---

Education and Skills Bill

We are trying to improve the status quo. By the time the Bill is enacted, we will have an effective database of all schoolchildren in the country, so we will, at a national level, know who we are trying to track as they leave school and pass into this two-year period. To then fragment that database seems perverse. It ought to be the basis of knowing how many children are going on to further education and pinpointing those young people about whom you know nothing. That must be done centrally because fragmenting the whole operation into a lot of local databases which do not check consistently on what is happening across borders means losing a lot of the advantage of having a national system to pick up people who cannot be picked up at present.