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Education and Skills Bill

My Lords, I want to speak, but I want to listen to the Minister first. I am sorry, I am being totally daft, which is not unusual: I am looking at the wrong amendment. I understand the aim of the amendment, but I have sympathy with what the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, said in Committee about accreditation. The voluntary sector is pretty diverse, and to say that voluntary work, whatever it might be, counts towards a person’s education is putting it rather widely. I am concerned about the process of accreditation which the Government envisage when it comes to entry-level qualifications. It really ought to mean no qualification at all. How can you have a qualification in an ability to work with other people, to behave in a social manner and to turn up to work on time—all the skills which many young people are leaving school without? If you are going to pick them up at 16 and turn them out as competent adults at 18, they are the first things you have to address. The obsession that the Learning and Skills Council has for everything having to lead into literacy, numeracy or some other chain of qualification is poisonous to these basic levels of education. It means that the whole structure of those courses must be bent towards box-ticking, because that is all you can do at that stage. Such bits of literacy and numeracy are entirely outside the main thrust and purpose of the education that is being provided. I agree that there needs to be a structure and supervision, but surely the best way of handling this is through the structure which the Government are providing in later amendments; one of local authority supervision through a contract between the local authority and the young person. If under that scheme the local authority, with a voluntary organisation, is providing a programme that is aimed at getting these young people motivated, directed and involved in society and their own futures, surely that is enough. That programme does not need to go through an expensive, time-consuming and essentially irrelevant LSC process. The control is there through the local authority. Most of these courses, particularly the good courses, will be local because they will rely on being run by motivated and directed individuals and will not generally be suitable for rolling out to the ordinary run of commercial education. They will work well within the local voluntary sector. Under those structures, there should be total freedom for the local education authority to provide these courses without them having to be formally accredited in some box-ticking way.