---

Education and Skills Bill

The Minister is encouraging me to be rather more critical of him than I would instinctively choose to be. However, because he has encouraged me, let me say that, when we debated the Bill in Committee, he made it clear that he believed that the vast majority of young people—including many who are disengaged—could be re-engaged not by compulsion but by the quality of the offer that the Government would seductively put before them. Furthermore, when I scrutinised his remarks closely, he acknowledged that there would always be a certain number of young people who would truant. We know that because, of the people who are currently obliged to attend school or college up to the age of 16, a proportion do not do so. We do not succeed in getting a 100 per cent. of those who are legally obliged to go to school or college to do so. The question that I put to the Minister then—I put it to him again now; perhaps he will intervene on me to answer it—was as follows, given that he thinks that about 90 per cent. of young people might be encouraged to participate post-16, and that about 5 or 6 per cent. of young people do not attend school, is he suggesting that coercion will affect only about 4 or 5 per cent. of young people? I am simply more ambitious and more positive, and less sceptical and cynical, than he is about our capacity to engage people without coercion.