Education and Skills Bill

moved Amendment No. 156: 156: Clause 47, page 27, line 15, at end insert— ““( ) No penalty notice shall be issued under this section unless the local authority had previously agreed a learning support contract with the young person.”” The noble Baroness said: The amendment suggests that no penalty can be issued unless the local authority has agreed on a learning support contract with the young person concerned. It goes back to some of the earlier amendments that we proposed relating to personalised learning programmes. I confess that I was slightly surprised to find that we had tabled this amendment right at the end of Chapter 5. The amendment relates particularly to Clause 39. Clause 39 proposes the procedures necessary for a local authority to go through initially if a young person fails to comply with Clause 2, which is on participating in education and training, or work-based learning with sufficient hours of training attached. The young person should either attend school or college full time or find himself or herself work or training with the required off-the-job learning hours. Clause 39(2) states that an attendance notice must be issued and explained to the young person. Subsection (5) states that the local authority must take all reasonable steps to provide support to the young person and give time for that support to get up and running. In Clause 54, which we have not yet considered, the local authority is put under a duty to make available to the young person and to the young adults for whom it is responsible, "““such services as it considers appropriate to encourage, enable or assist the effective participation of those persons in education””." We know from our discussions in Committee that these services comprise the Connexions support and mentoring services that have been developed to help these young people into education and training. Why, therefore, table an amendment that asks for precisely that? The key word is ““contract””. The difference between what we are asking for and what is already being offered in the Bill is that we want a formal commitment on the part of the authority to meet the specific needs of the young person in question. We accept that the Bill already places a duty on local authorities to provide this support and that in Clause 55 the Secretary of State will specify in considerable detail what sort of services are to be provided. However, the crucial word ““contract”” is not there. Just as the Government think it useful to persuade parents to buy into the procedures via parenting contracts, we think that on occasions such as this it would be helpful if the young person concerned were also to recognise that he or she has rights and responsibilities under these procedures. That also means that the local authority cannot duck its duties or responsibilities. As we learnt during the passage of the Children and Young Persons Bill earlier this year, there are perhaps too many occasions when, faced with having to meet the complex needs of highly disadvantaged young people, local authorities or their employees ignore, or just fail to deliver on, the duties of support. A formal contract has advantages in giving both sides clear guidelines as to what is expected. I beg to move.