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Education and Skills Bill

Given the time constraints on Back Benchers, which are longer than usual, I shall plunge in and say that this debate will be regarded as an historic occasion. Historians will, I hope, look at it and suggest that something rather important happened. As long as we have a successful vote at the end of the debate, it will be regarded as a step in the march—a slow one, I suspect—towards the Bill becoming an Act. I have a strong personal involvement in the Bill, and I pressed the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) on the age at which someone ceases to be a child and becomes an adult, because it is an important point. I have always believed—and Opposition Members, including Front Benchers, who have served on the Select Committees that I have chaired know that I passionately believe in this—that a child is still a child until 18. Every child matters, and the outcomes of Every Child Matters should apply to every young person until they are 18. There is a great danger in society of our diminishing the number of years during which a child is considered to be a child. There is a serious challenge, and I agree with some of the voices that suggest that childhood is shrinking: we want children to develop earlier, to go to school and formal lessons earlier and, indeed, we want to make them adults before they have the experience and judgment to become adults. I, for one, would not vote to reduce the age of suffrage to 16. There has been a long campaign on Leitch. Lord Leitch's review of skills is an important document, and running through it are two strands that we all consider important. First, an individual's potential should be fully exploited, and we should be able to extend the period of time in which they find what they are good at, and discover what qualities they have and apply them. They cannot do so without extremely good help and advice, and the more inquiries the Children, Schools and Families Committee and its predecessor carried out, the more I realised that the quality of teaching and advice that young people receive during their development is important. To be fair, individual potential and its fulfilment are what brought most of us into the House. In my generation, I saw the waste of many people with whom I went to school—and I suspect that you did, too, Madam Deputy Speaker— who did not have my opportunities. The vast majority did not have the opportunity to exploit their potential. A secondary aspect of Leitch is the fact that we want a more effective and prosperous economy and society. The more educated people are, the less prone they are to criminal and antisocial behaviour; the more they tend to volunteer; and the more they become multidimensional members of society, which is what we want. To develop Marcuse's concept, it is not one-dimensional man, but multidimensional men and women whom we should seek to produce. My personal involvement goes back to May when, supported by some Members who are in the House this afternoon, I introduced a private Member's Bill; one of the hon. Members who supported that Bill is sitting on the Opposition Front Bench today. We tried in a different way, because it was a private Member's Bill, to change what happens to young people at 16 and to introduce a system of proper assessment running through to 16. Under that Bill, there would be a proper assessment at 16 of the abilities and potential of young people. Even today there is still the possibility of people just fading away from education. They may have some exam results. What is needed is a full evaluation of what they have contributed not just academically but to the life of the school and to their own development. That still does not exist. This Bill may move us in that direction. I hope that hon. Members on both sides of the House will remember that this is a Bill to promote young people staying in education, training or work-based learning until 18. It is not forcing young people to stay on in school until they are 18. That is not the purpose of the Bill. I would not be supporting it if it were. If we take the long view, the interesting and refreshing thing about the Bill is that, unlike most Bills, which come through to make a law that will affect our constituents' lives in a few months, so that we start running the country in a different way, there is a long run-in—to 2013 and 2015. There is plenty of scope. There are some real problems around that; we would be daft if we did not accept that. Some have been articulated already, but the fact of the matter is that we have time to get it right. We have time to do more research and to do pilots. I suggested to the Secretary of State outside this place recently that we could set up a commission to look at the ways in which we can make the value of what young people do post-16—