Skills, statistics and OR

European Milk Strike

Normally I keep my private passions away from this blog and discuss them on my other one, but I feel this topic is something more linked to work thoughts as well as home life.

Did you know that dairy farmers across Europe, but not Denmark and probably not the UK, have been taking industrial action in protest at the farm gate milk prices unilaterally set by the dairies and other milk transformers?  It has been going on for quite a while and with some dramatic protests.  I reported on local action in this posting, while a European association has been set up, complete with website, to press the case, and recently nearly 1,000 tractors made the image you can see at this site in a field near Annencis to make their point.

Free marketeers would argue that there is excess supply and that therefore the low prices offered to farmers at 8 cents a litre below the cost of production are just a manifestation of the laws of supply and demand.  The fact that prices in supermarkets for milk, cream, butter, cheese and other milk related products have not fallen at all doesn't seem to come into the argument.  Sharing the margins from the consumer or cutting the prices to the consumer have not happened - so the market isn't really working.

It was also not that long ago that prices for milk products rocketed because of excess demand in the system before the credit crunch (although I can't for the life of me think who takes out a mortgage to buy yoghurt).  Supply is not something you can turn on and off that easily however - cows take a few years to breed and get to milking while the milking parlours farmers have to have to extract and store the milk need to meet ever stricter hygiene rules.  Cows also need to be fed, even if no one is buying the milk, and create a landscape that is cherished by all, not just the farmers.

Finally, there are surely some products that are essential to the nation - clean air, clean water, basic foodstuffs, energy.  If all our milk were to come from emerging nations, but then someone was able to pay more, our supply would be cut off, and we would be without the means of production ourselves (look at parallels in coal, gas, steel, aluminium, copper).

Personally I am prepared to pay a bit more for my dairy products, knowing that I am keeping an economy and way of life going.  Having said that, I try to make sure I buy my milk and milk products from someone who is also a producer or at least doesn't profiteer from the producer.  Bizarrely, such a purchasing policy also means I get to consume nicer products!

Who changed the definition of NEETS?

I have spent years monitoring NEETS - those not in education, employment or training.

First time round, we called it the Success Index and it was run in Coventry and Warwickshire and showed the first destination post-GCSEs for young people aged 16 or so in the sub-region.  It was published towards the end of the autumn term and was used as a measure of success in inspiring young people in the area. 

The original definition was that a young person had to be in education or training with work, and we used to have a lot of debate with Connexions about a job without training - due to really tricky semantics.  If a young person was on a training programme with Marks & Spencer or AXA, they often weren't counted as being in a positive destination as the training wasn't to a recognised qualification.  However the unqualified young man who was helping his Dad out as a scaffolder was a tricky one - should we grass them up to the HSE?

Then the concept of NEETS came up, so that whole debate was put on the back burner, as you could be in education, employment or training, and it was a positive outcome.  Then people started to get clever and think about what happened at the end of year 12, so ever more sophisticated methods for tracking young people were needed, and Connexions case workers were at the front of collecting the data.  Now when we just did the Success Index, we did find that people who went to public school for their sixth form education ended up as non-positive outcomes, as they were generally lost to the state careers system - is that the same for NEETs?

Today I find that there is a whole new category of NEET - actually we used to call them unemployed - young people aged 19 to 24 not in education, employment or training.  Here we get into seriously tricky water on definitions.  What about young mothers?  What about unpaid carers? What about unpaid postgraduate academics?  What about school leavers and graduates on gap years?  What about volunteers?  As one gets older, the range of options and life choices that are totally valid but don't sit comfortably within the categories of in employment or in education or in training get ever more numerous. 

Why call these people NEETs?  It takes the strength away from the 16 - 18 definition.  These people are unemployed or inactive.

If aliens beamed into your house from deep space and asked for a 24-hour tour of Earth, what would you show them?
Submitted by Writer's Notebook.

My bit of rural France - it has good architecture, scenery, friendly natives, and the daily life is good enough for anyone.

Social equality and education

"Professions reserved for rich" is the headline and the social mobility report seems to indicate thatit is ever more difficult to get into the professions - medicine, law and journalism being those cited.  Shock, horror - large swathes of judges and senior civil servants were independently educated!  So were quite a lot of politicians of all persuasions.  Leading universities must take account of the social background of pupils, particularly those at low-achieving schools when looking at admissions, they say.

Well, that has got me going again, I have to say.  Firstly, journalism, however good, is not one of the professions, and the current state of the British media puts it firmly below advertising copywriters in my opinion.

Secondly, is this bashing the public schools again?  Some of them are very good, many put time into pupils who need that bit of extra tuition as they are not all that bright, so what people are paying for is smaller class sizes and better discipline.  When I was at school, Eton was often described as a fee paying comprehensive, as selection was limited to those winning scholarships.  What they do seem to give young people are social skills, producing vibrant and articulate young people who are not afraid to follow a less popular course (being clever, good at sport or good at classical music).

However how do you determine social background accurately?  One of the best determinants of a child's academic performance is the academic performance of its parents, but universities are unlikely to get away with asking prospective candidates about the grades their parents got at A level and degree.  It is also not related to the social class of the parents, which is generally determined by occupation.  The Standard Occupation Classification puts Managers in a high SOC group (1, 2 and 3 - Managers, professionals and associate professionals respectively) but a manager can cover a multitude of sins, while associate professionals can also cover some occupations that do not require a degree.  When I was applying for Polytechnic, my parents' occupations were respectively retired and cook, and if one takes the application of social grouping to those occupations, I would have been down in the lower brackets, even though my father was an artist (up there in social terms) and my mother was a cordon bleu chef.  Occupation doesn't really do it therefore.

If we look at educational attainment, that is far more likely to be a good determinant, but until there is a good retrospective database of qualifications, it is likely to be skewed.  We are frequently told that people lie about their qualifications on CVs and job applications.  In any case, it won't cope with the City types for example who made shed-loads of money without having qualifications, but can afford to pay for public schools.

And what about all those exceptions - those who made good despite a "poor" background and ill-educated parents, or those who didn't benefit from their fortune of having wealthy or well educated parents?

A yong person at age 17 or 18 wants to stand for something themselves - forget their parents and the money - look at their grades, their ambition and the quality of the school they went to and its performance.  High grades at a high performing school is expected and the young person deserves well, but high grades and a poor performing school and the young person deserves the best.

Whither DIUS?

There is a lot going on in politics and I try to ignore most of it, as the media driven personality frenzy is just not my thing.  I will admit to having been wowed by the Obama story, but that is more interesting to me than expenses scandals and whether Gordon Brown single-handedly brought down theglobal economy (he didn't - in my humble opinion - no one person could).

I get interested when something happens that affects those that I work for and with, and which will have an effect on employment and skills however.  So who spotted that sneaky move last Friday that in a single stroke, removed the Department that is responsible for Innovation, Universities and Skills?  Well so far, it seems only the Universities sector has bothered to speak out, highly upset that they are put with anything so practical as business.

Once again FE and skills at level 3 and below is the poor relation and forgotten.  With DIUS, I gather the Minister took a real interest in what was happening and read everything he was sent on issues in the skills world.  He worked closely with DWP to ensure that the Integrated Employment and Skills concept got off the ground and in the West Midlands at least, is starting to be observed.  He could balance the needs of FE and HE nicely as he had two powerful lobbies to work with, but they were at least related in their objective to improve knowledge and skills.

I mean no disrespect to Lord Mandelson, but to mix HE and FE with a third powerful and indeed stroppy and diverse group (business) and you start to get a monster department with very differing needs and egos to match.  He will have his work cut out to serve and work with three such lobbies (remembering that BERR has also such things as Trading Standards under its wing) and to the detail that John Denham brought to the role.

It is also unhelpful that this occurs just as Machinery of Government is dismantling the LSC and putting together a number of new agencies to take its place - the Youth Funding Agency will be fine with DCSF but the Adult Funding Agency may not find itself a priority for the new department.  It is also not helpful when new initiatives between DIUS and DWP are being brought in to assist those facing or made redundant in the current economic downturn.  If Government will not save LDV and over 800 jobs are lost (excluding supply chain), but puts money into supporting redundant workers - that is one silly department, as now it is all together.

What is the future for Skills in the UK?  Who knows - currently it is not a political priority.

Adult Learning Figures

The BBC are now reporting the results of the annual NIACE Adult Learning Survey - this is a national survey undertaken on an annual basis with a sample size of about 5,000 respondents allowing for the data to be cut in some ways (social class, level of highest qualification or region) but not in multiple ways (social class and region for example).  The main value of the survey is as a longitudinal barometer of participation in learning among the adult population showing broad trends - the Government criticism that individual years should not be looked at in isolation is fair, but the same can be said of their own survey, NALS (National Adult Learning Survey).

Some of the NIACE findings are wholly unsurprising to those of us who have been looking at learning survey data for the past 15 years.  Those from higher socio-economic groups are more likely to participate in learning after school age than those from lower socio-economic groups.  I know you will always find the example of the bin man who has been doing a degree with the Open University for the past 7 years, but remember this is a generalisation based on majority findings.  However people from higher socio-economic groups include people who are doctors, accountants, lawyers and members of professional institutions, most if not all of which demand continuous professional development to maintain a licence to practise.  I am almost worried that only 53% of those respondents from the higher socio-economic groups have undertaken learning in the past 3 years.

There is concern that there has not been an explosion among those in lower socio-economic groups undertaking learning, given the millions being poured into schemes such as Train to Gain and the adult literacy and numeracy campaigns.  I suspect that even though this work has seen large numbers of new learners, the fall in the availability of free or low cost adult education opportunities has had an effect.  Not least in the mind of the respondent - having just completed a telephone survey myself recently, I can confirm that people don't necessarily remember slightly dull or ordinary business activities, where they do remember attending an external event or something that was fun. 

When training is delivered in the work place, it is highly effective for both employer and employee in general, but it may not be remembered as learning activity by an individual, particularly if it was not clearly badged as a learning event.

Surveys are excellent tools for understanding the broad characteristics of the population, but with adult learning, there is also access to the Learning and Skills Council Statistical First releases, which while complex do give definitive numbers enrolled on publicly funded learning.  NALS was last run in 2005, has had a small sample size in the past (less than 5,000 sometimes), is not undertaken regularly, and while the next round is in the planning phase, is unlikely to show headline results until 2010.

Redundancy Statistics

For those of us who work with or near the public sector, it is important to have facts and statistics to hand and to understand how those statistics are arrived at, so we can place the right level of reliance on them when formulating policy, bidding for funds or evaluating activity to see what works.

Recently I was tendering for a massive piece of work in the north of England to do ongoing monitoring and evaluation of ESF funding.  One of the aims of this evaluation was to be able to ensure that funds were being spent where they were needed and that they were being spent effectively.  The implication being that if they weren't, funding would be stopped and transferred to a more needy cause.

The colleagues that I was working on this with are brilliant, hugely knowledgeable about policy, evaluation methodology, full of ideas for doing things a bit differently, and able to express themselves to any audience.  My part in these things is often to be hideously well informed about statistics, management information and latest developments. 

The night before the final presentation pitch, I spent ages trying to find out recent redundancy figures for the Region in question.  I know these things exist - when I was still "within the system" I used to get regular reports from Jobcentreplus on actual and potential reducndancies by borough or district.  You had to use them with caution, but once information was in the public domain after employees had had their 90 day consultation, you would have thought that somewhere these figures were collated.

Well it seems not.  So if like me, you are outside the system and you need to make judgements on redundancy numbers over a period of time and in a specific location, you are back to relying on the good old British press.  My lesson for the day therefore is, don't go with the headline, read the full report.  There were stories about hundreds of job losses, that when you burrowed right into the story, turned out to be less than 50 for the area of interest, with others spread around the country.  It was no less sad for each individual and no less life changing for each family involved, but for the area of interest, it meant a lot less impact.  You also have to do this for every local paper and for every individual story.

That's a lot of work being repeated I would guess - wouldn't it be nice if those jolly chaps at ONS identified that there is a big issue going on in the labour market and started to monitor it?

So farewell, then...

Mark Heysom, formerly Chief Executive of the Learning and Skills Council.

I left the LSC about 6 months after he joined I guess, but even in that time he had made an impact on staff.  While that impact wasn't always regarded as a good thing, at least you knew he was somewhere in the organisation.  In many ways he was a more sympathetic character than his predecessor, known by many in the LSC as Monty Burns.  I met "Monty" once and introduced him to my colleagues on a show and tell style visit - I was impressed at his lack of charisma, and his ability to wind up my colleagues by being vague and uninformed.

I was not completely Mark Heysom's number one fan - the move from local to regional focus was not a good one in my view and the processes to move staff around meant that there was real hiatus and impact on learners and on projects.  This has been recognised in evaluations of ESF programmes at regional level and in more than one region too.  It did also seem that this was a reorganisation too far, being the third since the LSC's inception in 2001.

I did feel sorry for him when Gordon Brown sprung the split of the Department for Education and Skills and its delivery agencies on him and I gather with only 20 minutes to half an hour warning of the public announcement.  That has not helped performance or cohesion in the LSC in the past 18 months, and the next year promises to be as chaotic as the move from local to regional organisations.

However I have to admit to being very impressed that he has fallen on his sword, so to speak, over the issue of college rebuilding funds and related problems.  It seems a long time since anyone did the honorable thing, without ensuring a golden parachute, and Mark should be commended for that.  Good luck to you in whatever you chose to do next, sir!

Taking a Macro or a Micro view on funding success

Two stories have been reported in the media over the past two days, that can be taken at the macro level as an indictment of government policy, or at the micro level, as a great boon to individual beneficiaries.

One yesterday from the Audit Commission criticised the instability of funding and the administrative burden of bidding for funds and managing funds on work with disaffected young people, including young offenders.  The Government hit back saying that this was unfair on youth workers who did a marvellous job.  I couldn't help thinking that both were right - particularly having evaluated a project for young offenders in the Midlands last year that had just lost its funding.  The funding systems and the accountability that go with them are a nightmare, and must distract from the fundamental purpose of work in this area - to re-engage and inspire disaffected young people and get them ready to make a positive contribution to society.  Individual workers do resent this funding hash, and do their wonderful work despite it, not as a result of it.  On the project I evaluated, I spoke to the youth workers on the day they received their P45s, but all were positive about the work they had done, and some were still seeing clients that day as well.

Today the Public Accounts Committee have said that an unacceptably high number of people in England cannot read, write or count properly, and Ministers have defended their record of having pumped huge amounts of funds into Skills for Life in an attempt to redress this.  At an individual level, they reckon that something over 1 million people have benefited.  Again through various evaluations I have done in Plymouth and for Investors in People, I have been lucky enough to meet individuals who have benefited from Skills for Life, and heard their stories about how it has changed their lives. 

So much as it pains me to say it, I have to defend the politicians on that one, and say their activities, delivered by dedicated workers on the ground, have made a big difference.  However, the size of the task is immense and the funding and measuring rules that have been put in place have not been helpful and teachers and trainers all say that the tools they have to use to do the job do not meet everyone's needs apart from the funding regimes.

Ah - is there a link there?  Good work being done, but could be done better if the funding rules were not quite so silly?  The balance between doing good with public funds and being seen to purchase the right things with public funds inevitably brings perverse outcomes if it is not totally right.  I am not sure that the right balance has ever been achieved.  Perhaps that might be worth a study, carefully funded of course, and with a suitable procurement process...

It's official - it's a recession.

So there we have it - the official statistics point to a second quarter of falling Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which sets the definition of a recession.  Personally I always favoured The Economist's definition, which was also a lead indicator, which was the number of times the word recession was used in the press in a defined period.  If it hit a certain level, it was recession and the figures to confirm it would appear rather later.

Actually, on the official definition, we haven't seen a recession since the early 1990s - I am not sure where the Economist figures fit with that as I haven't subscribed for many years now.

Anyway, we can expect to see more misery in the news programmes, many more articles on how to survive a recession, how to manage the household budget in a recession, austerity food and drink, and pictures of people being turned out of their homes.  The early 1990s recession was grim I recall - I was lucky in that I had a job with a major company that wasn't about to make people redundant, but my husband had a new business start up that failed (albeit we managed to close it while it was solvent).  We had bought our first home, but interest rates went mad and property prices fell.  We lived in the North East too, where unemployment was already high and opportunities exceptionally rare.  My husband applied for one job with a drinks manufacturer that had 600 applicants - how can you chose the best person for the job in those circumstances?

This time round we both have small businesses, we have no mortgage, but our savings are being eaten away by low interest rates, poor investment conditions and performance, and inflation.  We are also affected by a weak pound.

So, 2009 promises fun and games for all.  However to be full of doom and gloom is also not helpful - if we all stop spending, retrench and focus in on ourselves and our misery, we will contribute to helping the recession thrive and go on for longer.  Perhaps it is time for a nice new pair of shoes in the knowledge that I am helping the economy?