Education and Skills Bill

I want to say a word in favour of Amendment No. 65. First, as a wording technicality, requiring a local authority to do everything that is ““possible”” is really putting no limit on things. Local authorities would be compelled to employ private investigators to chase children round the world to establish where they were, and children can be extremely good at getting lost under those circumstances. So ““reasonable”” does seem to be the right word in practical terms. Secondly, I am not sure that it is the local authority that ought to be doing this. The Government will be running the national children’s database and they are also intending to keep a complete record of who is doing what courses. These things are not happening, particularly once children reach the age of 16, at a local authority level. Children of that age are able to leave home and many of them will. They will be living in relatively informal arrangements with other people. A local authority will have no natural way of finding out about these people. It will take a central register to establish whose training activity is not known and a central effort to find out where these young people have got to and bring them to the attention of the local authority. We do not want 100-odd local authorities all chasing round independently, trying to find out where Sam Jones, who used to live in the area but now does not appear to, has got to, or which kids are in the area whose homes are not there. It is going to be extremely difficult to track these pupils down if you do it in that disaggregated way. Given the tools that the Government have to do this, it might be better to run it centrally, even if at the end of the day the local authorities then pick up the challenge of helping the kids back into education.