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Education and Skills Bill

My Lords, Report stage is very tiresome from that point of view, particularly when we are getting into an interesting discussion. I was about to say that the only example that I could think of was the Open University. It is the only institution that I am familiar with where you spend a lot of time working on your own but then everyone gets together. It does not mean that the whole programme is done away from your workstation or whatever, but there is a requirement for some of the programme to be conducted in a human rather than a mechanical way. Perhaps that is what we should be trying to include in the Bill; otherwise, as the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, said, the system will just be abused. No education will take place because it will be a formulaic course which happens to have been accredited somewhere and it will be delivered in a way that the students find extremely difficult to connect with. It will be a sort of blank, compulsory hour in every day that achieves very little. For courses to be structured so that students, doing the same course at the same level, have to spend some time together and therefore presumably get away from the workplace to a proper place of education—an educational provider of some sort—seems to be the right direction to go in, but how we work that into the Bill I am not at all sure. Nor am I at all sure how we would work it for the Prison Service, and that will be a challenge for OLASS when it comes to look at that side of things. The question is how to reintroduce the human element if you go for distance learning. I think that this issue is well worth discussing between now and Report, and I very much hope that the Minister will take up the invitation from the proposers of the amendment to sit down and talk to them.