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Education and Skills Bill

My Lords, I am not sure whether the noble Lord, Lord Young, is going to reply, but it rather looks as though he is. Perhaps I may take the first opportunity that I have had to welcome him to his new post and to wish him the greatest success in it. I hope that, by joining the list of people with whom he has to deal, I have slightly reduced the height of the fence that he feels he has to jump. I apologise to your Lordships, first, for not having attached my name to this amendment and, secondly, for, with disgracefully bad manners, tabling an amendment after today’s Marshalled List had been printed, both of which I deplore. Unfortunately, three and a half of the past 10 days of my life have been wiped out by a virus. In the haste to catch up with other things that have become undone in that time, some things to do with this Bill have fallen by the wayside. I support the amendment. It has already been demonstrated that the Government are under a legal obligation to include a provision of this kind in the Bill. That bears repeating: they are under a legal obligation to do so, as the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, made clear. I shall add only a grace note or two to what has been said already. The benefits of consulting children are obvious when they are drawn into the process, but they lie elsewhere as well. The noble Baroness, Lady Howe, did not mention the exercise, which she mentioned to me earlier, whereby an education authority consulted children about the architectural design of their school. It learnt a great deal of valuable material from it; in particular, ways of avoiding little secret places in which small children could be bullied by bigger children. Lower down the age range, it is very useful for a six-foot architect to be talked to by a three-foot child about what it is like to be in a room designed by the six-foot architect. These things are very valuable. It is an opportune moment to mention that the Government are engaged with rather less publicity than one might have expected in a 15-year programme of pulling down almost all the schools that exist and replacing them. If there was ever a moment when children’s advice was terrifically needed, it is now, and this amendment, therefore, or something very like it, should go straight into the Bill.