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Education and Skills Bill

We all look forward to hearing the Secretary of State deal with the 110 amendments and new clauses in this group before the knife falls, so I shall keep my comments relatively brief and try to return to some of the issues on Third Reading. I shall single out four or five issues on which I hope the Secretary of State will be able to touch, even in this short time. As the Secretary of State will have noticed, new clauses 6 and 9 are very similar to each other and also to new clause 1, which I tabled with a number of colleagues in Committee and which I freely admit was inspired by Rainer and Barnardo's. It appears that they have inspired my party, which has in turn inspired the Conservative party. I am pleased that there is such a degree of inspiration. New clause 9 is extremely important to us, as it relates to the basic flexibilities that there will be, particularly to deal with young people who have social or medical problems—they might be precisely the young people who have dropped out of education before the age of 16, and they will probably be part of the significant group who are at present routinely absent from school at the age of 14 or 15. We want the Bill to include undertakings that support will be available for such young people; that the budgets will be in place for that; and, equally importantly, that those young people who would find it difficult to be in a formal education or training setting because of the other problems have the option to be in some kind of supported environment that may be a stepping stone to education or training but may fall far short of the kind of accreditation that the Government envisage in the Bill for either those in employment or those in a formal educational setting. The Minister for Schools and Learners gave undertakings in Committee that he would aspire to have such flexibility and that he did not want young people with support needs to have to go through the enforcement mechanisms. However, many Members would feel far more reassured about that if it were stated in the Bill. I hope that this issue will be returned to in another place, if it is not dealt with in this House; I hope that the Government will agree to include these undertakings in the Bill, as that is extremely important to us. Amendment No. 29 addresses a matter that we did not debate in our earlier proceedings: how young people in custody or under the supervision of a youth offending team will be treated in relation to the duties to be in education or training. At present, far too many young people in custody experience little in the way of educational and training support. The pressures in the prison system have led to downward pressure on the number of hours young people in prison spend in education, training or employment, and we want undertakings from Ministers that young people who are in custody or under the supervision of youth offending teams will not also be overlooked by the learning and support proposals that we hope will be in the Bill. We would also like to hear more—amendments Nos. 16 and 18 relate to this—about the protections there will be for the records of young people who are affected by this Bill, when information about them is passed not only from educational organisations but particularly from non-educational organisations. We had an extensive debate on that in Committee, and many Members are still concerned about the type of information that could be accessed and its relevance. Amendments Nos. 19 and 70 relate to the crucial issue of the flexibility there will be for employers in relation to the provision of in-house training and the burden of checking on those young people aged 16 and 17 who will be employed by businesses, which will have obligations to check whether those individuals are compliant with the Bill's proposals on accredited education and training. We have a concern, which has also been expressed by those on the Conservative Benches, that some of these proposals could destroy the youth labour market and close down job opportunities, which might be better for some young people than being in a more formal education and training setting. On young people's rights in the process of appeal, we discussed in Committee whether a young person or their representative could be invited to attend the appeal stage in relation to the issuance of any attendance notice. We would like to know whether the Government are willing to be more flexible on that, and whether they have further considered the limits there will be on the penalties imposed on young people and how they will relate to young people's incomes, particularly for those on very low incomes, and to the current level of the education maintenance allowance. Having left the Secretary of State so much time, I hope he will now be able to respond to a few of those issues at least.