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Education and Skills Bill

My Lords, I shall speak briefly to my amendments. The fact that I hope to speak only briefly does not at all reflect how passionately I feel that the Government are on a totally wrong course in criminalising any young person who remains outside education and training. I feel deep despair that all the work done to make education attractive and positive for young people, to turn it into something that offers pleasure, joy and satisfaction, could so easily be damaged by the sharp alternative, which will be seen as, ““Either you stay in education or training, whether you want to or not, or you may end up going to prison and having a criminal record””. I cannot believe that the Government are going down that route. People of all political views and occupations find it impossible to believe. They say, ““Surely this cannot be right””. They say that they heard the item on the radio about raising the school leaving age and thought it a splendid idea, but nobody mentioned that the alternative to someone staying on in training or education was to turn them into a criminal. If the Government change nothing else, I beg them to reconsider this extraordinary provision. To my knowledge, we would be the only country in the civilised world with such a provision. There is absolutely no evidence that compulsion of any kind makes a difference. Six out of the top seven countries on the OECD table showing the percentage of young people staying on in education and training have no compulsion at all. Not only is there no criminal element to compulsion; there is no compulsion whatever. They have a culture that makes education desirable and where it is clearly relevant to the needs of the adult population and the young people as they become adults. We need to try to foster that culture in the United Kingdom. We are not doing so at the moment. We are very low on the international league table on the numbers of young people staying on. Not only making the provision compulsory but having a criminal offence as the alternative could make our culture worse. It could make education even less attractive and less important in this country. I beg the noble Baroness to think for a moment of the success that her Government’s policies have already demonstrated in providing what I called in Committee the carrots: the educational maintenance grant, the new curriculum, and so on, which I support and of which I wholly approve. They have begun to turn the statistics round and more young people are staying on. Why spoil it now by making this horrendous sanction? Even if the Minister says that it will be in extreme cases only and will probably never happen or will be a last resort, nevertheless the message is there, which is crucial to young people. The message it conveys is that education is something that you have to do or you will be criminalised. I beg the Minister to please think again before she and the Government go down that route.