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Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

From these Benches we think that there is a great deal to be said for the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley. Am I right in thinking—perhaps the noble Lord would nod—that such short courses would follow the sort of assessment of the needs of the young person that we have been debating this afternoon? Yes, the noble Lord is nodding. That is fine, but we also need to consider those things which, in the normal course of learning to read, a very young child must have in place. I am referring particularly to listening and speaking. Many small children come into nurseries whose speech is not very well developed; the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, has mentioned difficulties with speech and language. Nursery teachers and teachers in the early years of primary schools have to work very hard with those young people’s speaking and listening skills before it is appropriate to start teaching them to read. That is why we on these Benches have some reservations about specifying phonics at too early an age. The professional teacher should decide the most appropriate time for a young child to be taught using them, because children’s ability to speak, listen and communicate varies so much. If the noble Lord’s amendment included speaking and listening as a precursor to reading and writing for those for whom that is necessary, his short-course idea is good because so many young people in custody are there for such a very short period. He used another word that I thought important: the word "intensive". It does not appear in the amendment, but he used it several times when he moved the amendment and he is quite right. It may not be desirable for a young person to be in custody at all, but if they are you have to make the best of it and use every opportunity to send them out equipped with something that they did not have when they came in. That may mean their spending many, many hours a day working on their listening, speaking, reading, writing and numeracy skills. In my experience of visiting young offender institutions and talking to the teachers in the education department, they use reading and writing very creatively and imaginatively on various topics that actually interest a young person and keep them motivated when learning how to read and write. The young person sees the reason for doing it: to find out more about cars or aeroplanes or whatever they are interested in. As long as the noble Lord’s amendment actually means all those things—if they are implicit in what he is looking for—we very much support this idea.