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Education and Skills Bill

Indeed. No doubt the Secretary of State will be able to cite other names who are in favour of this element of compulsion. However, he could have cited not only the principal Opposition parties as opponents of compulsion and criminalisation, but many other bodies with which his party has been associated in the past—in some cases, the distant past—such as the TUC, the National Union of Teachers, the Children's Society, the Professional Association of Teachers and the Children's Rights Alliance for England. All of those bodies are opposed to the way in which the Government intend to deliver what in other respects is an admirable aspiration. In an earlier response, the Secretary of State did not do justice to the serious issue of the way in which we treat 16 and 17-year-olds in our society. They are not treated completely as individuals with adult rights, but they have many of the rights of adults. They have the power to start work, get married, be parents, or change their name; they are allowed to be pilots, to gamble, to join a trade union, to leave home and to apply for a passport. The Government are now, as the hon. Member for Surrey Heath referred to earlier, and as I implied in my question, proposing to give young people the vote at 16. One wonders what the ideology is of a Government who think that young people of 16 or 17 should have the power to vote and determine the future of our country, as the Labour party does, but who also manage to hold the idea that those young people are not equipped to make judgments about their own best interests in education and training. There is an inconsistency in the Government's approach and in their attitude towards liberty that I assume must reflect a confusion in their view of the age at which young people can be considered adults. I presume that the Secretary of State was not saying that if the CBI decided it would be advantageous for young people to be in education until the ages of 19, 20 or 21, the Government would consider legislating to force people to stay in education beyond even the age of 18. I assume that a confusion about when one acquires adult rights is behind that aspect of the Bill. We think that the measure is illiberal, that criminalising many young people in that age group will be counter-productive and that it will be difficult to pursue such issues through the courts. I also suggest to the Secretary of State not only that the Government are not yet able to keep all the youngsters whom they would like to in education until even the age of 16, but that he would be hard pressed to find any other country in the world, including those where there is compulsion, where all those in the age cohort up to 18 are in education and training.