Let’s crunch some numbers. In each cohort of just under 1.5 million 16-year olds, the choices are A levels, BTECs or apprenticeships (accounting for about half the cohort between them), jobs, unemployment or ‘other’. For T levels to grow to even a quarter of those in education or training and, let’s say, a tenth of the rest would mean nearly 275,000 T level work experience opportunities per year. Are there really that placements many out there to be had? 

Each T Level requires 45 days of work experience. For 275,000 T levels, that equates to just under 100 million hours. Let’s suppose each placement takes just one hour of administrative work to arrange and each experience hour that they provide takes up just 10 minutes of oversight by a paid employee. I suspect both those estimates are generously on the low side, but even that is nearly 17 million hours of employer time.

At a median hourly rate of £18.50 for those employees doing the administration or oversight (again, I’m being generous), that’s well over £300 million of direct cost to the employers. That’s before you account for any of the other costs in providing work experience (the space, utilities, equipment, insurance, etc).

A fund of £12Mn looks pretty paltry by comparison.

But let us not be churlish. It’s better than nothing and presumably the DfE hopes the £12Mn will help to fund tens of thousands T levels next year, not yet the hundreds of thousands which it may hope may be realised in the future.

Besides, it’s not as if employers engage in T levels to add to their bottom line anyway. This is an investment in the future of their workforce, creating a skills pipeline and contributing to wider society, surely?

So let’s think like a business. How else could they invest and achieve a similar outcome? Well, instead of the new-fangled T levels that as yet have no track record, one alternative for an employer would be to offer apprenticeships to young people instead.

Would it be cheaper and more cost effective for the employer?

Cheaper? Yes. Larger employers can offset the cost of apprenticeships against their levy. Smaller employers can claim (most of) the cost back.

More cost effective? Probably. Apprentices are employees whereas T level students aren’t. That gives employers have more control over what they can expect from apprentices’ productivity. And when they finish their apprenticeship, the employer can chose to (continue to) employ them, rather than, with T level students, hoping that, when they finish, they apply for a job with them rather than perhaps with their competitor, going to uni or doing something else.

If an employer is looking to invest in their future skills pipeline, they may well decide apprenticeships are a more attractive option than engaging in T levels and even the prospect of a share of a £12 million fund doesn’t come close to tipping that calculation.

That is perhaps why when the DfE tried setting up a similar fund in 2019, they managed to allocate only £500k out of a total available of £7Mn, funding about 2.5% of the intended number of T level placements.

The £1,000 per placement incentive simply didn’t sweeten the deal sufficiently. Even DfE’s own research told them as much: just 7% of employers said it would make a difference. (My back-of-an-envelope calculation above of £300 million costs for 275,000 placements – which works out at an optimistic £1,090 each – perhaps explains why.)

If at first you don’t succeed… right?

Or there is another way of looking at it: the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

When you have a bold and ambitious policy, you don’t get it to fly by giving it half a feather instead of a full set of wings

This may all sound like nay-saying about T levels as if I don’t approve of the concept. Nothing could be further from the truth. I would love to see them succeed. The problem is that when you have a bold and ambitious policy, you don’t get it to fly by giving it half a feather instead of a full set of wings.

Rather than recognising that a change this big needs real investment of money and effort – especially to overcome the real challenges of delivering T levels at scale at a regional level – the Government’s approach appears to be to defund other options, even when its own targets for T level expansion won’t replace what’s being lost.

Realistically, T levels won’t ever be the vocational silver bullet qualification that the Government longs for. The problems of employer engagement and regional disparities in provision can be tackled, but never fully overcome, and the fact will remain that for some young people, commitment to a single T level at 16 will simply be less suitable than a mix of BTECs or other options (which usually require a less academic approach to learning and can help a young people keep their options open for longer). 

I do hope, however, that T levels find a place in the choice of provision and do not suffer the fate of so many of the other well-intentioned efforts to create new vocational qualifications. The only vocational qualification that can really be said to have stood the test of time – six decades and counting – are BTECs, which, ironically, the Government wants to scale back. 

A shorter version of this blog was first published as a thread on Twitter on 17th February 2023.

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This week, the Higher Education Policy Institute published a report highlighting the underprovision of specialist careers support for international students. It highlights an important gap in provision, but part of the research involved a survey of international students, few of whom credited their university careers service with having helped them.

With just cause, Mike Grey of Gradconsult took issue with this on Twitter and I recommend his thread below that got me thinking more widely about the credit that careers advisers get – or fail to get – for their work not only in universities, but in schools, colleges and local services.

We’ve all heard – or told – tales about how some careers advisor “told me to be a [insert laughably inappropriate career]”, but people who are helped by careers advice tend never to mention it. Why? Can it be true that careers advice is so wide of the mark? Of course not.

There are multiple cognitive biases here.

For starters, as Mike’s thread shows, there’s a tendency to credit the outcome of a chain of events to the last link, even when the first link is usually more important.

Also, for the sake of our sense of self, we take more personal credit for the choices we make that we consider to have had good outcomes, and we outsource our agency to others when we aren’t so happy about how it turned out.

It’s therefore easy to retrospectively underplay the influence of careers advisers, as Mike describes, even when they have been instrumental in the process.

This effect is exaggerated by the fact that the idea that careers advisers tell anyone what to be is desperately outdated (if indeed it was ever true). Advisers help people explore what they have to offer and want they might want to do in life. They help map pathways that open up opportunities (or that stop them from closing). They help connect people with opportunities that they show an interest in.

What they do not do is puppetry.

The agency – the choice and control – always stays with the ‘client’.

Ensuring that the client feels ownership of their choices and that they came from themselves is an important part of the careers adviser doing their job well. However, in the process, it also means their good work is likely to go unrecognised.

So why the stories about advisers telling people to be secretaries, vicars or podiatrists? My theory is that it may be down to one of four reasons, some cobination of them or even all four together:

1. The memory may not actually be a faithful record of what happened, but rather during the (often frequent) retelling, the myth has taken over the true events.
2. These were mere suggestions on the part of the careers adviser in response to actual interests that the client did mention.
3. Rather than even suggestions, they were part of a wider conversation about avenues that could be explored.
4. The adviser may have been deliberately exploring unlikely options in order to help the client stretch their horizons, consider new possibilities or mark out areas that were of no interest.

Modern careers advice is driven by well established and well evidenced theoretical approaches. It is delivered by excellent practitioners using sophisticated digital tools. The professionals who deliver careers guidance help people to make their lives just as doctors help to save them.

If we want better careers advice, we should back it more and rely on the expertise of professional practitioners. Relatively meagre public investment in careers education, information, advice and guidance will yield huge returns in helping match employers with employees who will be more productive and fulfilled, and it will lower society’s waste of our shared human capital.

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Not a single person has taken a T-level yet and there are still no solutions to the vast challenge of finding enough employer support, but the Department of Education thinks the time is right to axe all alternative vocational qualifications.

Vocational qualifications have long been regarded as the low road of post-16 education compared to the more academic pathway of A levels and university. Too often they’re seen as what you do if you’re ‘not clever enough’, rather than being a positive choice. The most prominent, BTECs, suffer from this self-fulfilling depiction, but are nevertheless an important route into work and/or higher education for many, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds.

We all desperately want vocational qualifications to be regarded as a different and equally valid route, but replacing the tried, tested, popular, but admittedly flawed BTECs with untried, untested, and clearly flawed T-levels is like burning all your clothes because you’ve heard Primark is having a sale next month. What’s going to come along probably won’t be all that great and, in the meantime, you’re naked.

T-levels have been designed with the best of intentions, but many issues surrounding them remain far from solved. We’ve been here before. BTECs, vocational A levels, GNVQs, National Diplomas, and so on and so on – these were all valiant initiatives that didn’t live up to the high hopes when tested by realities. Finding a gold standard for vocational qualifications is a path strewn with bodies. It’s not as if A-levels are a robust gold standard for academic qualifications, so it’s not surprising how much harder it is for a field with an even more battle-worn past.  

The iceberg

For me, the iceberg right in the path of T-levels, whose existence DfE seems reluctant even to acknowledge, is that there just won’t be enough employers willing to provide the necessary 45 days of work experience – even if the government were willing and able to throw money at the issue.

To employers the current offer is this: take on an untrained learner who will soak up management time, but not contribute significantly to your business’s productivity (unless they’re employed in something so menial it gives them no real experiential learning). You’ll get no money or tax breaks for helping out, but it may mean that, at some point in the future, there may be someone better qualified to work for you – or who you have helped train to work for your competitors. This point in the future may be within a couple of years (a long time in business) or, since T-levels are intended to be a better pathway to higher training and education than BTECs, if your contribution works as it should, it may not be until many years from now.

Even the most socially minded employer is likely to prefer to spend their limited resource of time and money supporting the far more attractive proposition of providing apprenticeships instead which provide a faster, more targeted way of plugging their gaps, where they actually employ the learner and dictate many of the terms of their training.

To scale up T-levels to even 10% of post-16 learners (let alone half) will mean employers investing in the additional provision of around 3.5 million days of work experience every year. It’s simply unrealistic to imagine this is going to happen without significant bribery – sorry, I mean financial incentives.

Even if I’m wrong (let’s hope I am) and employers don’t act as they always have in the past, then the provision of T-levels will depend critically on what employers exist within a small radius of where the learner is based and whether they operate in a sector appropriate to the 24 T-level subject areas.

In some areas – big metropolitan centres – there may be plenty of choice, but in the areas where the skills needs are most needed, almost by definition there isn’t an excess of employer capacity to get involved in training. Almost nowhere will be able to offer anything like a full range of T-level choices.  

Even if the government were proposing to throw money at the problem of incentivising existing employers (which they’re not), the problem of incentivising nonexistent ones is not resolved simply with investment.

Without this work experience component, learners can’t pass the T-level so schools and colleges can’t offer the courses without those relationships in pace. Of course, DfE (and the T-level regulator IfATE) could relax or rewrite the rules on whether work experience is strictly necessary and how much, but then T-levels will lose their key point of differentiation. We’d be better off keeping BTECs.

A stormy T-cup

I do understand why DfE thinks that if it allows the continued availability of alternatives to T-levels, then they’re not giving the new qualification every bit of backing that they can. However, I would argue that, if T-levels can’t rise above the competition as attractive and valuable qualifications because they’re genuinely a better choice, then making them the only choice will make them weaker not stronger.

This government is genuinely engaged in trying to solve the problems of ‘the other 50%’ (those who don’t follow academic pathways) and ‘the Cinderella sector’ (further education and technical colleges), but they won’t make vocational education right by making the same mistakes that got us here in the first place. Indeed, the danger – the brick wall towards which they are steering deliberately and at speed – is to undermine the very thing they hope to improve. 

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Prince Philip, whose funeral takes place this weekend, once said, “everything that wasn’t invented by God is invented by an engineer“. He was himself an engineer by training and this pithy line is a favourite among his fellow engineers.

It brilliantly captures the fact that the world around us is largely manufactured and that the genius of engineers comes not only in the process of fabrication, but in hiding the genius involved.

That said, the idea that everything not of the natural world (let’s leave God out of it for now) is the work of engineers is patent nonsense. On my wall is a painting. On my shelves, there are novels. Certainly, engineers are responsible for paints, for paper, for inks, for the printing presses, for computers and for so much else involved in delivering these products to me. But the artworks themselves are surely also something not of the natural world and yet invented? 

Any writer who has had to invent characters, a plot or an elegant turn of phrase knows that ‘invention’ is not the sole preserve of God and engineers.

However, I think this leads us to a better understanding of what engineers really do. Engineers – like God* and artists – are creators.

To me, Philip’s comment belittles artists – albeit unintentionally. Instead of seeing engineering as applied science – or, worse still, fixing broken stuff – we should see engineering as an act of creation akin to the arts.

It was seen that way once upon a time. The relationship between the pure artist, the skilled craftsperson, the experienced artisan and the inventor was regarded as a continuum. We all know that Leonardo da Vinci was all these things, but so too were William Morris and Alec Issigonis. And today, the likes of Grayson Perry or Rachel Whiteread require the skills of their craft as much as James Dyson and Jonathan Ives need artistic vision.

The Duke of Edinburgh was a staunch champion for engineering, but his support failed to abate a crisis in the UK’s engineering skills pipeline. We have an estimated shortfall of 124,000 skilled engineers and technicians every year. The only way that this situation can be resolved is if the perception of engineering among young people – and young women in particular – is radically shifted. 

Children and teens love to create – to build sandcastles, to paint, to play Minecraft or to express themselves through performance. They don’t see a distinction between drawing as ‘artistic’ invention and creating a Lego house as ‘engineering’ invention. Somehow, though, as a society, we beat this out of them, creating the idea that engineering is more about physics and maths than ingenuity and design. 

Young people also care passionately about the problems we face – social challenges, environmental emergencies, sustainability. These are problems that – if humans can ever fix them – it will be through the efforts of, among others, engineers. Engineering offers young people an opportunity not only to be creators, but also to be world-saving superheroes. 

Other countries tend to be better than the UK at never letting their young people lose sight of the creativity in engineering. We must learn to do better too. It is perhaps unfair to say the Duke’s comment inadvertently depicts the world as a place of opposition between humans engineers and natural wonders, but certainly we need to regard our human power to create – both beauty and design – as something that is not only in harmony with nature, but an active part of it.  

* Or natural processes, depending on your religious perspective. I reference God because the Duke did. 

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What links oxbow lakes, metacognition and employability skills? We’ll get to that shortly. 

But first, if you want to know what works in creating social opportunity through education, you’d be hard pressed to find a better expert than Lee Elliot Major, former chief executive of The Sutton Trust and now Exeter University’s professor of social mobility.

Yesterday he gave a lecture at the Institute of Education (well, virtually) in which one slide pretty much summed up the toolkit produced by the Education Endowment Foundation and the content of his own book (with co-author Steve Higgins) What Works.  (Thanks to Lee for permission to use the slide below.)

I am delighted to see metacognition making an appearance as not only highly effective, but highly cost-effective too. Indeed, along with feedback (the two need to go hand in hand), these are the most cost-effective tools in the teachers’ box.

As anyone who has heard me talk about oxbow lakes knows, I have long been a metacognition fan.

I promise, I’ll get to the relevance of oxbow lakes in a moment, but first, what is ‘metacognition’? I’m sure there are more complex explanations, but I think of it as knowing what you’re learning. It is an awareness of the subject such that the pupil can learn deliberately, consciously, and with an understanding that they are learning, what they are learning and perhaps even why they are learning. 

So why oxbow lakes? The National Curriculum for Key Stage 2 Geography requires students to learn about river erosion and so, basically, by the age of 11, English kids are officially expected to have learnt about them.

Strangely however, we don’t require children to lean about many things of potentially more practical use – such as Facebook privacy settings, pensions or laundry labels.

I’m sure oxbow lakes are important to some people, but it’s not like they’re a critical piece of knowledge for the next generation (and those those who do need the knowledge could acquire it later), so why do we demand pupils learn about them?

Well, I love oxbow lakes. I don’t think this is useless knowledge at all. After all, they teach pupils about time travel.

From one data point in the landscape, you can deduce what that landscape looked like thousands of years ago or predict how it will look like in a thousand years time.

By understanding the processes at work in forming an oxbow lake, you can see problems before they happen and even develop solutions to prevent those problems.

This is what we’re really teaching when we teach about oxbow lakes: analytical skills.

Analytical skills are key skills – useful in every walk of life. Definitely more important than laundry labels.

The problem is, we don’t tell pupils that that’s what they’re learning. We tell them it’s Geography.

How much more effectively would pupils develop the analytical skills if we made the learning explicit and deliberate? Metacognition, innit?

Embedding metacognition can be as simple as saying upfront that we’re about to practice some analytical skills and, to do it, we’re going to use the example of oxbow lakes. Sadly, our education system is not designed to encourage that.

We also need to build in reflection on – and feedback about – those skills after they’ve been exemplified and, obviously, we need to reapply them in different contexts in order to develop them further ensuring they are transferable.

If each time we develop those skills, we do so consciously – metacognitively – the connections will be made in the pupils’ minds.

The oxbow lake example is my perennial response to pupils who ask “Why am I learning this? I’m never going to need to know this?”

The answer is always to think more clearly about what we really learn when we learn.

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In my last blog post, I mentioned that I’d got into a correspondence with teacher and author Matt Pinkett about whether young people – especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds – should aspire to university.

Matt suggested that perhaps young people should set their sights on the career they want and, if they can’t make serious progress towards it as they leave school, then they should consider university as a back-up – a ‘failsafe’, as he called it. 

After our previous discussions, he asked what I thought about this. This was my response (with a few edits to make it a blog more than a email to Matt)…

I don’t think I agree with the idea of university as a ‘failsafe’, although I’m still not sure I understand what you intend by the word. So I’m going to use Matt Pinkett’s line: ‘Aim for whatever you want to do, and if you don’t get it, well, at least you can go to university.’ That assumes that whatever you want to do won’t be best achieved by going to uni.

Obviously, university is not the best route for everything or for everyone, but for the vast majority of the best paid and most secure jobs, it is – if not a prerequisite – at least a head start.

The evidence is pretty clear: on average, uni helps everyone regardless of background, earn more in life and have other benefits such as health and happiness. It doesn’t eliminate the social advantages some were born with, but it does narrow the gap a bit.

For many students with disadvantage, higher education is not only transformative, it is almost the only thing that could ever have provided them with that transformation. On average, uni would be the right thing to do, if you are able and so minded. 

However, the sticking point there is ‘on average’. There are some people whom it won’t suit or for whom it further their aspirations. I never try to persuade people to go to uni, but I do try to outline the advantages – and disadvantages – so they can make an informed choice for themselves. You need to consider the individual. All guidance should be ‘Person first’. Or, more to the point, the person should consider their individual needs for themselves.

Rather than ‘aim for what you want to do’, I tend to think about ‘what do you want to be’.

For all of us, the answer to that is that we want to be happy. What happiness means to each of us and what will bring that happiness is different (and changes over time), but it might involve earning a lot (however much ‘a lot’ might be); it might be fame, security, a work:life balance, a family, power, a sense of doing something worthwhile etc. Each of us has a set of rewards we want in life and each career has the potential to deliver a different set of rewards. Finding a career that delivers the set you want is half the journey.

The other half is to be able to offer to that career the skillset that the employer will want. Just as each career offers a different reward set, each one demands a different skillset. If you don’t have the suitable skillset, the job might be a good match for you, but you’re not a good match for it.  

It’s worth unpacking what that skillset actually is. It’s not just skills, but broad ‘employability’. Employability comprises the following in no particular order:

(1) Skills:
(a) Hard skills, ie job specific skills, such as welding if you want to be a welder;
(b) Soft skills, ie transferable skills, such as communication, team work or numeracy, which are all useful in any job, albeit to varying degrees.

(2) Knowledge, some of which is specific to the job (eg. a surgeon’s understanding of anatomy), but much of it is broader (although to some extent, this comes up in (4) below)

(3) Character, which comprises attitude, behaviours and personality (and includes important traits like grit, resilience and a growth mindset, but also determination, politeness and amiability).  

(4) Social capital, or how society perceives your intrinsic value (based on class, age, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, height, accent, use of the right fork, etc). This is the often unwelcome component of employability because it explains why Boris Johnson gets to be Prime Minister with a record of being repeatedly sacked when anyone from a disadvantaged background wouldn’t have been given a second chance. We cannot ignore social capital though, if only to recognise that, in order to make it matter less, you need to ensure you have all the other components in overwhelming supply. There are also things that one can do to build social capital – most importantly, the wider knowledge is key to this and not in a bad way.

Although these four components comprise ‘employability’, actually we are talking about something far broader than merely producing career fodder. We’re talking about creating rounded people: someone with a full complement of the four components is well equipped for making a life, not just a living.

What role does university play in any of this? It’s easy to see that disadvantaged students might start out with even more limited employability than more affluent students. University explicitly sets out to build knowledge and often hard skills too. It builds soft skills, although it tends to do this implicitly. It builds social capital through exposure to a wider cross-section of society, establishing networks and broadening horizons. It might also build character, but it is arguable whether it does so better than the ‘university of life’. In any case, research shows that disadvantaged students tend to have a lower propensity to take advantage of many of the character-building opportunities (such as extra-curricular activities) that uni might offer. This is often down to money, circumstances and habits formed in school.

When you look at it like this, you can see how uni builds employability into a quality some researchers have called ‘graduateness’, which is clearly prized by employers.

So, should uni be a failsafe or a first option? As I said, it has to be down to the individual and the gap between their skillset and that required by the career that might fulfil their reward set.

Critical to this is the questions of ‘if not uni, then what?’ Around 50% of school-leavers do not go to university. Most go into jobs (usually just ‘jobs’, rather than ‘careers’). A few go into apprenticeships, training or other non-higher education. Too many become NEETs (Not in Education, Employment or Training). There’s not a sufficiently good other pathway (although there absolutely should be) and, unless there is a better option, university must surely look attractive to anyone with the grades and willingness to spend longer in education.

Degree apprenticeships are a decent option, but they are few and far between, fairly limited in the choice of jobs, and subject to many of the same prejudices against the disadvantaged that exist at any level of employment.

I haven’t touched here on the fact that uni is an expensive option. It is. And I believe the student/graduate’s contribution to the cost is disproportionate. (In fact, I have proposed an alternative system of funding.) That said, uni is pretty much free at the point of entry and you only pay when you earn a decent wage. In that sense, cost should not be seen as a barrier, although it might be seen as an impediment.

I agreed with Matt Pinkett that he could also publish my comments on his own blog which can be found at All Ears. I’m really grateful to him for what’s been – for me at least – an interesting discussion.

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My policy paper for the HEPI think tank was published yesterday proposing that employers contribute directly to the cost of higher education. 

Here’s a quick and dirty round up of some of the coverage.

• Here’s a link to the paper itself as published by HEPI
• Here’s a longer version with a more detailed argument and commentary on potential objections.
• A blog I wrote about it on this site. 
• A piece I wrote about it for the Times Higher Education (subscription).
• Another one on Wonkhe.
• This week’s Wonkhe Weekly podcast where I talked about it (among other topics), episode 10.
• Interview on BBC Radio 5 Live.
• Interview on TalkRadio.
• Article on BBC website.
• Article on the i.
• Another article on the i.
• Article in The Times (subscription).
• Article in FE News.
• Article in Media FHE. 
• Interview on RT.
• Response blog by Alan Simpson of Million+.
• Another response blog by HEPI’s Hugo Dale-Harris.
• A response from UCU.

I’m sure there are others out there and will be more (The Guardian will be doing something next week), but that’ll do for now.

You may also be interested in:  

• Fairer funding: achieving the impossible

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Read Fairer funding: the case for a graduate levy (HEPI Policy Note) and, exclusively on this site, Fairer funding: the case for a graduate levy (full proposal).

What I’d like for Christmas:

1. We should abolish tuition fees.
2. We should fund English universities well enough that they can continue to be among the best in the world.
3. We should match graduates and jobs so that they have the right skills to get jobs they want and succeed in them.
4. We should ensure that the nation’s skills gaps are plugged. 
5. We shouldn’t ask the taxpayer to pay for more than the public benefit of higher education. 

Is that really such a big ask? Over decades of fiddling with the funding system for higher education in England, apparently so. That’s because some of my wishes are seen as mutually exclusive.  

The funding of higher education England has been played like a game in which if one player wins, another must lose. For example, if students win and don’t have to pay so much, then the taxpayer loses and has to fork out more.

More usually over the past 30 years, it’s the student who’s lost: the burden of cost has shifted consistently to the student, first through student loans in 1991, then top-up loans, then fees of £1,000, then top-up fees of £3,000 and then, in 2012, a trebling of fees to £9,000. 

The funding system is under review at the moment by Philip Augar at the behest of the Prime Minister (as she is at the time of writing). Leaks suggest the balance may swing back away from the student, but the cost will fall instead on either the taxpayer or on universities in the form of slashed  funding. 

However, there is another player in the game, keeping his gambit very quiet in the hope of not being noticed: the employers. 

For too long employers have escaped making a fair contribution. They would, of course, argue that they do contribute through corporate tax and through salaries (which, on average, are higher for graduates). 

That’s true, but this approach leaves them without any skin in the game. They’re not making their investment work for them. 

I have written a paper for the HE sector’s think tank, the Higher Education Policy Institute on how employers could and should pay a ‘graduate levy’ instead of graduates paying fees. This needn’t cost the employers more and, critically, it would mean they get what they need from higher education far better than at present. 

In the process, it would also eliminate tuition fee debt. It would improve courses and graduate employability. And sure enough, it would fund universities well while costing the taxpayer less.

It sounds too good to be true, so please make up your own mind by reading the HEPI paper or I have also produced, exclusively for this website, an expanded version of the full proposal which also includes fuller explanations and counter-arguments to some objections that have been raised with me in discussion.   

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