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Further Education and Training Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 14: 14: Clause 6 , page 6, line 24, leave out ““and training”” and insert ““, training and pastoral care”” The noble Lord said: My Lords, this amendment is about the social and emotional needs of some of the students at FE colleges. If the House will forgive me, it may be helpful to explain where I am coming from. In doing so I can explain what I am asking for and why. My knowledge and experience in this area derives from the 16 years I spent as chairman of Toynbee Hall’s youth department, and particularly from my participation for three or four weeks each year in organising and delivering outdoor activity programmes for young people with learning difficulties, mainly those with emotional and behavioural problems. In the process, I got to know quite a lot about the needs of these young people. A large proportion of them, probably nine out of 10, came from dysfunctional and sometimes chaotic families. Quite a number had been neglected or abused. What most of these young people wanted above all was an adult they could trust and who cared about them. They wanted not a department or a service but a person whom they could rely on to be there when needed. Most of these young people had failed at school, usually because they had had a bad start, not having had any educational support from their families. They got behind, they got discouraged, they found it humiliating, and so it went on. Most of them ended up truanting or sitting at the back of the class, raising Cain. Interestingly, some of these young people, who had rejected the school environment, were prepared to be persuaded to have a go at a course in an FE college. They perceived it as an adult activity, they perceived some of the courses as relevant to their needs, and were prepared to have a go. These are what are called hard-to-reach young people—they do not walk through a door easily. It is crucial that if such young people walk into an FE college, we do everything we can to help them make a success of it. We must help them cope socially and emotionally, and to organise their life. Above all, we must encourage them, because self-confidence is often terribly lacking. That is what I mean by pastoral care. If they do not get that care, many of those young people will fall out of college, revert to petty crime, rent-a-mob, running drugs, climbing up trees to stop the bulldozers, or running cigarettes across the Channel—I have heard all those stories. Then they will go on to serious crime and the revolving door of prison, unemployment and crime. That is why I want pastoral care to be on the face of the Bill. The Minister wrote me an extremely helpful letter, for which I am very grateful,. It gives a very full picture. The difficulty with Report is that if I leave the Minister to speak his own brief, other noble Lords who want to speak will not know what he wrote to me. I shall briefly summarise the noble Lord’s comments but am quite prepared to be told that I have got it wrong. The first several paragraphs of the Minister’s letter refer to various other pieces of legislation which could empower a Government to bring pressure to bear on further education colleges and the Learning and Skills Council to provide pastoral care and other help to emotionally and behaviourally disturbed young people. I am not comfortable with any of those references. The two most important points are made at the end, when the noble Lord points out: "““In the March 2006 White Paper, Raising Skills, Improving Life Chances, we said that governing bodies should consider how their pastoral arrangements should best reflect the characteristics of their student body””." That is good, but that White Paper proposal has not appeared in the Bill. Perhaps the Government have thought better of it, which is why they have not included it in the Bill. We cannot rely on a White Paper. The other important point is that Ofsted’s Handbook for Inspecting Colleges has a marvellous list of things that must be inspected. It includes extensive guidance for inspectors, and inspection criteria include, "““whether the college plans effectively to meet the needs of potentially underachieving groups; whether the college helps learners to develop their self-confidence, team working skills””," and the emotional development of learners. I just eat up things like that—I love the idea of them. But those criteria are only for Ofsted. I think that I understand that Ofsted will no longer make regular three-yearly visits to every school and every further education college, but will visit only occasionally when there is some cause for concern. I am not entirely happy that the fact that Ofsted is carrying out such a thorough inspection will solve the problem that we are looking at, but I shall listen with interest to the Minister. However, I am pleased that Ofsted’s brief in this respect represents the Government’s point of view and that the Government are thinking in the same way as me: they want to do what I believe is right. The only question is whether we should not incorporate this in primary legislation now. I beg to move.