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Education and Skills Bill

We will come back to that in Committee. I welcome those very sensible aspects of the Bill, but it is clear from Alison Wolf's report and from talking to people in the further education sector that there are some flexibilities and freedoms in respect of these entitlements that could be dealt with far more fully in the Bill, so we will seek to amend it to deal with that problem. I put to the Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills a point put to me by many head teachers in my constituency. In expressing their views of the Bill, many of them told me that many among this small core of young people with multiple disadvantages are very difficult to engage in education beyond 16—indeed, they may have left school or disengaged completely by that age. They are the type of people we can easily end up chasing through the courts for ever and getting nowhere. However, I have been struck by how many of these self-same head teachers have told me that they often see the same youngsters later on in their lives—at 18, 19 and 20—much readier to engage with education and much readier to benefit from it. We will want to ensure—I believe that this is the Secretary of State's point—that those individuals have every freedom and opportunity to take up their chances then, when they are ready for it, rather than being forced down a course at 16 in order to allow the Government to publish a set of tables with a zero figure. My former noble Friend Earl Russell, now sadly deceased, often commented in the other place on the extent to which Government legislation, particularly top-down legislation, does not deal with the world as it is in its full complexity and richness, as we try to legislate for large categories of people without thinking about the reality on the ground. When we return in Committee to the list of people likely to fall into this category, I hope that we can deal with their real circumstances, acknowledge the extent to which they may find it genuinely difficult to engage at 16 or 17 and provide them with some real choices. I have other practical concerns, some of which are similar to those expressed by the hon. Member for Surrey Heath. I hope that we can discuss this issue seriously in Committee. I noticed the Minister for Schools and Learners nodding in recognition of the point earlier, although he was doubtless not conceding anything by doing so. Although the bigger employers' organisations can already easily supply accredited education and training for youngsters in their employment—often to a very high standard indeed—there may well be youngsters of 16 or 17 who find education a totally unrewarding experience and have no interest in engaging with it. We saw earlier that in respect of accessing education, there are also huge transport gaps in some parts of the country. Those youngsters might be in employment that we would consider to be low-skill, and they might not be getting accreditation for it, but it might be teaching them valuable disciplines and it might lead to accreditation later. In trying, for the best of reasons, to ensure that those people have accredited qualifications, we need to be careful that we do not drive them out of the labour market and discover, as the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field) indicated earlier, that their jobs are taken by many of the extremely energetic and effective economic migrants who are increasingly coming here from other parts of the European Union. In relation to the exchange between the Chairman of the Children, Schools and Families Committee and the right hon. Member for Birkenhead, it is useful to note the suggestion in Alison Wolf's report that the figures that the Government often cite about the small demand for people with no or low qualifications in the future are not based, as I understand it, on an estimate of what the demands will be, but on estimates of how many people in the labour force will have no qualifications, which is a totally different thing. My final point is on the assessment of costs and benefits contained in the documents published with the Bill. The paper that Alison Wolf has produced challenges the Government's cost-benefit analysis, which has alleged benefits for each cohort of about £2.4 billion. She suggests that the figures are grossly optimistic and that the range of possibilities is centred around the measures not having a net benefit but potentially a cost. As we consider the Bill in Committee, I hope that we will scrutinise the Government's assumptions closely, because if Alison Wolf is correct to say that the cost-benefit analysis of the proposals is unduly optimistic, some of the other educational proposals that I mentioned earlier might have a far greater effect.