Academies Bill [HL]

My Lords, I did not hear my noble friend answer the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, about the curriculum. These children have broken free from the ordinary structure of education and need to be reconnected with it. That process of reconnecting with it is in no way aligned with the idea of a curriculum based on English, maths or other academic subjects. You have to hook them on something to which they relate and then you can bring them back to academic work or whatever else is necessary to build their career. You have to be able to let go everything that they have rejected about the school and find another way into their psyche. I am sure that my wife, who spends a lot of her time working with these people when they reach prison, would endorse that. She uses family ties because by the time most of these kids reach prison they have a family of their own. They probably do not know their father and do not have much contact with their mother, but they have children and they can be made to reconnect with them or with the remnants of their family. That can give them the motivation to get back into what you might call school work. But to contaminate that process with school work risks the whole process; you have to be able to adapt what you are teaching to the needs of these children.