Education and Skills Bill

Perhaps I had better explain. I cannot do better than to refer to the last speech of the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, when he described how accreditation would work. He said that the LSC would fund the courses that it approved of but, if it was appropriate for someone to have a parenting course, that money would have to come out of other funds that the local authority had available to it. That is exactly the problem with accreditation as it runs now. There is presumably, when the Minister puts the LSC's budget together, the thought that it will be providing education for all these 16 to 18 year-olds and that is how that budget is calculated. So there is, at least notionally, a pot of money available there for every 16 to 18 year-old. But, if that 16 to 18 year-old ought not to be following one of the courses that the LSC chooses to fund, it has to persuade somebody else, out of some other hard-pressed budget, to spare the money necessary to fund that course, while the money that is in the LSC budget gets used for other purposes. That seems entirely inappropriate. If you have a system that is carefully determining what is right for a particular young person and you have a pot of money that is available to fund whatever is right for that particular young person, the two should coincide. It is therefore important that the local authority, as the person making the decision at the end of the day on what it is prepared to sign up to as being right for the young person, should be able to use the money which has in effect been allocated to that young person by central government for the purposes that are right for the young person and not be bound by whatever prejudices and fashions sway the Learning and Skills Council at that particular moment.