Education and Skills Bill

My Lords, this Bill threatens to become the Terminal 5 of the education world: wonderful in every way except that it does not work. It does not work because the people have not been trained and the systems are not in place. Although it will not be baggage being lost, it will be children who are failed, or continue to be failed as they are at the moment. An illustration of the problem is what the Minister said about diplomas, that they will offer extensive work-related experience which turns out to be 10 days. That is what students doing GCSE and A-level get at the moment. This is not a successful vocational system because it is not being taken carefully enough. We have not put the employer side of it properly into place. We have got to take these things at the pace at which they naturally develop if we want to make a success of them. The Bill has been written from a centralising, symptoms-focused, punitive point of view when it ought to be flexible, local, imaginative and supportive. Above all, it ought to recognise that in 16 to 18 year- olds we are dealing with people who are becoming responsible for their own lives and ought to be treated as responsible people. Among the people we are most focused on will be the likes of teenage mothers, Travellers and people who have been failed by the educational system. All these groups require specialist, focused and understanding provision. You cannot try to hit them with more of the same that they have fallen out of or lost interest in or that is not focused on them. I have seen examples of how this can go wrong in the prison system. Some while ago prison education was taken over by DCSF. The department has no one in it who has any experience of working in prisons. It has subcontracted a lot of the work to the Learning and Skills Council, which is similarly ill equipped to understand what goes on in prisons. A lot of specialist work has been done on how to reengage prisoners. As has been said, many of them have completely dropped out of the education system, hate the idea of sitting in a classroom and require to be re-motivated. Much of that specialist work, a lot of it done by the voluntary sector—my wife is involved in this side of things—has gone by the board because the LSC will only fund standard qualifications aimed at employment. If you have a criminal record, employment is immensely difficult to get. Prison is an immense impediment to overcome when you are looking for work. You need a strong motivation and an understanding of your own abilities to get through that. Not to equip prisoners with that—not to give them back a basic place within their own family and society—is a fault that is developing in prison education because of a centralisation, a lack of understanding and a lack of appreciation about what can be done at a local level. A lot of these people who end up outside education are just teenagers. They got bored with it and want to do other things. They are not focused on education. They need space and time. That is what the gap year evolved for, to give pupils a breather, but some kids need that earlier on. We ought to be allowing these children to come back to education at their own pace—looking after them, keeping in touch with them as the Bill proposes, but giving them space. It should be enough to get where they ought to be in education by the age of 25 if they have been doing useful things before that. By extension, we ought to be happy to see people taking several years out before university so that when they come back to education they come back to a course that they really want to do, are motivated to do and are actually going to work at, rather than spending time in the bars and clubs, as is advertised by many universities at the moment. There is a lot to be said for taking this whole business more gently. In Committee I will focus on trying to find ways of making the Bill more flexible and allowing room for the voluntary sector to get involved and to be innovative. I will try to make sure that the local authorities’ role is supportive and that we do not let them get back into running things, as the Government have rightly had as a policy aim. The local authority should be there as a friend of the pupil, trying to make sure that he develops his life right, rather than as a provider itself. The idea of individual budgets is constructive in that respect. Money should be attached to the pupil and spent in any way that the local authority considers useful taking regard of the requirements of that pupil. Why should the local authority’s options be restricted by what some central body has said is appropriate for children in general? These will often be specific cases. I will certainly oppose making non-attendance a criminal offence. There are lots of things that are good for us. It is good for us to play sport, and you are supposed to play sport at school; but once you are an adult, I am jolly glad to say that you are not criminalised if you do not do so. It is entirely inappropriate that we should seek to criminalise not doing something just because it is good for you to do it. Again, this comes back to the DCSF’s lack of experience in these matters. It does not realise how problematic it is to get employment once you have a criminal record. It will absolutely blow a hole below the water line in those kids’ prospects if they have a criminal record. That is not the way to help people under any circumstances whatever. I shall join my noble friends on the Front Bench in opposing that. I do not know whether I shall be as enthusiastic as those on my Front Bench about removing Part 4; but I want to understand what it is about. I have not seen anything anywhere that explains to me what advantages the Government see in the changes that they are proposing regarding independent schools. As has been said, the system seems to be working well at the moment, and the changes are not in themselves obviously logical. I do not necessarily believe that independent schools are perfect in all respects, but the Government need to show the benefits of the changes that they are proposing to themselves, to the wider community and to independent schools. I shall look carefully at what is being proposed for the Careers Service, which frankly has been a laughing stock for many years. The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, said that she wants it to break gender stereotypes; it does that to a certain extent. My son went through one of the processes to be told that he should be a beautician. He is a great deal larger than I am and would make an imposing person behind the nail varnish. Most of all, I hope that we—particularly my Front Bench, but perhaps also the Liberal Democrats, who might hope that in 2010 this endless game of piggy in the middle that they have been playing will end and they will catch the ball at last—will recognise the importance of getting this right and that we will learn through the discussions that we have in Committee and later what it is that we would do if we were given the chance. I absolutely support my noble friend Lord Pilkington in talking about specialist vocational colleges. They would be centres of innovation and centres of excellence that would be able to do far more in advancing the cause of vocational education than could ever be done by central diktat. We always suspect what comes out of the centre, but where we have individual schools and colleges leading the way, we are prepared to admire and to follow. They would fit so easily in the academies programme. As happened in West Dunbartonshire, once you have some real examples of what can be done for children to inspire them and to lead them in that direction, there would be a large number of people who wanted to follow. That would solve a problem that we have all faced unsuccessfully for a very long time.