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Education and Skills Bill

As the job of a cox in a rowing eight is pre-eminently one of guidance, I am sure that the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, did an excellent job. I shall seek advice on whether she was providing guided learning hours—I think it depends whether the course of instruction was properly accredited. There are ways in which she can seek accreditation if she wishes it to be taken into account for her relevant qualifications in future. The noble Baroness seeks to probe the meaning of ““guided learning hours””. I am happy to be able to tell her that, unusually for legislation, it does mean what it says: it means learning hours that are guided by a teacher or instructor. The guidance can be provided online but it has to be genuine guidance. It cannot simply be the provision of a course without guidance being provided online. Guided learning hours are currently assigned to all qualifications, providing an easy and objective way for young people, employers and local authorities to tell whether a young person is meeting the requirement. It is not our policy that private study time should count towards this requirement although, as noble Lords have said, private study will be a valuable component of any overall course. We do not wish to allow private study to count not least because it could enable employers to avoid releasing young people for any training at all by claiming that they are doing all their learning unsupervised at home in the evenings or outside the normal working day. The noble Baroness asked whether everyone will bureaucratically have to add up their number of guided learning hours. The answer is no. That is the purpose of Clause 8(2), which makes reference to a course or courses leading to an accredited qualification which has or have been assigned enough guided learning hours. The student will be able to tell whether their course has enough guided learning hours on that basis; they will not have to count up the number of learning hours that they experience.