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Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

Again, I put my name to this amendment, particularly because of the use of the word "modular". I very much welcome what the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, has just said. I have mentioned in the House before a two-year pilot of speech and language therapists in young offender establishments that was funded by Lady Helen Hamlyn. Unfortunately, the Government could not find the money for continuing with therapists in young offender establishments, but I hope they will restore them. One of the factors of the pilot was that people coming in were being helped with a speech and language difficulty, and the question was what happened when they went out. The therapists said that they needed twice as much time as they had been given for the custodial sentence and that there should be continuity. That leads me to a question to the Minister that is slightly outside the narrow box of the amendment. Young offenders between the ages of 15 and 18 in the Prison Service are virtually all on detention and training orders, which this Government newly introduced. Half of the order is spent in custody and half under supervision in the community. The sentence plan for a detention and training order is the responsibility of young offender teams who are already the responsibility of local government. What one hopes to see in all those sentence plans instead of four months in prison and four months in the community is an eight-month sentence, some of which should be spent in custody and some in the community. Although we have been talking very largely about young offenders and young offenders in prison, my question to the Minister is: does the writ of the local education authority run to the Probation Service as well? It has always seemed to me that there is no reason why the sort of courses that are run in prison should not be run for young offenders outside in the community. They do not need to go to prison for it. They all have exactly the same educational needs, learning difficulties, work skill requirements and so on. It has always seemed to me that that a community sentence, as conducted, would be much more positively received by the public if they felt that it had the same content as what was happening in prison—aiming to prevent reoffending—rather than doing something like painting out graffiti. This of course will work only if the writ runs to the Probation Service and those who are responsible for supervising people in the community, and for supervising the educational part of that sentence.