Education and Skills Bill

I support the amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris. I shall speak to Amendments Nos. 3, 5 and 6, which are in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Walmsley. As the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, mentioned, these amendments take us straight to the issue of compulsion, which is the central feature of the Bill. The preference on these Benches is that, rather than compulsion, there should be an entitlement to two years’ further education and training. This will be spelt out at some length when my noble friend Lady Walmsley addresses the next group of amendments. Nevertheless, at this point we should reflect on the extensive debate in the Commons on these issues. It is clear that, although we differ as to how this should be delivered, all parties agree, as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, said, that it is in the country’s interests that young people aged 17 and 18 should participate in education and training. The question is: what is the best way of securing this? The lengthy debates in the Commons clearly indicated that the Government believe that by 2013—which is the year in which the first element of compulsion comes into force and young people will have to stay in education and training until they are 17—90 per cent of young people will be staying voluntarily in school or working in a job that provides them with the requisite training as a result of the reforms that are currently going through in the 14 to 19 curriculum and through the new initiatives on apprenticeships. The key element to which this Bill is addressed is the 10 per cent, the NEET group who are not currently in education, employment or training. They are the hard core; many of these young people have dropped out of school long before the age of 16 and live in a shadow-world of odd jobs, drugs and petty crime. Many of them are illiterate or barely literate. They dropped out because they have not been able to keep up. Very frequently this is because they cannot read and write. Because they cannot read they do not understand properly and they find, particularly when they go into secondary school at the age of 11, that it is extremely difficult to cope with the curriculum. It is generally agreed that one of the reasons why we have such a low participation rate in this country as compared to all other advanced, industrialised countries, is that our secondary school curriculum does not motivate 50 per cent of the pupils. We are well aware of the reforms that the Government are making to that curriculum. We hope that they will be successful and that we shall see this natural increase in participation. But it is questionable whether compulsion is the right way to encourage this hard core of young people, who very frequently have dropped out of school at the age of 14 or 15. I turn to the group of amendments before us. There is an anomaly. Young people at 16 are now regarded as being old enough to go into the Army, pay taxes, get married, have sex and be parents. They are no longer tied to their parents’ apron strings. My party and, indeed, the Government are very keen that we should give these young people a chance to practise the citizenship lessons that they have been receiving at school and give them the right to vote. Is it right, therefore, that we do not give them a choice over what sort of education they have and when they take that education? Is the sledgehammer approach, as David Laws, our education spokesman in the other place, called it in his deliberations on the Bill, the correct one? This set of amendments is exploring two things: first, the anomalies that arise and secondly, the fourth option. The amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, picks up on some of these anomalies. It addresses those with full-time caring responsibilities, those who are parents of children under five, those who are engaged in full-time voluntary work—I will come back to that in a moment—and those with an illness requiring significant medical attention or a terminal illness, and so forth. Amendment No. 3 concerns the issue of sport. Those who take their sport seriously are, by the age of 16, frequently spending more or less all their time in what might be called a sporting apprenticeship. If we are trying to train new champions for Wimbledon or to coach a generation who will bring us some gold medals in the Olympics, these super-athletes are going to have to spend a lot of time in sporting activities. Will they be excluded from the requirements of the Bill? In Amendment No. 6, we have gone for a parent of a child under the age of one, rather than under the age of five, as the Conservatives have. We endorse the amendments tabled by the Conservatives in relation to both terminal illness and full-time caring arrangements. I turn to Amendment No. 5, which is concerned with what might be called the fourth option—voluntary activities. Some extremely interesting sessions were held at the beginning of the Committee stage in the other place when a large number of organisations presented evidence to the Members. Among those organisations were Barnardo’s, the Prince’s Trust and Fairbridge, which deals particularly with the 10 per cent of young people in the NEET group. At Second Reading I quoted some of the recommendations made by these bodies in those Committee sessions. We have to accept that these voluntary bodies are much more successful than schools or colleges at helping young people get back into employment and education. They stressed what a long-term exercise it is. This is where Amendment No. 5 comes in. It provides that if young people are engaged in voluntary work for more than 20 hours a week, which might well be under the auspices of one of these organisations, they should not be involved in the compulsory element. Amendment No. 5 puts forward a fourth option: there is a way forward that does not have to be within the education sector or training for accredited qualifications, an issue we shall pick up later. These are important issues and broadly speaking we support the amendment introduced by the Opposition.