Education and Skills Bill

I understand the Minister’s difficulty with bad employers who might wish to claim that time spent at home thinking about the job qualified within the 280 hours, but I am appalled at the idea that private study is not a properly accredited part of learning. Most people in the second year of the sixth form would have much less than 280 hours of anything that would qualify as guided in the very strict sense which the Minister meant. Much of what people do in their final year in school—particularly if they are doing only three A-levels, as many young people are—is guided private study in the sense that they have been told which books to read and where to go. I speak as one who comes from the humanities rather than the laboratory end of the scale and I know that a tremendous amount of real learning—in fact, the best learning—happens when one is in private study. I am appalled by the idea that it would not count. I taught for many years in American universities where one assumed that for every hour spent in the classroom there would be three hours of private study, leading to accreditation and credits. One did one’s teaching and lecturing on the basis that the students would have at least three hours of private study time either before or after the lecture. I am shocked at the idea that properly structured private study time will not count. Rather than excluding private study time, we need a better definition of properly structured and guided private study time.