Education and Skills Bill

My Lords, I join other speakers who have recognised the skill and the clarity with which my noble friend the Minister outlined the Bill. I am not sure that the Bill is ambitious but its direction of travel—where it wants us to go—is extremely ambitious. The goal of having all our young people stay in education or training up to the age of 18 was aspired to in 1917, as we have been told, and we will be the generation which achieves it. However, this Second Reading debate is one of the most unusual that I have come across. I respectfully say that I have never known so many speakers talk about matters that are not included in the Bill. However, I am about to do the same. I say gently that the Minister did exactly the same. For about a third of his speech he talked about things that were not in the Bill. That is what is strange about the Bill; it makes sense only if you look at it in conjunction with all the work that has been done on raising standards, the EMA, the changing curriculum, the diplomas and improved staff skills. If it never passed into law, education for 14 to 19 year-olds would go on improving. It is an unusual Bill but its direction of travel is ambitious when considered in conjunction with other work that is being done in this area. The Bill’s main provision concerns compulsion. I suspect that if the Government had not decided to make that a central part of their strategy for 14 to 19 year-olds, the Bill would not have been introduced this year. There are two points of view on the matter. Some noble Lords say that enforcement may be the only thing that will work for some people whereas others say that everything may work apart from enforcement. Therefore, the debate on enforcement is very polarised. Both arguments have merit. There is no doubt that persuasion is better than compulsion. However, imposing criminal sanctions on 16, 17 and 18 year-olds who do not attend school is a strange notion. It is nonsensical to introduce a law without providing a means of enforcing it. However, if people do not engage with this measure despite all we have done and you want to keep 16 to 18 year-olds in school, the administrative solution is to introduce compulsion. Therefore, I can see both sides of the argument and why people arrive at the conclusions that they do. I am not convinced that easy answers can be found by changing the curriculum. I do not think that an easy solution can be found as regards vocational work, diplomas, the quality of teaching or anything else. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, that the matter is far more complicated than that. However, I have concerns about the details of compulsion. I am concerned not so much about whether this is an illiberal Bill but about whether it is workable. I am concerned about the shift from attendance being the parent’s responsibility at the end of year 11 to it being the student’s responsibility at the start of year 12. That is a huge shift in a six-week period. I am not sure how you prepare the type of young people we are talking about to face up to and come to terms with that responsibility. I am in favour of criminal sanctions being imposed on people who do not send their children to school. Your actions should not jeopardise your child’s ability and right to succeed. However, I am less convinced about the imposition of criminal sanctions on people when their actions affect only their own chances. That is a confusing issue but the thing that causes me most concern is the procedure for enforcing this measure. If we wish to be fair, to impose a sanction as a last resort, and, we hope, never to have to impose it at all, there should be opportunities to get the young person back on board at every stage of the process. We are dependent on teachers informing the Connexions service if there is a problem. That service informs the local authority and therein lies a story and possible delay. The child has to be warned, notice has to be given about attendance and an appeal panel has to be set up. If that does not resolve the issue, notice has to be given that a penalty may be imposed. Then notice has to be given for an appeal. At the end of that process the Youth Court may become involved. There is nothing wrong with that. It is a perfectly respectable process whereby we ensure that the measure is implemented. However, my difficulty is that the aim of staying in education or training between the ages of 16 and 18 should be to route a young person into lifelong learning. It is not just about education and training between the ages of 16 and 18 but about not letting young people drop out in those years and never getting back throughout their adult lives. However, as regards the robustness of the enforcement process, I am not sure that if you get young people back into education or training between the ages of 16 and 18 you will necessarily help them to commit themselves to lifelong learning beyond the age of 18. Like the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, I am very undecided on the matter. The Minister said that if you want the end you have to will the means, but both sides of the argument that have been put forward have strengths and weaknesses. However, we might look at two or three other matters before we make a decision on which avenue we go down. I wonder whether we fully understand what goes on in the minds of 16 to 18 year-olds who choose to disengage with learning. It has been said that in the past few years we have made tremendous progress in encouraging people to stay on in education or training beyond the age of 16. However, we are still nearly at the bottom of the OECD table so there is nothing to boast about. The NEET tables show striking regional variations. In the south-east 5.6 per cent of 16 to 18 year-olds are NEET. In Yorkshire and Humber the figure is 9.2 per cent. In the north-east, which has the highest percentage of NEETs, the figure is 10.5 per cent. In the north-east twice as many young people are NEET than in the south-east. If the performance of the worst-performing region could be made to match that of the best-performing region, 6,000 fewer students in the north-east would be in the NEET category. Nationally that would mean a NEET rate of something like 94 or 95 per cent, which on my calculation puts us in the top 10 to 15 per cent of the OECD range. So, if we could get the worse performing region to be at the level of the best, we would have a take-up rate of 95 per cent. On the difference between the south-east and the north-east, I do not for a minute think that teachers are better in the south-east than in the north-east, that there are better and more motivated 16 to 18 year-olds, or that there is a more exciting curriculum or a more engaging support system. The difference is that in the north-east there is a higher level of unemployment, more jobs with fewer skills and more parents and adult who have not been to university. Surely that has something to do with it. In the north-east you are not surrounded by people who talk about jobs needing a high level of skill; people in the north-east, Yorkshire and Humberside are more recently in touch through their parents with the death of the old manufacturing industries and less in touch with the birth, growth and expansion of the new industries that need a high skill. I should like the Government to look at that. Perhaps that is not an enforcement issue; perhaps it is a regional economic issue. Because of that one thing, what very much surprised me is that the department does not publish or collect NEET information on either a regional or a local authority basis. It has to rely on the Connexions data, which uses a different set of criteria from the Government in the Labour Force Survey published in the Statistical First Release. Therefore, is this not a regional economic issue, and how can the Government address this without having to hand regional figures on what NEETs are? We could do more in our school system to give a very clear signal that children do not leave school at 16. Why do we have GCSEs? GCSEs were a school leaving examination. That is why they are published in the tables. That is why mums and dads are very keen on what their kids do. That is the history of them. As long as we have at the end of year eleven the biggest, most important exam that a child has taken since the day they were born, children will get the message that they can leave school. Indeed, we still talk about whether a 16 year-old will stay on whereas the Americans talk about whether a 16 year- old will drop out. While we have what is an important school leaving exam and while we have education from five to 11, 11 to 16 and 16 to 18, we will have a structural problem in giving that message to young people.