Education and Skills Bill

I am glad to have the opportunity to spell out more fully our position on accreditation, because, as ever, it is too complex to be reduced to a few sentences, as I was trying to do in our earlier debates. I shall then deal with the threshold between part-time and full-time. All part-time education and training needs to be accredited to qualify under the Bill, because it is important that young people gain qualifications to help them progress in their career. It is important, too, as a guarantor of quality, because employers could otherwise offer any education and training regardless of the quality, and it would count without there being any external check on the process. However, full-time education and training under Clause 4 does not have to lead towards an accredited qualification, because we wish to allow for other categories of education that might be provided, including home education, independent school education—as the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, keeps reminding me, they do not have to offer just accredited qualifications—and non-formal education. In practice, the Learning and Skills Council funds mainly accredited learning, but other forms of learning may be publicly funded through other local authority funding streams. That may include, for example, the parenting classes about which we spoke earlier. It is possible for parenting classes funded by local authorities not to be accredited but still to attract local authority funding. Developments such as the foundation learning tier and entry to learning will make it easier to get good, non-formal learning programmes recognised and publicly funded. I hope that that clarifies more fully the position on accreditation. Why have we set the bar at 20 hours? More than 90 per cent of young people who say that they work full time as their main activity work for more than 20 hours. Some 93 per cent of those who say that they work part time while studying full time work for 20 hours or fewer. Taking those two factors into account, 20 hours seemed to us the right threshold. By contrast, if we had drawn the line for full-time work at 16 hours, as suggested by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, it would catch around 15 per cent of those who study full time and work part time. So it was on the basis of what we regarded as a reasonable assessment of the impact of existing patterns of working and studying that we introduced the threshold that we did. I should mention that, with one day a week in training, work plus training would occupy most of a young person’s week—around four days—at the 20-hour threshold. If the threshold was much lower than this, the young person would not be occupied for most of their time and it would reduce the potential benefits. We have taken all those factors into account when deciding that the 20 hours was an appropriate threshold.