaps didn't have particularly in terms of their adaptability with technology there was one basic concern and that was about literacy and numeracy of some of those who are obviously have the potential to be highly skilled but that literacy and numeracy was a problem are you going to make some recommendations about what has to be done about there I think less so on the schools side of things from our point of view so we do see the skills system as across post 16 education including the senior phase of school however the reports that we've undertaken focus much more on that post school sub degree level and so adult education is sometimes what it's called FE and skills and so less so in terms of literacy and numeracy in terms of schools where we do in where I would as maybe a little more polite in the in the company that we had in September but where we'd push back a little bit is that employers do need to take some responsibility too and this isn't an absolutely a government or a skills system publicly funded skills system responsibility and it certainly didn't used to be you know it used to be the point where employers would take responsibility further up the pipeline if you like and get involved in schools or if not not expect ready made workers there and then for them so I think yes literacy numeracy a focus on it and you can see the government has a focus on it through the attainment gap challenge and it's less a focus for us more actually the responsibility that employers need to take in terms of developing the workforce of the future and there's some interesting if not worrying trends within the employer side of things so we've seen reductions in investment from employers in recent times now things are tighter you could imagine why pressures on budgets for employers are leading to cuts in training but equally you see patterns of investment that are a bit worrying so if you're a high skilled employee you're twice as likely to have investment in skills and training from your employer than if you're a low skilled employee now if we're trying to achieve inclusive growth if we're trying to improve productivity across those low skilled low wage sectors then encouraging employers to invest as much if not more and those people that do have skills needs is actually some you know a name for us in the future thank you corn I was quite intrigued actually about pages 12 13 and 14 of the report and particularly by paragraph 3.3 on the future labour market demography has obviously been a big issue in terms of you know what's happening out there in the market we've always had this big gap supposedly coming where all these elderly people would move out of the workplace and into the into the retirement homes but in 3.3 you raised some interesting points in terms of how the jobs will change but could you give us a little bit more information on that and is there some optimism that those that are displaced by technology in the sort of mid to low skilled range will they drift then into the what you call the absolute gaps that will appear in terms of the the economy at that time does that seem a likely outcome and how would you see these skills having to be developed and enhanced so as to they're very interrelated but they are separate two trends happening demographic change and technological change or automation and they're very likely to hit us over this next 15 20 years so demography is one of those things that we can actually project and predict quite accurately quite long term into the future immigration might change things a little but actually only at the margins so we do know that finally what we've been talking about or what it seems like we've been talking about for a long time in terms of the ageing population already is hitting but it really really begins to hit in this next decade so by 2030 I think it's roughly a third increase in over 85s and the proportion of the working age population drops and the proportion of the non-working age population increases so in terms of demographic change it will happen it will happen over this next 10 15 years and whilst it's a huge success and brings huge opportunities actually in terms of how we reshape our society in our economy it brings huge financial challenges too so that's the context I think within which we're operating over that period of time technological change is a bit of both so if that's the pessimistic sides technological change is a bit optimistic and potentially pessimistic too so on the optimistic side in fact let's start with the pessimistic side so that we can end with the optimistic side the pessimistic side around a third of jobs are at risk of automation over that period that same period of time so high potential risk of automation this is through numerous reports now Bank of England, PWC and some other academic papers across the UK and US so this is a huge disruption if you like to the economy and you can imagine if so I think the figure is two and a half million people are in the workplace now that will still be in the workplace by 2030 so this isn't going to be fixed by training new sort of school leavers and school system leavers this will have to be done by retraining people that are already out there so that's the pessimistic the optimistic though is that every single technological disruption in the past has also created jobs and in actual fact created more jobs than than it lost people argue that it depends over what time so over the long term that has happened in the short term there's been disruptions that are more negative than that but and also optimistically technological change can be the way we get through those headwinds those demographic headwinds so if we need more in essence tax revenue more economic growth from fewer people of working age then productivity has to be the way to achieve that and technological change is one of our big hopes in terms of achieving it so for Scotland to take advantage and embrace that opportunity we need a skill system across the board that can then also embrace that opportunity around technological change so to get really specific on it in terms of projections we're very likely to see the human interactions of care health particularly those human interaction jobs that are related to older people increase automation though is likely to hit yes low skilled yes mid skilled but also new sectors that haven't been hit before and the challenge there is to anticipate that change to put in place a responsive skill system that can help people transition through that change and thirdly a skill system that can take advantage of opportunities that come through that change too looking at again paragraph 3.3 the second paragraph actually in that you're talking about an existing fairly substantial gap between vacancies and potential applicants and it's potential applicants which is a very important word that's quite a big gap to fill now is it likely and this is probably a finger in the air is it likely that technological advances are going to displace enough people to be able to keep pace with the demographic changes given the fact we're starting from basically a negative situation yeah and there's um so i can hear my why i said colleagues my friends over at sds and sfc in my ear um you know slightly pushing back against the stats that we have for that so um the employer skills survey for example would show you that the skills gap is maybe there but smaller um again we've we've used new data that is real time up to date we can even tell you what it was happening yesterday in terms of demand in the labour market and that shows a bigger skills gap so reported from employers is smaller you know much more quantitatively uh checked by us is bigger so just with that caveat in terms of the skills gap yes starting from a gap now and looking ahead to not only a pattern that changes so do we have learning in the right place are we producing people for example for our care system or um other um for example sales that will be increasing over time or do we have the right pattern and then secondly do we have the right quantity um i would i would suggest on both we don't have it right so that to me suggests that we don't have a skill system yet that is responsive to demand in terms of pattern and that we don't have a quantity coming through the skill system including out into the employer work based route here um that is ready to meet demand of now never mind demand of the future and some of this does come down to funding and i'm not suggesting this all comes to public funding but it does come back to the amount invested and therefore the quantity that we can get through again technological change and you allude to it might help in terms of efficiencies here so can you look at um a blend of online and face-to-face learning that's quite um i suppose new for the vocational route which is much more focused on face-to-face physical learning for obvious reasons because you're learning how to do um the things in a way that uh perhaps you can't do isolated from groups but nonetheless technology is changing all the time there are ways now to do online learning that don't um risk some of those sort of diminution and quality um so can technological change just in that example bring efficiencies that allow us to put the same if not a reducing amount of money in but get better outcomes higher quantity um and a much more responsive skill system and again just to clarify that isn't just public funding in my view that has to be employers taking responsibility too and elsewhere in your report you did mention about employers being a bit slow to take up the responsibilities in that regard yes so there's um in the next report we focus much more on employers um if you like we're sort of tracking through the skill system and there is evidence that across scotland across the UK actually um that employers are pursuing a low skill business model far too often so if you look abroad and one one fact that's particularly stark in my mind is that around a third of the productivity gap between the UK and our international competitors is actually a gap that takes place in our low wage sectors so it's retail that is less product productive than retail in Germany wherever it's hospitality that's less productive for example than the same in equivalent countries and again in inclusive growth terms if we want to produce an economic model that narrows inequalities rather than widens them you would focus on those areas where the inequalities exist which is retail which is hospitality which is um a good care um and childcare too so that's just an example of where the the employer's business model is having an effect over our ability as a country to achieve the outcomes that we want to and how we you know i'm not suggesting we force or we dictate to employers but i think we need to encourage and show the benefits of of changing business model um for the benefit of them but also for the benefit of the economy as a whole thank you uh danyl you wanted to come in with a supplement yeah so i'm in technology change i think is really important aspect what skill system needs to develop both in terms of the technology skills people will need to acquire but also it's going to change the the way that they're employed much higher levels of self-employment strikes me at the skill system at the moment based around full-time college places and apprenticeships where you have to have an employer aren't terribly well suited to self-employment have you given any thoughts to what needs to happen in the skill system to help people sustain self-employment and also access training while they're self-employed yes and it's an issue for small and medium enterprises as much as those self-employed too so that the ability to access the skill system diminishes with the size of the the company in essence or the employer um so this is an issue on a spectrum if you like and one of the apprenticeships in the current um set up very good at accessing um larger businesses those that have the administrative capability to cope um with um employing and looking after an apprenticeship throughout their framework there are ways without having to restructure that um that you can begin to make it more accessible to smaller or even self-employed so in way back actually in 20 years ago in the on the gas sector um you found a pooling if you like of apprenticeships or apprenticeships in terms of their employment so rather than one company employing there was a few that pooled together to employ and that I think you know we can go back in time and try some things that worked in the past that may well work in the future but more generally in terms of more casual work self-employed smaller businesses are on that spectrum too for me I think you also need to look at a new route that is to the side of one apprenticeships that begin to plug that mid career gap for those very companies and for those very employment structures that has a much lower hurdle a much lower barrier to entry if you like so much less administration much less risk for both sides um and that allows a work base route that is really tailored for that um that future that we are facing thank you can I ask about the points you're making on earlier on about integration uh the paragraph you've got or the sentence you've got on page 19 of the report on the skills system integration is the closer integration and collaboration of skills agencies etc etc etc integration means bringing them together doesn't it in our view um it didn't so in our view I think the Scottish Government's been quite clear um the consultation feedback's been quite clear in terms of the skills and enterprise agency review that uh all four I think and then we may have a fifth one coming of those enterprise sorry of those agencies will remain in their current structure there may be a strategic board above what there will be um for us structural change could help but actually it's as much about behaviour between those agencies and for us it's less at that national level where the debate has been to now and more at that regional if not local level so bringing them together is one option but again I don't think you need to do that in order to get the benefits um of that integration and alignment okay so yeah so integration and that says doesn't mean bringing them together you're arguing against that I'm quite ambivalent on that yeah okay can you give me some specific examples of of what needs to change to make this integration happen yes because to be honest I've read lots of reports of a lots of years saying integration yes and you also relate us to many reports on the same theme yes and uh so why is it so difficult I have I have a I have a phrase at the start of most events um which is that old ideas aren't necessarily bad ideas but um but yes and I think um we in terms of why is it so hard I think you do have very different types of provision so you do have training providers out there in terms of SDS predominantly funded that have a very different set up to colleges or universities in terms of what they're teaching how they're teaching it and therefore if you're trying to get to outcomes for both you'd actually probably uh approach that in a very different way so uh integration of both is quite tricky and also where do you draw the line so do you integrate FE and what we've commonly called skills and modern apprenticeship training and learning you can make a case for that if you try to integrate that though what about hian college you can make a case for that and what about university therefore you can make a case for that and what about schools over at the other end all of a sudden you've got a uh a one agency covering senior phase of school all the way through to postgraduate university levels and that brings its huge problems too so I think in you know being frank that those are some of the issues and then being frank too you've got agencies that have interests and you've got government that have interests and you've got MSPs around here that have constituents with interests too so that's why it's so hard but I suppose the point I would make is that focusing on the governance and the architecture is one element but it's only a means to an end the end is getting to some of these outcomes based approaches and you don't need to restructure in order to do that and sometimes again you will you will know this more than I in the time that you've spent here but sometimes restructures can distract from getting to that end you think the schools reviews doing a lot of distracting right now to anyway that's a well we had a report on that just yeah exactly um the other one I wanted to ask you about developing scotland's young workforce eamwood's paper probably the one piece that I have read over all those years that was very clear in its recommendations why don't we just concentrate on doing that and nothing else oh yeah so yeah and employers are involved and you actually I thought I couldn't quite work out whether you were seeing those employer led boards of a good or bad I couldn't decide what you were seeing earlier on so maybe you could clarify that but you know we are that is a piece of work that has cross party support it's well led it's ministerially driven that kind of thing shouldn't we just try and get something right because it starts at the school it's your point about micro and it goes I invert your pyramid I don't start national project start what's going to work locally and then a metal help people because that's how it should be isn't that the thing we should concentrate on so are they good or bad they're doing some really good work in and of themselves so if you focus as the question would suggest just on youth employment or on tackling youth unemployment they're doing some really good work and certainly some are stronger than others but still this is new the I think the strategy is good so Ian Wood's paper is good in my previous role at NUS Scotland we were involved in that paper through a representative on the commission so I think it's a good good strategy in your right it has cross party buying which actually is a really strong part of it so in and of itself it is strong but if you start to look across the sector as opposed to just in that sort of vertical snapshot of youth employment suddenly you start to see where it could integrate better I use that word again with other parts of the system and we're potentially having regions for youth employment that don't match up to regions for schools if we go there that don't match up to college regions etc etc can lead to some inefficiencies in the system and some missed opportunities so in and of themselves I think they're good but in terms of coherence across the system I think we can do better than that should we just focus on youth employment or stroke unemployment I think we have to focus on it and I don't think these are either or things and it almost brings us into this lifelong learning versus young people debate which I also think is a false dichotomy too and we have to focus on youth employment but we cannot just focus on it because of some of the things we talk through so 2.5 million people are out in the workplace already that will need to be helped to transition to the economy of 2030 focusing on youth employment won't help with those people but equally if we lose focus on that we'll be storing up problems for later too so unfortunately it's one of those ones where we need to focus beyond youth employment we need to focus across the range without also using focus on that really crucial issue you'd well know and understand because you're involved that in which reports much broader than just youth unemployment news employment it's also about young people and the learner journey and so on so forth but my point is if you have one agreed strategy get the rest of it to work in around that and deliver I mean I take your wider point about adult employment and the changing workforce and 50 percent of people doing different jobs in 15 years time because of artificial intelligence and robotics and so on so forth they totally get all that but my worry about all governments is that strategies strategy end the strategies lots of reports like yours that come out there's never any long-term focus on one issue yes and I could understand so in terms of implementation focusing on one issue an hour issue albeit a wide one a wide actually no sorry yet an hour issue though than the whole thing focusing on that has its advantages but I think there was a risk you'd be dropping the ball in other parts of the system if you did that okay all right thank you join thank you convener um I'm kind of crossing into the other committee that I'm involved in as well I'm in the economy committee and we're looking at the gender pay gap and that's thrown up quite a lot of evidence around gender segregation in particular sectors which could be a potential problem in terms of skill gaps skills gaps I mean namely I think I won't be surprised that I'm mentioning construction engineering and the care sector as well and these are all areas that are under a little bit of stress particularly with Brexit approaching as well and we need to be looking at how we can have perhaps more women and girls coming into the construction sector and how we have more men going into the care sector in order to be able to sustain these sectors and I wonder there wasn't there wasn't much mention of gender segregation in this report but I'm wondering whether or not that's something that you're going to be looking at because that has been flagged up as been one of the potential skills gaps that's problematic yes and I think both in terms of gender and in terms of socioeconomic factors actually the areas where we need to work in terms of increased pay increased productivity increased progression are dominated by people um that are from backgrounds or women so care retail hospitality et cetera they're low pay but this is a gendered low pay sector I would argue now I'm conscious I'm a white man so I don't want to get entirely into it but as far as I would because there are other people women that could you know speak much more strongly than I on this tackling these low productivity low pay low progression sectors is a gender issue as much as it is a socioeconomic issue and as much as it is an economic issue so if you are trying to get higher productivity rates from a narrowing smaller working age population you just from an economic point of view can't afford to leave whole chunks of the population behind based on gender or others never mind on a social justice issue so inclusive growth to me has to include you know tackling these gender segregations but also these social class segregations too that does have an impact on what you've been talking around about employers getting involved in schools as well because it really is starting at school age where you may be wanting to encourage um you know either gender to go into a sector that is traditionally as gender segregated as well so are you going to be looking into that in the next report and solutions around less so in this next report but it is absolutely something to take on from this next report I think whether us whether others and there's two approaches so it's it's you're right getting in very very early with education aspiration raising to some extent but more linking those aspirations that I think do exist to how do you do it you know navigating that system so information advice and guidance um so getting again one approach is to get more women into sectors that currently don't have another approach and you have to do both I think again is to take those sectors that are gender segregated particularly low paid um whether there is injustice and tackle that issue at the same time so this is whether it's construction whether it's engineering whether it's actually I'd focus as much on digital and new technologies too which is by 2030 the timescale that we're looking at likely to be an even bigger part of our economy how do we get women how do we get um you know people from putter backgrounds into those routes yes but secondly those routes that are currently dominated by people from putter backgrounds or by women care retail etc how do we improve those routes in terms of pay progression and productivity too and I mentioned the issue of brexit and I want to know how much that informed um what what you did in this report because obviously that is a an issue around there are ready gaps in terms of the people going into certain sectors the care sector particularly has got an issue with recruitment health sector as well how much is that informed your thinking yeah so we so this came out in earlier this year so the field work if you like for the report was pretty much started as the vote came in in June last year so it was certainly on the minds of people in the skills system and certainly on our minds in terms of how we respond there's a few factors in in terms of brexit so the first one obviously is around skills gaps so if you if you in those sectors you mentioned and others are going to have fewer people coming in from the EU or outside of the country more generally to fill those skills gaps then that is a short term issue that needs to be tackled for those employers but there's a long term issue there in terms of how do you train people up within this country to meet that gap so that skills gap issue would be the first one but equally there's the wider economy issue too so if brexit is a headwind on the economy that we'll be facing over that time demographic change technological change that are also headwind then it affects our ability to whether it's employers or government to invest in skills and to invest in training so in a way it's a double whammy in terms of brexit in terms of opportunities from brexit in a way less convinced that it brings the opportunity in and of itself to train up people domestically and this is a good thing and for some of the reasons we've talked through it isn't as simple as saying people from outside of this country have been allowing employers to get away without investing in training it's not as simple as that so the opportunities there I think are maybe overplayed that I think some of the the challenges that come from brexit hit both in terms of the skills gap but also in terms of the economy more genuinely too thank you thank you for that and now we have ross toss intervention couldn't be better take does expect it's not on brexit though there are many opportunities right my question is round about priority five in which was improving the flexibility of learning and in your presentation you referred to it as is key and you touched on the reduction in the part time places for further education now my understanding is that part time courses have between 2007 and 2016 so it's a 54 percent reduction that there's been and as you said you don't want restrict opportunity because you need to ensure that there's the balance for those who want to work and study so you posed the question actually in your presentation of does that make sense so I want to ask your own question to you does that make sense and from your own evidence what is the impact of that reduction being so I think the the reduction just to get underneath it a little bit it predominantly comes but not entirely but predominantly comes in very very short courses and also non-recognised qualifications so very very short courses are less than 10 hours in their entirety across potentially a year and non-recognised qualifications there's some really good things in there around access qualifications but there were also some less good things in there that would have allowed people to train up but not necessarily take that training to another institution or indeed out into the workforce so what we've lost isn't by all means as simple as saying we know we should get that back what we're saying is more general than that in that if you look at some of the so here in a multiple career multiple job a longer working life scenario what you will need will change throughout your year there'll be points in between jobs we need really intense bursts of learning there'll be points when you're in a job where you need very sort of low frequency learning alongside your job at the moment it doesn't seem like we're set up properly across the skills system to cater to that and everything in between so it's not quite as simple as saying we need more part-time and certainly not quite as simple as saying we need to get back what we've lost over that 10-year period and what we do need to do though is a live flexibility so that employers and learners can get short bursts all the way through to very long low frequency learning and everything in between to suit their needs because we're going to need that in the future that we're going into if you don't mind what does that flexibility look like here I understand what you're saying you know short burst that flexibility but so I'm clear in my mind what does what does that what does that system actually look like there's some examples in the system already so code clan is a really interesting example within the coding industry they in essence provide a 16 week really intense burst of training for anyone who has a degree of any sort pretty much they do I'm sure have very strong admission systems too but a degree of any sort you need the aptitude rather than the qualification before you come in and by the end of the 16 weeks you will be trained up to be a coder and they have really really high employment rates at the other end this is a real skills gap sector we didn't have enough people within Scotland who had those skills we've responded to it with that so that's over on the very intense end another example that's out there in a system just now within HE would be the open university so it's a very modular approach you can study at full time you can study all the way down to I think 30 credits which is about quarter time and in doing that you can build blocks of learning at your own pace and in your own interests in your own capabilities that allow by the end of it to have an open degree that is built by yourself so those are examples that are out there just now to give it some to make it tangible taking some of those principles and applying them much more to either in the case of code clan across different sectors on the case of the open university across other parts of the skills system could allow you to take some really good practice that we've developed in this country and extend that across the whole of the skill system and that to me would much better suit the future that we're going into rather than trying to sort of get back what we've lost over the last 10 years or so okay thank you Ross Ross great thank you there's a lot of really positive stuff in this report particularly the issues are in automation that I'm interested in but I can't help with fuel is some of this not working with one high one hand tie behind our back in the absence of a coherent national industrial strategy to dovetail with well so in terms of national industrial strategy we have in essence an industrial strategy through the Scottish government's economic strategy now i'm not suggesting i'm not here to sort of review your comment on the Scottish government's economy strategy but it sets out certainly a vision for the future it sets out some priorities within that i think where the focus probably should be is on implementation of those priorities so i'm not sure we lack an industrial strategy it might be one that you or others don't agree with but i'm not sure that we lack one per se what we do need to focus on though is the implementation of those things so if it's inclusive growth if it's innovation if it's internationalism then what do we do underneath that in order to deliver on those eyes inclusive growth for us is a focus you know it's one that we do support and i'm sure it's one that would gain quite a lot of support across the political spectrum delivering sustainable growth that is inclusive and that narrows inequalities rather than widens them it is getting a little bit onto motherhood and apple pie you know who would disagree with that but on the other hand i think that's absolutely the right aim and if we can crack it in Scotland then we'd be among the first to do so some you know it's within that lens that we're operating with the skills system work where in the how can the skills system be at the centre of driving that inclusive growth in essence and delivering on that economic strategy in a way that actually has an impact on the ground and for us some of these ideas are really focused in that territory i suppose i should have said nationals are relatively politically charged term these days i was referring to a UK wide industrial strategy even with the criticism i might have of the Scottish government strategy they are relatively limited by the powers of devolution and at the UK wide strategies require on the automation point that's been covered quite a bit already but a lot of the public policy debate around how we deal with automation potential job losses has focused recently on the social security response we've got a couple of local authorities now who would be trialling universal basic income and for a range of reasons but one of them is part of combating that automation agenda how do we ensure when we're looking at an issue like this that it is a joint up approach that we've not got john swinney taking an approach on automation Keith Brown taking an approach and gene freeman taking an approach in three different siloed areas yeah and i think so just on the UK wide point i think that's i think that'd be a fairer criticism in terms of the UK government for now they are developing more now you understand from colleagues in the rest of the UK in terms of automation i think so the the third figure so there's a there's almost a utopia and a dystopia when it comes to automation so either we're going to be apparently all with our feet up no matter what either way either in a utopia because the machines are doing the work for us and we're willingly and happily allowing them to do it or in a dystopia because they're doing it and we're not getting any you know we're slaves to the machines um i'm not sure i buy into either of those at all um i think we're much more likely to see change than we are um sort of annihilation of jobs so i think it's much more likely to take engineering take car engineering you know it's already happening to some extent a mechanic needs to know how to operate a computer as much as the traditional tools of the job so there's an example of how automation is changing that role as opposed to eradicating it secondly we have at least for the demographic change periods in the next 10 15 20 years attrition so replacement and demand if you like as the aging population retires there will be even in contracting sectors new roles for new entrants so even if automation reduces jobs that doesn't mean it annihilates opportunities for young people to come into those jobs so i suppose that's context in terms of the universal basic income in terms of more of a sort of cross approach to automation um whether we need to go as far as such things we'll see but again you can hear i'm dubious that we might need to go as far as a wage for everyone there may be other reasons to do it but it may not be automation in terms of that cross approach that connected approach i think that's absolutely right and i think setting out you know as far as the skill system is concerned setting out those national objectives those national outcomes that we wish to achieve and trying to ensure that this goes across portfolio as opposed to uh as seen as the minister for skills or the minister for fe and he is crucial i think um so i back that i mean how you do it is almost back to tavishes point which is we talked about this for a long time um we need to begin to achieve it sooner rather than later thank you thank you clear thank you convener um i'm keen to ask a little bit about transferable skills um and you mentioned in a what you found future challenges number five encouraging employees and learners to upskill in progress but then in the priorities for action in number six you talk about um the increasing transferability of learning and you'd mentioned that there were some barriers to that could you maybe expand on what you saw the barriers where to transferring that learning yes so the articulation is the one that um people focus on quite rightly um quite often which is again people moving between hd in college with hd or hd to university and not having to go back a step or two so transferability in that sense there's some quite old issues there but there'll be some quite new ones coming i would guess too so articulation between hd and uh and uni is an old issue i think an old issue that hasn't received much attention is actually fe straight to university so you know on the on the terms of the levels of learning fe learning non-advanced learning can reach just as high as hires it can be hires actually and yet school leavers have much more breadth of choice than a college leaver does uh with a same level qualification which doesn't seem firstly efficient secondly right or maybe you could put that in the opposite way round the new transferability issues coming which already exist would be much more out into that distance of time so if you are learning throughout your career over potentially a 50 year career um how do you ensure that learning from 10 years ago can be updated and taken with you um as much as learning um that's much more uh recent than that first thing secondly in terms of learning in the workplace whether informal or formal how do you ensure that that's recognised by your next employer or indeed if you go back into the skill system by an institution so that transferability gets a bit sort of greater if you like in terms of the future that we're going into um there are some examples out there that we're interested in so in Singapore there's a workforce qualification that allows a modular approach you know we talked about this was Ross's question it allows accreditation of prior learning informal or formal it allows flexibility in terms of really full time down to really part time and using that as a basis i'm not suggesting it's something to transplant to scotland but certainly something we can look at and be inspired by as a way to allow that transferability within the workplace could be a really interesting thought it's certainly on our mind for this next report so do you think then from what you're saying there that that these the skills that have to be transferred there has to be some sort of a recognition of those skills a formal recognition of those skills for them to be transferable between workplaces or educational establishments or do you see another way of doing that well that i mean again employers can informally you know they wouldn't be you would guess you would argue be doing their job properly if they weren't understanding the skills that their employees held informal or otherwise but we do have a skills what's called skills utilisation um problem in that um around a third i think it is of employees in scotland um have qualifications formal qualifications that outstrip their current role so we've got actually a really good record in improving the skills levels within our population where we're beginning to see a problem as an employer is using those skills in work so it could be informal it could be formal but we have a utilisation problem even of formal skills um you would guess that um there may well be a similar equivalent problem for informal skills if employers are not in the mood of looking at you know how they can stretch their employees in terms of the role and more looking at whether they can do the role that they want so to me i think it could be either i think formalising it could be helpful to allow that sort of passporting of learning across different employers and if you indulge me just one more question can you and can we anticipate and i know i'm asking for a sneak preview here can we anticipate that you're going to look at some of those issues in your next report yes absolutely um thanks very much i want to go back to what you said or two things that you said one was the question of post of destinations and the other was the question of part-time courses in college i mean my view of the decision on part-time courses is if accidentally possibly got rid of some courses there weren't much value but by deciding when a crude decision round part-time or full-time they've got rid of a lot of other courses that were particularly valuable and i don't know whether you've done any work in that i suppose the question i would ask is do you think there's a tension between the needs and rights of people to access education and the needs to have a skill strategy that meets the employment needs of our economy so i think on the i mean i couldn't comment as to the intentions in terms of part-time you know where we've ended up is that i think you're right there are some valuable that have been lost but there are also some less valuable courses that have been lost in the reduction in part-time and equally i think it goes beyond colleges for us so we're looking at the skill system as a whole so can you do a modern apprenticeship in a flexible way as much as can you do an FE or an HE course in college in a flexible way so as that specific point is there a tension between access and our economic needs if you like i think for us um you have to align the two so if 2016 tells you anything it tells you that if you don't look after the the levels of inequality of whatever of income of wealth of power um and if you just focus on economic growth that begins to bite back over a certain period of time and never mind that much more within our world view if you like it's a just thing to be doing to be looking at narrowing inequalities and growing the economy not seeing them as distinct from each other and i suppose it comes back to the point earlier around gender and around socioeconomic or people from more deprived backgrounds if you're going into a world where we need to get more from fewer people to put it bluntly in terms of getting through demographic change in terms of getting through brexit and whatever else we face then you can't afford to have you know what are we talking 20% in terms of socioeconomics you know a proportion in terms of gender you can't afford to not be getting the most out of that level of people that level that proportion of people so in short i think they can't be intention they have to be together you have to have you have to have strategies that get the most out of everyone and in doing so grow the economy too who's responsible then for the quality impact assessment on government strategy around skills if you've got a strategy which currently means that folk who can only learn part time because of their caring responsibilities can't access courses or indeed people are far away from the jobs market because of their circumstances i've not to get the wee courses that take them to the place where they're their job ready who's responsible for a really honest equality impact assessment of policy decisions around this because i think that my own view is that you know you can understand in a world where there's lots of job ready people available for work you might this is an issue round you might argue round Brexit there's no brainer for the employer to choose the person that's work ready but if you've taken away the courses that get people to that point where they may be job ready are you denying people access to economic opportunities i think there's two two things underlying that question so one is almost who's responsible in the system as it stands and then secondly is that enough are we you know is it doing well at that responsibility so you know the government would be able to answer more fully or the agencies of government but in short the people responsible the systems responsible now are through outcome agreements for college and university so they do track gender they do track gender segregation they do track fair access by certain measures and then over in the the skills system the sds funded skills system they have equivalents albeit not really outcome focused so they do track for example frameworks modern apprenticeship frameworks that have been traditionally gender segregated to try and improve that so that's the system as it stands that's who's responsible as it stands but that probably more important question i think is as you put is it doing well enough you know are there things underneath there that are hidden and i think positive destinations does potentially hide quite a lot within there so it can look quite well it looks great doesn't it to have um i think it's 92 percent positive destinations out of fe qualifiers um but actually underneath that again is a is any learning opportunity a positive destination is any job a positive destination within those are the really good jobs and the vertical is going to certain groups and other again in the vertical is bad jobs going to others we don't track that as well as we could i think so moving away from positive destinations becoming a bit more ambitious than that i think is a really important part of the work that we're trying to push over these next well over these three reports really and i think that would begin to get underneath what looks like a really positive picture depending on how you look at it to look at some of those inequalities that are hidden just now but is are those who have the colleges are meeting outcome agreements defined by policy which one might regard as unequal in its its approach so the colleges are tracking gender inequality or whatever in the context of a policy which says full-time courses rather than part-time courses when part-time courses disproportionate might benefit women who are asking those questions and is it part of yours role do you think to be looking at these questions for them so we um there's almost an unlimited infinite amount of questions we could ask and i'd love to get onto some of that stuff my own background before this was as part of it was as a commission on the widening access commission so it's an issue that is close to my interest both professionally and personally we don't at the moment have plans to to look at it because in essence everything we do needs to have a funder that's interested in as a charity in funding us to look at it so we don't all be it i'd love to um i think more generally though um again it's really back to the answer to the previous point which is are we getting almost a granular you know are we getting underneath some of these trends that look positive so yes gender balance has dropped but on the other hand gender segregation is a focus and seems to be improving in part in part to the skill system but the overall point might be missing some really really important much more detailed points underneath that which i think you're hitting on okay thank you jillian you wanted to come in with a shot because obviously the route to employment retraining and acquiring skills is more diverse now modern apprenticeships play a big part in that now there is a perception though i think still employers and maybe the wider public that modern apprenticeships are just for school leavers and was that something that you came across when you were speaking to employers you know because that is a route for older people as well into retraining yes so particularly with the advent of for example technical or graduate apprenticeships um they're focused on different parts of skill level but also different age groups therefore um the core modern apprenticeship route though is predominantly focused on those that are very early or pre-career so the proportion of people um that have had less than six months of working parts coming into modern apprenticeship is quite high so we're opening up routes that are potentially there for people throughout their career but actually it is still dominated by people that are either early or pre-career um so you know whether there's two approaches there do we want to promote those which i think we do those routes um to older people um and to people that are mid-career but also the second question in my mind is whether the modern apprenticeship route can do that all by itself or do we need something in addition to it that can focus on those very mid-career older workers too i think again it's back to doing both we don't need to just do one or the other um i would i mean the apprenticeship legislation in terms of pay makes it difficult for much older people in terms of the minimum wage for apprenticeships um which obviously is a reserved matter um albeit i think sds have a real focus on um a minimum wage more generally rather than employers paying the apprentices minimum wage um but yes i think yes modern apprenticeships are opening up to people beyond pre- and early career i'm not sure they can do it all by themselves the part of the picture but i think we need something else in addition to that too yeah thank you i'd like to hear a little bit more about your recommendation around um learners and employers co-designing um the skills system i think co-designing co-production are inherently sensible um but it's quite a challenging thing to achieve you said um in the report that the skills system was often seen as confusing for learners and one of the challenges you mentioned is around promoting a kind of high skills business model and i suppose getting employers to invent to value skills so just to hear some of your reflections on how we would meet that recommendation in those challenges so in terms of co-design again it's one of those ones that brings um i suppose principles right down to that micro that local level um so how do we ensure that to me co-design allows us to meet that that demand gap as far as there is a demand gap much more easily if employers are involved in designing courses are involved and tested in terms of their demand for their workers to go on those courses we can begin to narrow that demand gap i would hope um for learners i think we have to in the skills in the fe in the non-university parts non-HE parts of the system get used to the idea that learners need to be able to shape their learning as much as those in school through curriculum for excellence and principle have and as much as those at university and college through um sort of quality improvement and quality assurance and enhancement principles have because at the moment i'm not sure that that principle is embedded across FE and skills in the same way so those are general reflections in terms of specifically i think getting um so there's i mentioned a few international examples but one from america is around what's called a career pathways approach and in essence what that does is sets out quite clearly for a number of careers if not unlimited numbers of careers the qualifications the education the experience that will allow you to progress either in educational terms or in um career terms and i think getting into that territory in scotland could be a really interesting place but the crucial element for that for me would be to ensure that the career pathways aren't just designed by the employers and by the sectors but they have flexibility for the employee or the learner in order to bring their interests and their potential to it too so in essence you're bringing a little bit of that culture that's coming through curriculum for excellence and it's already there in the university side of things or at least in theory is into the FE and the skills side of things too thank you okay thank you very much there's no more questions excuse me so i think that we'll just we'll just draw that session to a close can i thank you very much for your time and the very interesting responses and particularly i think for the tantalising glimpses of your next report which we were hoping to see in may but it looks like it will be probably during before we get the chance to see it so thank you again for coming here today and i'll suspend the the public that's the end of the public meeting i'll suspend for a few moments until the gallery clears if all you people could