Education and Skills Bill

moved Amendment No. 53: 53: Clause 10, page 5, line 40, at end insert— ““( ) The duty in subsection (1) applies to all such persons who are under the supervision of the local authority youth offending team, including those in custody.”” The noble Baroness said: We now move with this group of amendments to Clause 10, which imposes a duty on local authorities to implement the main requirements of the Bill. Theirs is the responsibility to identify and chase up all those young people aged 16 and 17 who are not in school or in college, or in work with training, and to ensure that they are either in a job which includes the requisite training element or that they are helped to get back into education or a job with training. Theirs is the responsibility to find the mentors to counsel these young people with complex needs and to act as their advocates if they stray from the designated path. Theirs, too, is the responsibility to set up the individualised learning programmes to suit the needs of these young people. Amendment No. 53 reminds local authorities that they also have the responsibility to look to the education and training needs of young people who are in the care of youth offending teams or in custody. During the passage through this House of the Children and Young Persons Bill earlier this year, we had much discussion on the needs of young people who were in custody or under the care of the youth offending teams. Indeed, many noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, were passionately concerned that they should continue to get the care from local authorities that they would receive if they were, in that particular case, looked-after young people. The need for continuing mentoring and friendship through the social services is a necessary part of their lives. Equally, there was on the part of many noble Lords some scepticism about the degree to which local authorities had the capacity to meet these requirements; that on many occasions they rather conspicuously failed to deliver on their duties towards looked-after children and others with complex social and educational needs. This is where Amendments Nos. 58 and 65 come in. Local authorities do not deliver on their duties because often they do not have the resources to do so. Amendment No. 58 expressly concerns resources. Money for schools is now directly mandated by the Treasury and ring-fenced for this purpose in local authority budgets—the term is ““passported directly to the schools””. Presumably this will also be true of the further education colleges once the LSC has been abolished. Perhaps the Minister will confirm that the 16 to 19 element of funding, which currently comes through the LSC, will be part of the schools’ budgets and meet the same rules of being passported through. The division of these sums between schools is now the job of the schools forums. Amendment No. 58 reminds those forums of the new responsibilities which fall on local authorities. Amendment No. 65 adds the words ““and reasonable”” to the caveats in Clause 12. Local authorities do not have infinite resources. The cost of pursuing young people who are supposedly in their area of responsibility possibly to all parts of the planet is just not feasible. What is possible may carry a totally unacceptable cost to the taxpayer. Amendments Nos. 57 and 67 put the onus on the local authorities to establish whether the young person has special educational needs which need to be addressed. Amendment No. 67 had been proposed to us by TreeHouse and the National Autistic Society. In their briefing, they remind us that autism is a complex condition that affects one in 100 school-age children. Children with autism represent 16.2 per cent of the children with statements of special educational needs. There are many barriers faced by young people with autism and their families in the current education system. More than 40 per cent of children with autism are bullied at school. Statistics on exclusion rates from school further indicate the problems faced: 27 per cent of children with autism have been excluded from school, a quarter of them on more than one occasion. Pupils with special educational needs are nine times more likely to be permanently excluded from school than the rest of the school population. In the past few years, there has been an increase in the number of pupils with special educational needs on fixed-period exclusions. Despite these shockingly poor indicators of the experiences of children with autism, education is accepted as the best intervention. It is essential that the existing problems are dealt with to ensure that those children and young people already in the education system have positive experiences to ensure that they wish to stay on at school post-16 and also that these problems do not continue in the post-16 education and training opportunities so that the young people with autism and special educational needs can access appropriate opportunities. This is why we are putting forward Amendment No. 67. I remind noble Lords that Clause 12 is headed, "““Duty to make arrangements to identify persons not fulfilling duty imposed by section 2””." It provides that: "““A local education authority in England must make arrangements to enable it to establish (so far as it is possible to do so) the identities of persons belonging to its area to whom this Part applies but who are failing to fulfil the duty imposed by section 2””." We wish to add, "““and identify reasons for failing with particular reference to any special educational needs””." I beg to move.