Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

My hon. Friend makes a good point— I mean the hon. Gentleman; it is hard to get that right when Opposition Members are on the same Committee as me. The fact is that in politics, we all like to deal in conspiracy theory. We all want to believe that a Minister rings people up and says, ““You do this for me or there'll be trouble,”” or ““Do this or you'll never get a renewal of your contract.”” In my experience, if a Minister—they are only in post for a couple of years before they move on, anyway—had phoned up Ken Boston and said, ““Ken, I want you to do this,”” Ken, being an Australian, might have used pretty strong language in response. We might all talk about issues of political independence, but although there might be drift and there might be cases of people getting a little bit too chummy, I have seen no evidence of overt political interference. We need the two bodies to work properly, we need to ensure standards over time, and we need an independent curriculum watchdog if we are to get the curriculum right over time. I want to make a couple more points, generally on issues that arise from the Select Committee's inquiries. I cannot resist mentioning local government's new responsibilities towards young people with a custodial sentence. I am a bit worried about that, because there has been turmoil. The Education and Skills Committee, as it was, only got a handle on education in prisons when the Home Office lost responsibility for the issue and it passed to the Department for Education and Skills. We could then get involved. We held a thorough inquiry on the state of education in our prisons—it is still not very good. Most people know that. The hon. Member for Buckingham (John Bercow) knows extremely well how we feel about the fact that many people in prison or in custody have such a poor record when it comes to their start in life; they may have been in care, or may suffer from all kinds of special educational needs. It worried me when we saw the chaos brought about by Government changes to policy on the National Offender Management Service. We all know about the NOMS fiasco and what it did to prison education and much else. The Prison Service is still recovering from that, and now there is to be yet another change. Surely we need a consistent national approach to the educational needs of people in custody; looking at the Bill as printed, I am not sure how it is to achieve that.