Evaluation, statistics and OR

The Tiger That Isn't

This is more of an informal book review than anything, but I feel I have to share my delight at finding a book that helps people to make sense of numbers.  The full detail of the book is "The Tiger That Isn't" with a sub-title of Seeing Through a World of Numbers, by Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot, published by Profile Books, in 2007.  It is available through all good book sellers it seems and they did an RSA lecture on it in September.

For anyone who  uses numbers, this is essential reading, particularly (and this is a personal whinge I think) PR people who are writing press releases on anything to do with numbers.  Any journalist should be locked in a room with it until they can recite the whole thing verbatim, and when questioned, can actually interpret what it means.

The concepts are introduced clearly with examples that are easily pictured and examples of abuses that are amusing and thought provoking.  They look at issues of size and magnitude, how things are counted (a particular issue in the world of skills and education), chance, averages, targets and a common topic on this blog site - risk.

One of their examples looks at the risks posed to the health of children by mobile phone use - invisible waves have been a talking point in this blog, so I go back to this unashamedly.  The key being that while research showed a doubling of risk of acoustic neuroma, the question not posed and the information not provided was what was the baseline risk?  In this case, about 1 in 100,000.

Statisticians will generally put caveats on their numbers - I know if I am reporting something that looks a bit dramatic or is based on a small sample, I like to put a confidence interval around it or put a level of certainty on it.  Press releases will often include this information in the technical bits at the bottom that don't get reported (always see if you can find that original press release if you are worried about a report), or even in the technical notes of the report that the press release is about.  It is worth doing that bit of digging to make sure you have understood the numbers being talked about.

The Tiger That Isn't makes this point again and again, by getting the reader to question every number they are presented with - in many ways, this is what real numeracy is about.  Good work chaps and thanks for a great read.

Minimum wage rises

From the 1st October, the UK national minimum wage rises for adults from £5.35 to £5.52.  There will be notices in the press from the Unions saying this is a great thing for their workers, but the rise is not enough.  There will also be notices in the press from employer bodies saying that thousands of businesses will go bust because of it and the rises were calculated in an unfair manner.

I am all for the minimum wage, in that it sets a level with legal sanctions, and gives an employee a right to a wage that is somewhere near fair, however it is sad that it should be needed and also need to be enforced with legal sanction.  In the learning and skills world, the mantra is that the workforce is an organisation's greatest asset.  What do you do with your assets?  You care for them, be that varnishing the windows on your house, polishing your car on a Sunday morning, spending a couple of hours at the beauty parlour on a regular basis, ensuring regular maintenance routines are carried out on machinery, or ensuring that living assets are well fed, kept warm enough and are content.

Paying someone a wage that you would not consider adequate for you or one of your own family does not meet the need to care for your living assets in terms of ensuring they are well fed, adequately housed and content.  If the basic wage is not enough to do this, they will look for work else where or take on a second job.  In the latter instance, you are faced then with workers who are not getting enough time to recuperate between shifts, who are not able to take up learning opportunities, who miss time with their families.

There are all sorts of good economic reasons for not having a minimum wage - not least the arguments about how it might drive inflation.  The free market in all its natural savagery would however destabilise wage rates in certain sectors - most probably hospitality and retail.  To a certain extent that can be seen in the US, where tips make up the majority of a waiter or waitress's wages. 

So human nature seems to dictate that some form of protection is needed for wages, and so we have the annual round of increases.  Remember when you see the CBI and Chamber notices about the difficulties it causes, that for an individual working 37 hours a week, their GROSS pay has gone up from £181.90 per week to £204.24 per week, or on an annualised basis, from £9,459 per year to £10,620.  There will be tax and NI to pay on that before the individual gets to live off the rest - and in the UK at the moment, that is hard.

Do graduates drive the UK economy?

The OECD have just published another report comparing education across member states.  The BBC are reporting on the fact that the UK doesn't do so well (again) in international comparisons.

The statistician in me quibbles over shock statements that Australia, Poland, Iceland and Finland have higher numbers of young people entering university than the UK.  These particular 4 economies are very different to the UK, with smaller populations, different social security regimes, different economic bases.  Even the geography is very different, with in each case for nearly half the year, the weather making any sort of outdoor life rather difficult (either too hot or too cold).

The learning policy person in me is rather sad that the UK is slipping down the league tables of getting young people into higher education.

However the wider pragmatist in me wonders if there aren't two particular issues here.  Firstly, with £28 billion earnings from overseas students, has Higher Education made itself seem a bit like a finishing school for foreigners?  More importantly - how do we use our graduates when we have produced them and are they any good?  Are our PhD students still heading for lives of serving at MacDonalds, sweeping the labs at GlaxoSmithKlein or driving fork lift trucks at distribution warehouses, as was once the case and the popular joke?  Or are they gainfully employed, helping British businesses to compete in the international economy?

I suspect that there is still quite extensive under utilisation (I won't say under employment as that phrase is generally banned in skills circles) of the talents of our graduates.  For every mythical one graduate one knows that got that dream job at McKinsey's, and is on mega-bucks with a company Merc at age 27, every one knows the ones that are working in sales, restaurants, recruitment agencies, call centres and warehouses, and not actively using the specific skills they learnt at University.  I hope they will be using the generic skills they learnt (problem solving, team work, researching and writing skills), though they might deny either learning those things or using them in their job.

There is nothing wrong with working in sales (we all need to buy things, and it helps if the sales person knows a thing or two), restaurants (we all like to eat out, but someone has to cook, to serve and to clean up after us), recruitment agencies, call centres (yes, they are annoying, but the 24 hour lifestyle dictates someone has to help us out with banking, insurance, computer queries etc) and warehouses (if you want to go to your local supermarket on Boxing Day, someone will have had to work Christmas to ensure there are things in store for you to buy).  However in the UK we do not value these roles, and while it is fine for someone else or someone else's children, husband or wife to do them, it is not for us.

If we took pride in some of the less glamorous occupations and stopped expecting everyone to be a brain surgeon or web designer or model or TV star, then the graduates we do have might take on jobs where they can make a difference to UK plc.  And that has got to be good for all of us.

Getting projects implemented

I review books from time to time for the Operational Research Society - it is a nice way of keeping up with new techniques and ideas in the business world and sometimes I get to read some real gems like Managing Green Issues by Tom Curtin.  The latest book I have reviewed looks at a system for managing multiple projects, in order to optimise benefit to the organisation.

Optimisation of resource, activity, profit, output - all these are standard areas of OR and management concern and some of the classic OR techniques have arisen from the desire to optimise.  Linear programming and integer programming are good examples of this - I remember struggling for hours with working out the Simplex Algorithm by hand as a student in preparation for exams!  Similarly I remember one of my earliest OR assignments was to look at allocation of IT staff to IT projects at British Gas Northern using integer programming (an elegant solution but not taken up by the client, as it was a bit too Black Box).

Similarly, identification of waste and prioritisation of mission critical (to use a horrid management term) work has long been the Holy Grail of business improvement strategies.  I was involved in a Zero Based Budgeting exercise at British Gas - again I don't think anything changed from the project, other than I made some new friends, learnt a new technique - personal wins rather than benefits to the business.  That project had a top level sponsor as well, but it was cumbersome and expensive.

The project portfolio management methodology was heavy on acronyms, advocated a special team responsible only to the top level sponsor, but with powers to determine which projects would be undertaken and how much resource they would receive to be implemented.  At the age of merely 43 I shouldn't be overtaken by a wave of cynicism when I read about such techniques.  All I could imagine while reading the book, was the spoiling tactics that could be used by colleagues unwilling to change, the challenges to the project team posed by senior managers who were not the project sponsor and an overwhelming vision of Dilbert cartoons about cubicle workers!

In building a solution for a client, I have learnt that it is important that the client is fully with you, keen to find something that will make a difference and that the client's colleagues and partners are willing to sign up to.  Without hearts and minds, even the project that will make your organisation number 1 in its field, will not be implemented.

It all depends on how you look at things

One of my favourite books, both as a child and now as an adult, is Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth.  It is a type of Pilgrim's Progress for children, telling the story of Milo, who had loads of toys, but was always bored.  One day he receives a present, a toll booth (not an easy concept for English children until the M6 toll but work with me), and being bored, he decides to play with it, passing through the toll booth to another world where words and numbers are more real.

One of the characters he meets on his journey (he has a quest to rescue Rhyme and Reason from the Demons of Ignorance), is the Average Man, who is tall, short, fat or thin, depending on your point of view.  Another is Alec the 0.4 child in an average family with 2.4 children (he has sole use of the .3 of a car as the average family has 1.3 cars).  A key message throughout the book is that it all depends on how you look at things.

The FTSE and the other stock markets have been having an exciting August (the Daily Telegraph's Alex cartoon puts this down to too many managers taking their Blackberries on holiday with them), which is not normal.  Much has been written about the slump and the problems for pension funds.  No doubt there is indeed an underlying issue with unsecured loans in the States, but the reactions to the FTSE levels have been hysterical in my view.

Over the past 3 months, there has indeed been a fall in the FTSE closing price as you can see in the graph from the BBC below.

This seems like a terrifying drop until you consider where the FTSE was just a few months further ago than that, as in the 12 month history of FTSE closing prices again from the BBC shown below.

The scarier point on this graph to me is the over inflation of the FTSE around June time, but in the Autumn of last year, the index was consistently below 6000.  I could panic about any investments I might have or I could take the long term view - it all depends on how you look at things!

Qualifications pay

So another vintage year for A level and GCSE passes, and well done to those whose hard work paid off and they achieved the grades they wanted for further study or for work based learning options. 

To those who didn't do so well - the pain passes and you find your way through life.  I was listening to You and Yours on the 14th August, where they were doing a story on how not getting the grades you wanted wasn't the end of the world.  I was almost tempted to phone in myself to say that I got two poor A levels, but that meant I went to Hatfield Polytechnic and discovered OR and went on to do a PhD.  Considering my school regarded me as rather a failure, I thought this was quite an achievement.  However others with a very similar story got to the phones before me - so there is a way out!

But the basics still count - even if you don't get those qualifications at the expected time, you need to carry on trying and learning to get them eventually.  The Learning and Skills Council (LSC) published some research today demonstrating that qualifications do pay off in money terms (Five good GCSEs net £2,200 more).  They had spoken to around 4,000 employers to look at starting pay and how much each successive GCSE pass would net the holder.  For a first employment, they found that 5 good GCSEs would mean an extra £2,200 in starting salary.

Over the past 10 years, the LSC and its predecessor bodies used to fund household surveys and would include questions on levels of qualifications held and also on current salary levels.  I have never analysed one of these surveys without finding that with each progressive level of qualification (GCSE, A level, Degree, further degree), the average salary level increased and increased substantially.  In Coventry and Warwickshire we used to use these figures extensively in careers events and materials, and I tried to introduce the same analysis in Kent and Medway.  It is a powerful message and one that speaks directly to an individual's self interest.

The Household Surveys seem to have died a death, so thank you to the LSC for this research, and get that message out there!  While we all know an exception to the rule, someone with no qualifications who earns a fortune, I think if you scratch below the surface, they have gained vocational qualifications on the way to their success.

Results time

Very soon now, the A level results will be out, with the usual debate in the media about whether the youth of today are brighter than their parents or whether standards are dropping.

The French Bac results are already out - the relative simplicity of the French examining boards makes this possible even when the exams finish at about the same time.  Over 85% of candidates passed their Bac, with some entrants as young as 14 passing.  The comments in the press were broadly the same as we will get in a week or so in the UK.

It is a tricky issue - on one hand one does not want to trash the fragile egos of adolescents who have worked hard and struggled in order to achieve their no doubt excellent grades.  On the other hand, the lack of transparency of the grading systems and the rumour mill and the ever improving grades do raise the issue of whether or not standards have slipped.

My only comparison is that I did my main batch of A levels in 1981, gaining a C in Geography and a D in History and failing appallingly my English Literature A level.  In 2004 I did A/S and A2 French in a year at evening classes and got As for both.  I don't believe I worked harder in 2004 - in fact I am sure I didn't study as hard, as I was firstly in employment and then setting up a small business, which tend to occupy the mind rather.

Where I won out in French was that I had real life experience and knowledge to bring to my essays - I remember being able to quote my Internet rates and e-mail accounts in one of the exam essays on new media.  Back in 1981, my classmates who did French were restricted in general to studying classic texts - if I had had to study Rabelais or Anatole France for my A-level I am sure I would have failed.  Instead I could concentrate on things that either interested me (music, cinema) or were pretty obvious to anyone who read a paper or watched the news (crime, transport policy, immigration).

My personal assessment therefore of my success in A level French after all these years therefore is that I was more mature and had a wider general knowledge, plus the advantage of a home in France.  I didn't know genders of nouns, my use of various tenses of verbs was probably all over the place, but I knew an awful lot about culture.

But what is important about learning a language in an academic environment?  In my view, it is where the principles of grammar should be drilled in, dull as that can be.  The cultural side you can pick up if you are interested via France 24, TV5, newspapers and magazines, France Inter Radio - it is what you go to France to learn if you like.  But before you go, it would be nice to know how to speak grammatically!

Increasing the demand for skills

The Commons Education Select Committee has issued its last report on post 16 skills and learning - a bit like the Curate's Egg, some bits are highly insightful and will therefore probably be forgotten or ignored, as it was published in August when Education is on holiday!

The BBC report on it intrigued me into reading the whole report.  The BBC story on "Skills scheme restrictive - MPs" did the usual stuff on highlighting potential bureaucracy for learners and expressed concern at Train to Gain.  I am probably not the biggest fan of Train to Gain, due in part to the focus on employed status learners, when all adults could use some support for learning.  However I am aware that employers, particularly in smaller private sector businesses, could use some help when training their staff.  The Audit Commission said that some of the employers benefiting from Train to Gain would have done the training anyway - perhaps true of the large public sector employers, but less likely to be true of the private sector as every minute away from work and every penny spent paying a training provider has a direct impact on the bottom line.

So what were the things that impressed me?  One of them was actually something that in the BBC report, made me see red, until I read the full version.  Basically the report doubted the direct link between qualifications and prosperity unless those qualifications were linked to overall business development and the needs of the business.  This is a clear message that Investors in People has been about for years - invest in your people to make sure they have the right skills for the business today and tomorrow, and is therefore as much about business planning excellence as people development excellence.

A second key message - the new Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills must not become dominated by Universities, but must also keep the Skills part of its agenda firmly in the public eye and in the core of its activities.  Well, Amen to that, but it is probably a lot more prestigious to hobnob with Professors at Oxford or Cambridge than get down to real issues with the local college of Further Education.

A third key message - qualifications and skills are not necessarily the same thing.  The credit framework is not quite there yet, but employers do not want to buy full qualifications if half or more of the content is irrelevant to them, and learners may not want to learn the whole qualification if they can see no point in some of it.  It does raise the question of whether the national Qualifications Framework is really fit for purpose currently, but that is another issue.

A fourth key point - the importance not just of getting the skills supply side right, but actually building the demand for skills and learning.  It is difficult but it is a key activity.

A fifth key point (it really was a good report) - the issue of funding ESOL.  Sadly the BBC report was borderline illiterate at this point, so I urge you to read the real thing, but it is something I know I have spoken to clients about and have muttered about in previous postings - funding is being cut, or rather refocused, so those learners that need ESOL teaching are less likely to get it in future.

However, the Commons Education Select Committee is no more, so it will take a while for the two successor select committees to find all of this out for themselves once again.  In the meantime I hope the skills campaign works in terms of increasing the demand for skills out there among individuals and employers.

Learning - a life long sentence

I had intended to make this week's post about flooding and the issues of one in fifty events - I'll come back to that next week I think!  The reason being that I was reminded of the importance of lifelong learning today by my cheese merchant!

Once a week I go to the biggest local market around for the basics to see us through the week - vegetables, fruit, meat, fish, yoghurts, and most importantly, cheese.  I am not a fan of supermarket cheese - as I was reminded at the beginning of the month when Jean-Marc went on holiday, and I had to buy prepackaged supermarket cheeses.  Even well treated and at the expensive end of the market, they just weren't up to scratch.

Jean-Marc is brilliant (he won't mind me saying so either!).  If a cheese that I normally buy isn't quite to my taste, he will advise against buying it or even refuse to sell it to me.  Last week I needed a balanced cheese board for a dinner party I was doing for my mother and her friends, and he came up with a brilliant mix and just the right quantities so that there wasn't a huge amount left over.

I once took him a piece of well kept Stinking Bishop as a present, and didn't tell him what it was.  It was like watching a real wine expert - he looked at the cheese from all angles, smelt it, felt the texture, all the time giving a running commentary on his thoughts - cow's milk, washed in alcohol, fruit alcohol, probably pear.  He was highly impressed with the flavour too, when he eventually got round to tasting it - and was horrified but impressed to hear it was an English cheese as it was so well made and well done.

Today we were talking cheese - he said that he was one of the panel of expert tasters used to give out the awards for Pont l'Eveque cheeses, doing blind tastings just as the wine chaps do.  He said he felt that you couldn't be a cheese expert if you hadn't trained hard for at least 10 to 15 years, understanding things like the effect of forage on milk quality, the different ways of refining cheeses, the influence of soil and weather on a producer.

The reason he should be an advertisement for lifelong learning strategies?  With all his skills and knowledge thus far, he said he still had even more to learn and was learning every day.  If he wasn't learning, he would be dead.  Bravo Jean-Marc!  Those are my sentiments entirely.

When is a skill vocational?

Yesterday afternoon the new Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills announced the Government response to the Leitch report (see previous blogs!) in the Commons.  He announced an adult careers service, individual skills accounts, called on colleges to be more responsive to learners and employers, and called for a "skills revolution", with training for what local people or businesses wanted.

The cynic in me says that a lot of this has been spoken about before and my views on the practicability of the skills accounts are generally unprintable currently - having lived through the ILA (individual learning account) fiasco a few years ago.  The responses reported by the BBC are also fairly mimsy for the moment - though it was the responses from the National Union of Students and the University and College Union that prompted this blog, as both questioned the balance between employer demands and individual development.

Someone somewhere seems to think that vocational qualifications and skills are very easily defined - well one could argue that the National Vocational Qualification (NVQ) covers this I guess.  So why are people pushed to non-vocational qualifications and the plethora of A levels and GCSEs in the academic route?  Unless they are also vocational in that you need a relevant A level if you want to follow a particular occupation?  But we don't have particularly strict vocational entry requirements, so I am confident that there are accountants out there without Maths A level (sorry to pick on accountants but it seemed a good example).

Then there are the leisure courses that are so derided - yoga, basket weaving, pottery, country crafts.  Should they be pushed down the priority list as they don't have any employment or vocation attached to them?  Well, how do you know you want to teach yoga if you don't start learning yoga somewhere yourself?  I have a friend who was an accountant, did a series of evening pottery classes, decided she loved it so did an arts foundation course and last heard of, was running community arts projects in the Midlands.  Basket weaving and country crafts - how do you know whether you are good at them until you try a course.  How many farmers' wives are now running successful micro businesses to diversify the farm income? 

Similarly a number of years ago I was working with Warwickshire CVS, and foolishly mentioned sewing classes as perhaps being leisure oriented, only to be told that half of the sewing circle that was running in Nuneaton had found jobs in the clothing industry as a result of their involvement in the sewing circle!

The vision that is lacking in all of this therefore is the ability to unlock the hidden potential and desires within the individual.  Fine, let an employer pay for CNC setting training for today/tomorrow among their workforce, but will those same skills be relevant a year or more down the line and will the employer still have that worker and need the same skills? 

We are told that there is no job for life any longer and my household is a prime example of that, but will an adult careers service have the time, funding, vision and skills to help an individual find the niche where they will be happy and will have the aptitude and skills to succeed?  At my grammar school in the seventies, the options were university or the banks - anything else was considered a waste of talent.  The personal assessments and the labour market and economic information were missing then - will they be there now for adults?