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Education and Skills Bill

The difference between us is less than the noble Lord has just set out. As I said in our previous debates on this issue, accreditation does not apply to full-time courses, where providers, by definition, will overwhelmingly be colleges or established education providers—provided that they can attract the funding from the local authority or the Learning and Skills Council, until local authorities take it over—and can be the best judge of the courses that young people want to take up, responding to demand. We are dealing here with the specific and much more limited issue of part-time courses for people in work. As I have set out, our concern is that, without accreditation, anything might go in respect of training provided by employers; it could be low quality or indeed of no quality at all. The noble Lord, who is alive to this issue, did not say in his concluding remarks that there should be no check; he was proposing a different check from the one in place. He thinks that local authorities themselves should play the accreditation role. That is an issue for discussion. It is not a proposal I had heard before. We would be concerned about the capacity of local authorities to undertake that role, but I am happy to respond to him on that point when I have been able to consider it more fully. I would simply point out that that is effectively a different form of accreditation; it is not saying that there should be no accreditation.