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Health and Social Care Bill

My noble friend Lady Emerton, in tabling this amendment, has come up with something very sophisticated and really rather clever. By requiring education, she will ensure that the next group has its standards driven up. People enter into a caring group and learn from others around them; the problem is that at the moment they are learning bad practice as well as, hopefully, learning good practice. Making sure that these are assured training programmes is eminently sensible. Modern educational techniques using e-learning, DVDs and other ways of training mean that you do not have to take people away from the job and put them in college. They could be given provisional registration while they worked through some of these training programmes. Modern ways of teaching also allow you to train those with very low literacy skills. It is worth remembering that some of the very high-standard care assistants in the system providing care in people's homes often have low levels of literacy, so they need to be taught using modern techniques. This will allow that to happen. As for tracking their attendance, with electronic records it becomes quite easy to monitor what they turned up for and how they performed and to assess them in the tasks that need to be undertaken. This amendment seems to meet all the criticisms that the Government laid at the door of previous amendments. I hope that it will get a better reception than its predecessors.