10:30 am
Mr. Simon: It is a great pleasure it is to serve under you, Mrs Humble; I echo the comments about your sagacity and all your other qualities.
Is now the right time to move towards a more flexible, responsive and employer-responsive skill system? The answer is yes, obviously. A lot of what we and the Learning and Skills Council have managed to do in the last six months or so in response to the recession is precisely the kind of thing that the Skills Funding Agency will do more and more of, and be better and better at. It will be slimmer, more streamlined, faster and more responsive to things such as introducing £350 million-worth of flexibilities into Train to Gain, the integration of employment and skills, and the discrete work that we have been doing with, for example, car manufacturers in the north-east.
Far from being against the grain of the reforms, all of those are entirely in line with the direction of travel of the SFA. The Learning and Skills Council has done an outstandingly good job, but a different job is needed next. The job of the LSC was to drive up participation and success in a skills system which was sadly lacking. It has achieved that with a great increase in success rates and at levels 2 and 3 in respect of the skills system.
What we need to do next is to make the skills system more specifically and directly responsive to employers and learners. The SFA will do that through its customer-facing outward-looking gateways: Train to Gain, the National Apprenticeship Service, the adult advancement and careers service, skills accounts and the National Employer Service. It is about making the system respond more directly and quickly to the needs of individual learners and businesses. I commend it to everybody.