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Education and Skills Bill

My Lords, we share the noble Baroness’s views that access to affordable transport is integral to helping young people to access education and training. Current legislation strikes a balance between protecting the interests of young people everywhere and giving local authorities the flexibility to direct resources to local priorities. I am sure that the noble Baroness will agree that it is right that local authorities should have the discretion to determine how to target their funding to meet local needs. By 2010-11, the increase in total government grant for local services since 1997 will be 45 per cent in real terms. Drawing on this funding, the current duty requires local authorities to take into account the costs of transport in preparing their transport policy statements and this should ensure that transport is affordable for young people. Furthermore, I can announce that we will use the opportunity of the fourth Session Bill to amend the current post-16 transport duty and strengthen local accountability. We will do that by bolstering the current duty on local authorities to prepare and publish a transport policy statement, requiring them to set out in the statement the assessments they have made in drawing up their transport policy and by improving the route for appeal to local authority policy, if a parent or young person believes that transport provision is a barrier to their participation in education or training and that their circumstances have not been adequately considered in the transport statement. I therefore hope the noble Baroness will withdraw her amendment. Amendment No. 73 relates to transport provision for learners with learning difficulties. In Committee, my noble friend Lord Adonis committed to looking at this issue over the summer. Over the summer we have been working with Skill: National Bureau for Students With Disabilities to work out the best way forward. I recently met the noble Lord, Lord Low, who is unfortunately not able to be here today, to discuss progress and the need for momentum. As part of this work, my department has looked at the services and support that are made available to learners with learning difficulties by local authorities and how we can support them to develop commissioning and other systems to improve their efficiency and reach. We have also commissioned some work from Skill, looking at the needs of this group and possible solutions. This research is in its final stages, and we will consider the findings very carefully; in particular, it will inform decisions about how we legislate in the new fourth Session Bill. As noble Lords will be aware, this new Bill proposes transferring the funding and responsibility for commissioning 16 to 19 provision from the Learning and Skills Council to local authorities from 2010. Local authorities will also have responsibility for commissioning provision for learners with learning difficulties and disabilities. We are sympathetic to the purpose of this amendment and think it needs to be considered within the changes as a part of the fourth Session Bill. The proposal made in the White Paper was that responsibility for the participation of these learners will sit with local authorities. In the mean time, we believe that we can make a number of improvements to the existing system. The noble Baroness highlighted those, including strengthening the current learning difficulty assessment guidance to include an explicit reference to considering the young person’s wider needs, including transport. We will consult on this guidance directly after the Bill receives Royal Assent. The noble Baroness is right that travel training can be extremely beneficial for this group of young people. It is an area that we particularly asked Skill to consider. Its interim findings advocate the benefits and the good work that is going on in many areas but, but it also recognises that it can be of variable quality and not available everywhere. To address that we have committed to highlighting good practice in travel training through our guidance on transport to local authorities and we will underline their responsibilities in this area in a series of workshops to take place in the spring. We will also work with awarding bodies, which I see as an important mechanism to encourage the accreditation of travel training as part of the foundation learning tier to enable colleges and providers to attract funding for this training more easily. That will really help. We believe that these measures will improve the transport support available to this group and will bring all local authorities up to the standards of the best. I will be looking closely at progress and will consider whether it is necessary to do more alongside other local authority duties as we introduce legislation in the fourth Session. I assure noble Lords that the trail is not going cold. In the light of my comments, I hope that the noble Baroness will feel able to withdraw her amendment.