Education and Skills Bill

We have Amendment No. 69 in the group. We agree with the objective of the noble Lord, Lord Elton, but noble Lords will notice that there are a number of differences between his amendment and ours. In particular, ours is flawed and his is not, necessarily. We are of course aware that schools no longer have to provide a yearly report to parents, much though we perhaps wish that they should. We did not simply add our names to the noble Lord’s amendment because his refers only to schools. Given that many of the young people at whom this Bill aims will not be studying at schools, our amendment talks of ““educational institutions””. Some kind of democratically elected mechanism to provide the management of the school with the voice of the students is just as relevant and appropriate in FE as it is in schools. We would like to see something like the noble Lord’s amendment in the Bill but referring to educational institutions as a whole and not just schools. We also hesitated to be too prescriptive about the way in which the voice of the students should be collected, although I am encouraged by the wording in the noble Lord’s amendment, ““or other collective mechanism””. We devised our own amendment that did not specify a school council because we did not want to be too prescriptive; we wanted to give schools the opportunity to be creative and respond appropriately to their own circumstances, devising their own ways of gathering students’ views, and to put pressure on them to do so by giving them a duty to report on it. We felt that the most appropriate people to report to would be the parents and the local authority. In doing so, of course, they would report to their own students and would be accountable to them as to how they were reflecting their views. The elements that we believe are the most important are that we are not too prescriptive, that the voice of the student should be collected in a democratic and appropriate way and that the matter should apply not just to schools but to other educational institutions to which the young people of the age group we are referring to might go.