Education and Skills Bill

We are back to a couple of themes we discussed on the last day. One is the need to have great flexibility for the local authority to decide what particular pattern of education is appropriate to any individual young person. You cannot specify these things from the centre. You are dealing with individual difficulty, character and circumstance. There has to be flexibility within an overall responsibility to allow the form of education provided to fit the case. You are dealing, in a lot of circumstances, with people who are not at level 2. They are somewhere around level zero and have developed nothing but bad habits in the course of their education. They have ended up extremely averse to formal education and have great gaps and inadequacies in their knowledge. They have developed social habits which make them unemployable, like not turning up on time for anything or usage of language and methods of behaviour which would be likely to result in an early termination of employment—if they ever got any. These things have to be dealt with in the course of the two years, if these young people are to become useful members of the workforce and society and to enjoy themselves as they should. These things are not dealt with by accredited courses. This business of accreditation has become a method of control—I know things have changed— and the QCA and related organisations control what should be taught and allowed. It comes back again to an issue I have raised previously. One of the difficulties in the Prison Service is that there are no level zero accredited programmes available for PSHE and related areas or all the work that goes on in the arts. You somehow have to graft a bit of literacy or numeracy onto your arts programme in order to get an accreditation to go with it. There seems to be a belief that you can take these people at the bottom—they are absolutely flat on the floor—and make them employable by giving them a GSCE. First you have to get them to take an interest in education. That will take an unaccredited course of some kind—at least unaccredited under the present system. Accreditation in terms of putting academic hurdles into the qualifications should not be there. You are not trying to evaluate what these people have done, you are just trying to get them started. Secondly, a system which is so rigid and based on accreditation is never going to work in the sort of environment that particular young people want to be in. There are all sorts of ways to get educated when you are that age. Experience comes in all kinds of forms. As my noble friend Lady Perry has said, a lot can be provided through an employer who is dedicated to looking after the young people in their charge. They are not going to want to leap through the hoops. How long is it taking a professional organisation like Cambridge Assessment to get one of their exams through? An employer will not go through that for their own in-house experience. There has to be some way in which following such a course is allowed. The right way to do that is surely to allow a local authority discretion. It should get to know what is available locally, what the results are when young people go through that course, and that should become an available option for them. If something is much bigger than that, or national, perhaps accreditation is appropriate. One way or another, we have to approach this with great flexibility and understanding, and not try to cram these young people into a framework devised essentially for the other 90 per cent, but not them.