Education and Skills Bill

In response to Amendment No. 16, we absolutely acknowledge that we could not require all young people to participate in education and training until we believe there is a suitable route available for them in every area of the country; and this is already built into the policy and the legislation. That is precisely why we are not raising the participation age until 2013 for 17 year-olds and 2015 for 18 year-olds when the national entitlement to the new diplomas and the apprenticeship guarantee will be in place and the foundation learning tier for provision at entry and level 1 will be established. Furthermore, the September guarantee, which was implemented for the first time in every local area last year, guarantees an offer of a suitable learning place to all young people leaving year 11. This year it will be extended to 17 year olds. In respect of planning, the Learning and Skills Council currently has a duty to ensure appropriate provision for all 16 to 19 year-olds. This role includes preparing assessments of the sufficiency of education and training in an area, assessing demand from young people, and planning provision to meet that demand. In March, we published a White Paper which set out our intentions for transferring the funding and responsibility for commissioning provision for 16 to 19 year-olds from the LSC to local authorities. So in future, assessing the sufficiency of provision will become the role of the local authority, which we believe is best placed to make these judgments, which would, under the amendment, fall to central government. We believe it is appropriate that these judgments should be made by local authorities, which, of course, are the strategic commissioners of provision in their areas. We agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, in respect of her Amendment No. 17, that it will be crucial to successful implementation that participation is as high as possible immediately prior to the new compulsory requirements coming into effect. All our policies that I have described, including the learning agreements and activity agreements that we discussed in the previous group of amendments, are geared to that end. I am in danger of repeating myself, but the latest statistics show that post-16 participation rates are at their highest level ever and are very encouraging: 90.8 per cent of young people currently participate at 16, the first year after compulsory schooling, up from 87 per cent last year; 78.4 per cent of 17 year-olds were participating in education and work-based learning in 2007—up by 1.5 percentage points over the year. The proportion of young people not in education, employment or training has fallen substantially at all three ages and the proportion of 16 and 17 year-olds has declined from 8 per cent to 7.2 per cent. While we are making good and steady progress towards the 90 per cent participation rate, it would not make sense to link the commencement of the duty on young people to the publication of reports and data, which would inevitably lead to confusion and uncertainty about what the requirement means and precisely when it will come into effect. We believe that we must balance the improvements in train and the judgments we make about the follow-through effects during the next five to seven years, with the need for certainty about what will happen and when, which all of those engaged in planning will require—not least the young people themselves and their parents. Making that judgment about getting the balance right between the need for certainty in the system and ensuring that we have the improvements in train necessary to achieve our objective has led us to setting 2013 and 2015 respectively as the dates for increasing the education ages to 17 and 18. To repeat myself, when it comes to enforcement, that is subject to the requirement in Clause 39 that local authorities should have regard to reasonable excuses. As I said in the letter, which I once again promise to circulate to Members of the Committee, on 9 June, on what could constitute reasonable excuses, it could be that, "““if a particular learning difficulty has been identified and the right support to address it is not yet secured or in place, it would be reasonable to expect that the young person could not begin their learning programme until that support was in place””." If we take into account the measures in train to meet the fuller range of learning needs, the evidence of increased participation at the moment and the enhanced role for local authorities to plan locally with the provisions in the Bill, which give a proper balance between compulsion and reasonable excuses for not participating, we believe that the dates of 2013 and 2015 are appropriate.