Question: The ALI is publishing its annual report on the standard of learning offered to young trainees and adults in England. What are the main conclusions?

David Sherlock: That significant improvements have been made in the last 12 months, particularly in work based training. There are two measures in this.

The first is inspection results and the other one is in actual achievement rates for learners, which have gone up about five per cent in work based learning and in most college courses.

Question: You work with 'young trainees and adults'. How old are the youngest you work with?

David Sherlock: 16 onwards for workplace training and most other things which are work related, and 19 plus for colleges and other areas. We are not involved with people who go on to universities.

Question: How do the failure rates compare to other European countries?

David Sherlock: That's a very good question. This is going to sound peculiar but it actually depends on how you measure it.

For example, A levels are measured against the entries to the examinations. So when people say 'Oh my god its getting towards 100 per cent, they are reflecting the fact that kids are not entered for A levels if they are not going to pass them.

Workplace learning is measured against the young people who started the programme. So it's a much, much tougher measure.

Question: When you say 'workplace learning', how do you define that?

David Sherlock: That's people who are employed and do most of their learning on the job.

They are probably coming for day release, lets say one day a week in a college or they may be doing a block course in a college or in a training school in a company.

Most of the learning is actually done and assessed on the job.

Question: So do you talk to employers to stress the need for workplace learning?

David Sherlock: The people who actually promote it and fund it are the Learning and Skills Council, and in a slightly different way Jobcentre Plus for unemployed people.

If they are receiving government money we come with the package - we inspect it.

Although our job is not actually to promote work-based learning, inspecting it means that we have a great deal of contact with employers and private training providers.

It also takes us into charities like YMCA and NACRO - all of those sorts of organisations, as well as big employers like BAE Systems, MG Rover, BMW and so on.

Question: Are you happy with the way these organisations manage these workplace learning programmes?

David Sherlock: Not really, they are not always managed as they should be - so they don't pick up on young people leaving before the end of programmes or failing to gain their qualifications.

Its also partly about over complexity of the programmes themselves. This is partly an issue for the government - which sets up the programmes - but also the fact that there are just too many awards and too many awarding bodies.

Question: So would you advocate a streamlining of the whole system?

David Sherlock: Absolutely - this would be a very good idea indeed.

I think at the moment we've got something like 2,100 vocational awards and workplace awards - including 1,000 NCVQ's.

If you look at international comparisons, most countries get by on somewhere between 15 and 30 programmes and maybe 100 workplace awards.

What we've tended to do in this country is to produce highly specialised and very narrowly specified qualifications for every kind of occupation under the sun, rather than design broad qualifications patterns which actually mesh together legally. So people could start at a low level and work their way right the way through to degree level without coming up against all sorts of cul-de-sacs.

Question: What should be done to improve inspections?

David Sherlock: We have demonstrated pretty clearly that inspections add value to the whole business.

Inspections pick out the weaknesses and make people address them.

What we need to know is whether the training providers breathe a sigh of relief and say 'thank god they've gone for four years' and then return to their bad habits. We've got some indications that this might be the case.

The new short monitoring inspections which we are introducing in January 2004 are going to go back to those training providers at fairly short notice, about a year after we've re-inspected, just to ensure that they are not 'coasting'.