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Education and Skills Bill

My Lords, this is a very important amendment. I find myself entirely in agreement with what the noble Lord, Lord Layard, said about the importance of human interaction in a successful learning process and about getting together with one’s fellow students and in a personal way with people who know and understand the subject and can deal with you face to face. However, I see problems with the idea that you should spend all your time away from the workstation. A lot of these people may be small employers. They may have their kids stuck in front of computer screens of some kind or another. To force them to provide extra computers and space for use an hour a day by the youngsters they employ is not sensible. Anyway, are not a lot of the courses they are going to be pursuing essentially distance learning courses which are designed to be absorbed at a workstation? As long as there is a dedicated time set aside for it and they are not supposed to interrupt it every two minutes another person is needed on the cash desk or whatever, the workstation is going to be the sensible place for them to do it. This problem is not restricted to this Bill. It is a direction which the Government are pursuing when it comes to learning within prisons. They are looking at getting students there to pursue distance learning individually on their own workstations rather than taught in classes by teachers. Once you go down that route, instead of having a group of pupils within a reasonably close physical proximity who are all studying the same course and are all at the same point on it, you have a group of pupils who are studying different courses, or if they are studying the same course, they are at different points on it. What is the point of getting that group of students together to discuss anything with anybody when all their interests and requirements are different? I am a believer in the old style and the way that education works. The noble Lord, Lord Layard, made a point about the importance of students as a group and students with teachers, and about the difficulty of translating that into a world dominated by personalised distance-learning. The only model that I can think of—