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The idea of learning and support contracts is a proven one. It is used by many organisations in the voluntary sector. There are even activity and learning agreements being piloted by Connexions partnerships. These have had encouraging results, as the Government announced fairly recently. Many of Barnardo’s services for young people have an alternative education component because the child has been excluded from school. That organisation has found that agreements that address the underlying difficulties give them the opportunity to re-engage and often lead young people back into the mainstream eventually. Rainer does similar work with homeless young people—those leaving care or young offenders. It has the same experience. Both organisations believe that enforcement should never be used on a child with unmet needs. One of the purposes of the amendments is to get a clear undertaking from the Minister that that will never happen. Spelling out the agreements in guidance would of course be welcome, but, if they are to become routine, they must be put in the Bill.
I have tried to get some costings, and there appear to be major cost benefits. In 2001, the DfES estimated that the average cost of a NEET—not in education, employment or training—was about £5,300 in public spending and £5,500 lost from taxes not paid and economic impact not made. Those are the most recent figures that I could get but the costs are probably greater and the loss from taxes and economic impact probably also greater. This means that effectively engaging a young person in education, perhaps in work and training or in apprenticeship, could save more than £10,000 per year. I believe that that is a saving worth making. But the main argument is not an economic one. It is a matter of ensuring that no young person loses out for lack of the appropriate package of support and that no enforcement will take place until they have been offered the right package.
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We have considerable sympathy with the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, on the obligation to fund courses for which presumably there is a demand. We would like to listen to his arguments before definitely making up our minds about his amendment, which is grouped with mine. I beg to move.
Lord Lucas: Perhaps I had better explain. I cannot do better than to refer to the last speech of the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, when he described how accreditation would work. He said that the LSC would fund the courses that it approved of but, if it was appropriate for someone to have a parenting course, that money would have to come out of other funds that the local authority had available to it. That is exactly the problem with accreditation as it runs now.
There is presumably, when the Minister puts the LSC's budget together, the thought that it will be providing education for all these 16 to 18 year-olds and that is how that budget is calculated. So there is, at least notionally, a pot of money available there for every 16 to 18 year-old. But, if that 16 to 18 year-old ought not to be following one of the courses that the LSC chooses to fund, it has to persuade somebody else, out of some other hard-pressed budget, to spare the money necessary to fund that course, while the money that is in the LSC budget gets used for other purposes. That seems entirely inappropriate. If you have a system that is carefully determining what is right for a particular young person and you have a pot of money that is available to fund whatever is right for that particular young person, the two should coincide. It is therefore important that the local authority, as the body making the decision at the end of the day on what it is prepared to sign up to as being right for the young person, should be able to use the money which has in effect been allocated to that young person by central government for the purposes that are right for the young person and not be bound by whatever prejudices and fashions sway the Learning and Skills Council at that particular moment.
Baroness Morris of Bolton: We support the Liberal Democrats on the new clause on learning and support contracts, as we did in another place, and my name is attached to the amendment. I also listened to my noble friend Lord Lucas, who seems to make a great deal of sense.
The learning and support contracts will be used where the young person concerned is failing to fulfil the duty imposed by Clause 2. We believe that a learning and support contract should always be considered before an attendance notice is issued. By providing a mechanism earlier, before and ideally instead of the enforcement process, our desire is to minimise the chance of enforcement proceedings taking place, because of the damaging effect that they can have on a young person’s prospects.
Time and again in the evidence sessions in another place we were told that young people could be criminalised by the Bill. That is a great concern not only for the young people, but for many of the organisations that work with the most disadvantaged members of our society. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, I
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Lord Dearing: I rise briefly to support Amendment No. 50. This seems to me to be a constructive and positive approach to intervening with a young person who is showing all the signs of not complying with the provisions of Clause 2. It gives him or her some standing to have a contract. He or she has never had one before. Parents will take an interest in something like that and if, as I would hope, young people who are clearly heading into difficulty have a mentor to help them, this is the kind of document that would give a basis of reference for discussions and encouragement and going to the local authority and saying, “You are not doing your part adequately”. If there is to be an element of compulsion, I welcome this as an important step to try and avoid the need for it.
Lord Adonis: I start with Amendment No. 50 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, which inserts a new clause to enable local authorities to enter into a learning and support contract with a young person who is subject to the duty in Clause 2 to participate but is not participating. We are very grateful to the noble Baroness, along with Barnardo’s and Rainer, for highlighting this approach and its benefits. We will be happy to look further at how we can take this forward in concrete terms and I will reflect further on the arguments that she set out. We know that an agreement that a young person has signed up to, where they understand their obligations and the consequences of not fulfilling them, can be very effective. That is how the education maintenance allowance works and it has been a great success in boosting both participation and attainment. We have also extended the conditions for EMAs so that from this coming academic year providers will take into account a young person’s behaviour and progress rather than just their attendance in deciding whether they have fulfilled their obligations for receipt of the EMA.
Contracts or agreements are already widely used with success by voluntary sector organisations, including Barnardo’s and Rainer, in their programmes to re-engage young people and support their transition back to formal learning. The idea has been popular with young people. This something-for-something approach is also the model for our activity agreement and allowance pilots. In these, aimed at 16 and 17 year-olds who are not in education, employment or training, the agreement is tailored to the individual, following an assessment of their needs, and is designed and agreed with them.
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I will consider whether there is a case for any reference in primary legislation, but our current thinking is that guidance is the appropriate place for emphasising this approach. The noble Baroness will have heard my concern many times in the past, but it applies here too. If we were to set out requirements in primary legislation, they might risk making learning and support contracts too inflexible to respond to the specific needs of individuals, too formal to be effectively supportive and too prescriptive to allow for other innovative solutions that have been developed locally. However, as I say, I will consider this issue further.
The noble Baroness’s Amendment No. 15 goes further in proposing that participating in a learning and support contract should count as a way in its own right of fulfilling the central duty to participate. While we very much encourage local authorities to pursue a learning and support contract approach or similar measures where appropriate, we do not believe that this should be an alternative route, a way of fulfilling the duty to participate on a par with existing routes. A learning contract is not a form of learning in itself. The contract needs to describe a programme of learning, along with the support needed. It is a tool and approach that can be used to help re-engage young people who have struggled to engage in one of the other routes.
In addition, informal, tailored learning programmes of the kind often provided by voluntary sector organisations, including those we have mentioned, will count under the terms of Clause 4, and the entry to learning approach announced in the Children’s Plan in December will help to ensure that good-quality provision which supports progression into mainstream learning is encouraged and recognised.
While we are glad to see this important practice highlighted, and we are prepared to offer clear assurances that we will continue to seek to promote this contract approach to re-engagement in learning—I will look at whether there is a case for strengthening this in the legislation—we do not think that it should constitute a learning route in itself.
As regards Amendment No. 56 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, at present, the Learning and Skills Council is responsible for ensuring that there is appropriate provision for all 16 to 19 year-olds, and for funding that provision. The overall 16 to 19 budget is planned and allocated by the LSC to respond to learner demand so that all 16 to 19 year-olds who choose to do so have access to suitable provision.
However, we have announced that in future responsibility for commissioning and funding 16 to 19 provision will be transferred from the LSC to local authorities. We published our proposals for consultation in March and, subject to that consultation, will bring forward the necessary legislation in the next session. We expect that the calculation of funding for 16 to 19 courses will operate in the same way when local authorities take over responsibility from 2010-11.
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Once that change happens, local authorities will indeed have the power to decide what provision in their area should be funded and to pool budgets in precisely the way that the noble Lord said was desirable. Therefore, we are moving to precisely the regime that he described where budgets are pooled much more effectively at local level, but we require legislation before we can transfer the funding from the Learning and Skills Council to local authorities. That will be forthcoming in the next parliamentary session.
Lord Lucas: I am delighted at that good news and at the good news that we shall have an education Bill next year.
Lord Adonis: That is subject to decisions on the Queen’s Speech.
Baroness Walmsley: I thank noble Lords who supported these amendments or at least one of them. I thank the Minister for his further consideration of whether Amendment No. 50 should be included in the Bill. As regards his concern that it might be too prescriptive, by their very nature these learning and support contracts are exactly the opposite of that. I do not want to be too prescriptive about the way that local authorities work with young people to put the appropriate package of learning and support together. The very fact that they must be personally tailored militates against the possibility of their being too prescriptive. Therefore, I do not share that concern.
I understand the distinction that the noble Lord drew between Amendment No. 15 and Amendment No. 50 and between the learning and support contracts and the other kinds of education specified in the Bill. However, I notice that Clause 4(1)(b) ends with the words “or otherwise”. Might not a learning and support contract be regarded as “or otherwise” provision? I hope that he will consider that. Perhaps he is able to answer me now.
Lord Adonis: It depends what is in it.
Baroness Walmsley: It is supposed to lead on further and to be a gateway for those young people who are not ready for a course that leads to an accredited qualification. These young people may lack the social skills or study skills necessary to take part in training leading to an accredited qualification. Learning support contracts might provide them with a gateway to the very thing the Minister is hoping for. That is why we think they are so important.
I thank the Minister for his further consideration and other Members for their support. In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford moved Amendment No. 16:
“( ) The duty under this section shall not apply to any person until the Secretary of State has published an assessment of the availability of suitable education and training opportunities in each local authority area.”
The noble Baroness said: I shall speak also to Amendments Nos. 236 and 237 in our names and mention Amendment No. 17.
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These four amendments seek to delay the implementation of the compulsion measures in the Bill until the reforms for 14 to 19 year-olds currently under way are completed. A number of noble Lords share our feelings that a great many reforms are under way and that to some extent the Government are putting the cart before the horse. We talked earlier about the NEET group at which the Bill is targeted and about the demotivation that many of them experience in the current secondary school curriculum. The reforms are aimed at trying to motivate them better and encourage them to stay in education or enter training after the age of 16.
Many of these young people find the current GCSE/A-level curriculum much too academic—too elitist, in many senses. They will quite possibly learn by doing rather than by cognitive learning and didactic teaching. We feel it is necessary to wait to see whether the reforms work because there is the feeling that we have seen them before. Over the past 25 to 28 years, we have had YOPs, TOPs, GNVQs, TVEIs and vocational A-levels. All have come and gone.
The Tomlinson committee was set up in 2000 to address this issue. For three years, it deliberated with experts on the secondary school curriculum—teachers, academics and laymen. The proposal for the diploma embraced current GCSEs and A-levels but allowed for a degree of flexibility. As well as the introduction of practical modules of learning, those who thrived on the more academic courses could do a bit more practical work. In the event, as we all know, the Government rejected the Tomlinson proposal for overarching diplomas.
The current diploma proposal is a hybrid between the Tomlinson proposal and what the Government wanted. We discussed diplomas during the passage of the Higher Education Act 2004; initially they were called vocational diplomas, only we had to call them specialist diplomas. There were three clear streams—apprenticeship, diploma and GCSE/A-level—with remarkably little flexibility between them. I am glad to say that the Government have shifted their ground somewhat. Partly because of the introduction of the academic diplomas in science, humanities and languages, we are seeing some bridging of the two in the diploma stream. But it is not at all clear how much bridging will be carried out; nor is it clear how far there is going to be flexibility within GCSEs and the level 2 diplomas, because they have not worked themselves out.
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It is partly because the diplomas are still such an unknown quantity that we on these Benches feel that the sensible thing is to see whether these new initiatives work in trying to introduce more practical learning for those who are going to be motivated by learning and doing. If they work well, there is no problem. We can raise the learning leaving age because everyone will be involved, motivated and wanting to, but if they do not work and we have the same failures that we have seen in the past, it is premature to try to introduce compulsion.
Amendment No. 16 states that we should not introduce compulsion until we know whether the diplomas are going to work; hence, let us have a review of local provision to make sure that the new agenda is up and running and that it is running smoothly at the local
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Baroness Morris of Bolton: The noble Baroness, Lady Sharp of Guildford, is right about the swathe of change going on at the moment. She is also right to say that much of the success of this Bill will be predicated on the success of diplomas. We do not yet know what is going to happen there. These amendments would have the effect of delaying the coming into force of the duty until certain conditions have been met. This is necessary to avoid swathes of young people being caught out by a system that was not ready to take them, while they would be left to deal with the consequences. If the Government are going to press ahead with compulsion, we must make sure that it is not the system which is at fault for any avoidable failings.
As we have already made clear, many of these young people have been failed by the educational system before they reach school-leaving age. It would therefore be unforgivable to sweep them up under compulsion into a system that might let them down again. It would be unfair to compel a young person to participate, if in fact he or she was unable to do so. These delaying amendments switch the onus to the state so as to ensure that the necessary funding, framework and organisation is in place before the duty comes into force so that 16 and 17 year-olds are not left scrambling for places to avoid falling foul of the law.
In our amendment, one of the Government’s justifications, indeed if not the primary one, for sanctions, is that 100 per cent participation cannot be reached, but 90 per cent can. If that is so, there should be no need to impose a duty before that 90 per cent target has been achieved. If the Government are serious that the criminal sanctions in the Bill are to be reserved for only the most hard-to-reach 10 per cent, then why allow any of the others to risk being penalised? I would argue that the Government will never realistically reach more than 90 per cent participation and they are likely to get that far with inducements and encouragement alone. Imposing a criminal sanction is, in reality, extremely excessive.
Baroness Perry of Southwark: I have only a brief word to add. I have been around in education for a long time. While five years seems like a long time, it is not in education terms. I entirely support what the Liberal Democrat spokesman and my noble friend said. It would be common sense to allow the current 11 year-olds to run through with all the innovations that the Government have introduced, many of which we wholeheartedly support, and see what happens at the end of that process, before attempting to implement
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Lord Adonis: In response to Amendment No. 16, we absolutely acknowledge that we could not require all young people to participate in education and training until we believe there is a suitable route available for them in every area of the country; and this is already built into the policy and the legislation. That is precisely why we are not raising the participation age until 2013 for 17 year-olds and 2015 for 18 year-olds when the national entitlement to the new diplomas and the apprenticeship guarantee will be in place and the foundation learning tier for provision at entry and level 1 will be established. Furthermore, the September guarantee, which was implemented for the first time in every local area last year, guarantees an offer of a suitable learning place to all young people leaving year 11. This year it will be extended to 17 year-olds.
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