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Education and Skills Bill

?save-line2? I hope that the hon. Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Mr. Evennett) will forgive me if I do not directly follow his speech, because I wish to pick up some of the themes in the stunning speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry, North-West (Mr. Robinson). It brought us to the heart of the debate, where we need to focus now and in the immediate future. I wish to concentrate on what is happening to the poorest in our society. We are immensely proud that the Government are the first ever to undertake to abolish child poverty over a 20-year period. Progress has been made, and although it has stalled somewhat recently, the record is second to none. However, the number of the very poorest has increased. If we consider various health indices, the Government have generally made good progress, but the very poorest in our community are not benefiting equally with other groups. The gap between the very poorest and the rest of us—let alone the rich—is widening. My hon. Friend concentrated in his speech on what was happening to the very poorest in our education system, and I wish to put two pieces of information before the House that should caution us against concentrating solely on 16-year-olds. We know from the Government's own data that four in 10 children leaving junior school for secondary school do not have the qualifications expected of them for that age group. However, they go on to secondary school, where many of them fail. We also know that more than five out of 10 of our constituents who leave school at 16 do not get the minimum education qualifications that the Government want everybody in that age group to get. The position has improved in the past 10 years, and although we should not make absurd claims about that, the numbers are truly great. When I intervened on the hon. Member for Yeovil (Mr. Laws), who was talking about a group of 16-year-olds who were damaged, I said that I spent time in the summer talking to people of 16 or over who were not in employment, education or training or who were on the new deal and I did not think that they were damaged at all. I thought that they were highly intelligent. My point was that they posed a challenge not only because they were intelligent but because many of them had not been at school since they were 14—some had not been at school since they were 12. In the Bill, we are talking about what we do with young people—whether we call them children or adults—at the age of 16. Although we do well by the majority of children who go through our schools, what makes a mockery of that is our failure to engage with a significant group. That lack of engagement does not arise because they are thick or damaged, but because we are serving a diet of education by which they are deeply bored and quickly failed.