| Previous Section | Back to Table of Contents | Lords Hansard Home Page |
The noble Baroness said: I shall speak also to Amendment No. 27. These amendments are designed to provoke and explore thoughts on what form appropriate full-time education and training might take. It must not be forgotten that non-formal learning can be supportive of and complementary to formal education. We should make sure that provisions in the Bill have regard to those programmes which do not necessarily lead to an accredited qualification but which can help young people to overcome issues related to their wider family and personal life that may have had a negative effect on their ability to engage in formal education.
Non-formal education provides opportunities for volunteering and participation in youth work which can develop necessary and basic skills which had hitherto been lacking. For some young people who are currently failing in, and being failed by, the formal system, non-formal education may be more suitable. If they have already disengaged from the education system, this could be a way of re-engaging them and preventing them from disappearing from the system altogether. The important thing is not to ensure that everyone by the time they turn 18 has a piece of paper with a qualification written on it, but that they have picked up the skills they need to take control of their own lives. I beg to move.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford: I shall speak to Amendments Nos. 28 and 31 in this group. They are both important amendments because, as the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, mentioned, the Bill is targeted at the 10 per cent of school rejectors—the NEETs about whom we spoke at length in Committee previously. Many of these young people drop out of school when they are 14 or 15 having failed to have been motivated by the school curriculum. Many have minimal literacy and numeracy and many have special educational needs which have not been picked up earlier within the school system or, if they have been picked up, have not received the help and support that they need. For many of these young people, the experience of school
1 July 2008 : Column 170
It may be that the various reforms to the education system—the personalised learning that we are introducing in primaries and at key stage 3 in secondaries, and the new diplomas—will have the effect of motivating these young people and that the problem with which we are now concerned will largely disappear. But we all have doubts as to whether this will really happen and Amendment No. 28 provides for the kind of programme that would be suitable for these young people. As the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, mentioned, basically they may be motivated by a work environment.
The Bill envisages that each person will have a personal mentor and that the programme of education and training set for each would be personalised. In the hearings held in the other place before the full committee sessions commenced, Barnardo’s, the Prince’s Trust and Fairbridge, in their evidence, made it clear that intensive work with these young people can help to get them back into education and training but that it takes time. The other day we also heard moving testimony from the Rose Trust that young people with learning difficulties can hold down jobs, which gives them confidence and self-esteem. They learn a lot from such employment, but never enough to take accredited tests or qualifications because their learning disabilities are too great to do so. It is vital that there should be a place in the Bill which recognises this.
I was heartened by the letter sent to my honourable friend the Member of Parliament for Yeovil on 13 February—I thank the Minister for circulating it —where, in the second paragraph, Jim Knights, the Minister in the other place, said:
“As I have said before, I do not believe that there should be groups of young people who are formally exempt from the duty to participate, and I have emphasised our belief that it is desirable for all young people to continue learning, wherever possible. We must put our efforts into developing suitable learning provision that is flexible and personalised enough, and providing the right support”.
Our two amendments aim to do precisely that. Amendment No. 28 seeks that regulations must provide that the appropriate “education or training” referred to in Clause 2 can take place not only in a formal educational institution but also through voluntary service or in a work environment; that it is not required to be accredited and includes personalised support for non-educational needs. Amendment No. 31 adds the rider to the “relevant training or education” in Clause 6 that, where a course is not accredited, it is part of a personalised learning programme.
Amendment No. 31 links up with two amendments we shall be discussing after Clause 10 relating to what a personalised learning programme might be and whether local authorities have the capacity to deliver such a programme. Both are important amendments and touch, to some extent, on the core of the Bill: how can we encourage back into education this 10 per cent of young people who have deserted or are deserting it? As we discussed on the previous occasion, if they are breaking the law by not attending school when they are under 16, why should we expect them to attend
1 July 2008 : Column 171
Baroness Perry of Southwark: I hope that when the Minister replies to the amendments he will tell us that the Government already envisage a much wider spread of places in which education can take place—not least, for example, in the Youth Service, where excellent programmes are widely provided and where young people have a genuine progressive-gradient educational experience in many different aspects. This is knowledge-based in some cases as well, although I, too, think that is an interesting phrase.
I endorse what has been said about the contribution of employers, many of whom take their responsibilities extremely seriously. Although their qualifications have not been necessarily accredited by the all-powerful Ofqual or the QCA in the past—I declare an interest as having been on the advisory committee of QCA for some considerable time—they are widely respected and recognised, often internationally as well as nationally. Some of the large multinational companies provide education which is of a higher standard than the more formal—dare I say it?—public examinations that we have in this country. I look forward to the Minister’s reply and I trust that he will tell us the Government accept that.
Baroness Howe of Idlicote: I endorse what the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, has just said. I, too, hope that this is part of the Government’s thinking. Having listened to what has been said and having read the letter from Jim Knight—to whom we are grateful for the detailed ideas—it seems that all four amendments go entirely in the right direction. They will certainly enable far more young people in a disadvantaged state to participate and gain some qualifications which will help them on their way. Some of the stories are remarkable: disadvantaged young people who have completely rejected education so far and come away with no skills or basic qualifications, can suddenly be re-inspired to join the rest of us and go on to lead useful lives. We must do everything possible for them. “Mentor” is the right word here. It is absolutely crucial in situations like this that there is a mentoring scheme.
Lord Lucas: We are back to a couple of themes we discussed on the last day. One is the need to have great flexibility for the local authority to decide what particular pattern of education is appropriate to any individual young person. You cannot specify these things from the centre. You are dealing with individual difficulty, character and circumstance. There has to be flexibility within an overall responsibility to allow the form of education provided to fit the case.
You are dealing, in a lot of circumstances, with people who are not at level 2. They are somewhere around level zero and have developed nothing but bad habits in the course of their education. They have ended up extremely averse to formal education and have great gaps and inadequacies in their knowledge. They have developed social habits which make them unemployable, like not turning up on time for anything or usage of language and methods of behaviour which would be likely to result in an early termination of
1 July 2008 : Column 172
This business of accreditation has become a method of control—I know things have changed— and the QCA and related organisations control what should be taught and allowed. It comes back again to an issue I have raised previously. One of the difficulties in the Prison Service is that there are no level zero accredited programmes available for PSHE and related areas or all the work that goes on in the arts. You somehow have to graft a bit of literacy or numeracy on to your arts programme in order to get an accreditation to go with it.
There seems to be a belief that you can take these people at the bottom—they are absolutely flat on the floor—and make them employable by giving them a GSCE. First, you have to get them to take an interest in education. That will take an unaccredited course of some kind—at least unaccredited under the present system. Accreditation in terms of putting academic hurdles into the qualifications should not be there. You are not trying to evaluate what these people have done, you are just trying to get them started. Secondly, a system which is so rigid and based on accreditation is never going to work in the sort of environment that particular young people want to be in.
5.45 pm
There are all sorts of ways to get educated when you are that age. Experience comes in all kinds of forms. As my noble friend Lady Perry has said, a lot can be provided through an employer who is dedicated to looking after the young people in their charge. They are not going to want to leap through the hoops. How long is it taking a professional organisation like Cambridge Assessment to get one of their exams through? An employer will not go through that for their own in-house experience. There has to be some way in which following such a course is allowed. The right way to do that is surely to allow a local authority discretion. It should get to know what is available locally, what the results are when young people go through that course, and that should become an available option for them. If something is much bigger than that, or national, perhaps accreditation is appropriate. One way or another, we have to approach this with great flexibility and understanding, and not try to cram these young people into a framework devised essentially for the other 90 per cent, but not them.
Baroness Morris of Yardley: I have two comments on this. The amendments are interesting and I do not disagree with them in principle for trying to find ways of engaging and supporting young people, making sure that they leave this period of their lives well equipped to go into the next. I would be grateful if the Minister could respond to two issues that are on my mind.
We have to be careful not to see the 16 to 18 group as not joined on to the 11 to 16 group. There is a real danger that we are seeing two curricula. We talk about
1 July 2008 : Column 173
Secondly, I still have a great wish to see children and young people get accredited courses. If I were to choose a different word and say they need to get courses where their progress is recognised and recorded, would that more meet the needs? I hope that my noble friend will respond to those two points. What are the safeguards against us not having the mindset that looks to this variety of courses in Year 12 and Year 13 when we could have introduced them earlier on? Where is the continuity; how are we bridging the gap between those years when they are subject to the national curriculum and those when we have more flexibility? On the accredited courses, I would be sorry if we moved to a situation where young people did not leave this extended period of compulsory education with at least a recognition or record of the progress that had been made. I am not sure whether that is “accredited”. I would like my noble friend to respond to that.
Baroness Perry of Southwark: To respond to the noble Baroness’s point, which I absolutely understand and accept, we on these Benches are arguing about the nature of the accreditation. At the moment it is so rigid it has to be through Ofqual—the QCA as was. Yet multinational companies like Microsoft, BP and British Aerospace offer a real gradient of qualifications which are not accredited by anybody but themselves. If a young person who has been through such a programme—be it McDonalds’ well-graded system, Microsoft’s or whoever—is looking for a job elsewhere, employers are going to be just as happy, if not more so, with that than with an “educational” qualification that has been through the tortuous processes of accreditation by Ofqual.
We are asking for something that bursts the rigid boundaries of Ofqual. It is a pity to vilify the new organisation, the QCA, and its tortuous processes of accreditation when there are other perfectly respectable forms of accreditation, including from those employers, which are not within its boundaries.
Lord Adonis: I am in the happy position of being able to satisfy everyone who has spoken, to some degree. I was going to say I would be able to respond entirely positively to three of the four issues but, in being negative about the fourth amendment, I am responding specifically to the point raised by my noble friend Lady Morris in a positive way. So, here comes the land of milk and honey.
In response to the first two amendments, moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, I assure her that home education and education in the workplace meet
1 July 2008 : Column 174
“In this Part, ‘appropriate full-time education or training’, in relation to a person, means full-time education or training which is suitable for the person, having regard ... to the person’s age, ability and aptitude, and ... to any learning difficulty which the person may have, and is provided at a school, at a college of further education, at an institution within the higher education sector”—
and then, crucially, the two concluding words—
Those two words fully encompass appropriate full-time educational training that takes place at home or in the workplace.
Amendment No. 28, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, raises the important issue of non-formal education and training. We agree with her that appropriately tailored and personalised programmes of learning will be essential to engaging some of the young people who are hardest to reach. Some of those may not take place in formal educational institutions; they may happen, for example, at a centre run by one of the voluntary organisations mentioned by the noble Baroness, although some colleges and local authority providers have also developed excellent practice in providing flexible tailored learning programmes integrated with support. Young people may not find these more formal settings appropriate to their needs; where alternative providers are able to meet those needs better, they can do so under the Bill.
In Amendment No. 31, however, the noble Baroness seeks to allow for personalised learning programme-type provision for those in work undertaking part-time training. As I have just outlined, that type of provision may be the appropriate route for some young people and will be a valid way of participating in full-time education under Clause 4. It may also be a perfectly valid activity for those who are in work and need support to engage in training or education alongside it. However, it is our view that such programmes should not, for the purposes of the law, count towards the part-time training and education requirement under Clause 6 for that reason. It is important, in our view, that young people have the opportunity to acquire accredited training and qualifications that enable them to demonstrate what they have learnt to future employers, helping them to progress in work and to adapt to changes in the labour market.
Without a requirement for accreditation in respect of part-time educational training, there would be no guarantee of the quality or the quantity of the training undertaken in the workplace, and we would create a loophole whereby employers could provide very little training, or indeed none, under the guise of personalised learning programmes or suchlike. That is part of the issue raised by my noble friend Lady Morris, who wanted to see that people are making recognised progress in their learning beyond the age of 16.
I am able to meet three of the four points raised. I am sorry I cannot meet the fourth, but it is for the reasons I have just given.
1 July 2008 : Column 175
Lord Lucas: We are back to the problem of accreditation again. Why does it have to go through these Ofqual hoops to be acceptable for the purposes of the Bill, when for the purposes of life afterwards there are all sorts of other things that will do just as well but happen not to be accredited? Can we not allow local authorities the flexibility to take on board, particularly at level zero, courses that, as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, says, give you a record of progress—a certificate of completion, fine, but not an accredited qualification? Most of these courses will do that, because if someone has gone through the courses successfully they will want the badge. Something that gets them started again and on the road to education can be an enormously important part of doing right by the children at the bottom of the pile between the ages of 16 and 18, but it will never be accredited in the way that Ofqual means. If an employer is offering something, someone must say whether it is satisfactory, but that person surely should be the local authority, which is at the appropriate level to take that sort of view, while Ofqual is just too far away to ever look at it. To clamp everyone into the formalities of an accredited qualification does not do right by those at the bottom of the pile.
Lord Adonis: The difference between us is less than the noble Lord has just set out. As I said in our previous debates on this issue, accreditation does not apply to full-time courses, where providers, by definition, will overwhelmingly be colleges or established education providers—provided that they can attract the funding from the local authority or the Learning and Skills Council, until local authorities take it over—and can be the best judge of the courses that young people want to take up, responding to demand. We are dealing here with the specific and much more limited issue of part-time courses for people in work. As I have set out, our concern is that, without accreditation, anything might go in respect of training provided by employers; it could be low quality or indeed of no quality at all.
The noble Lord, who is alive to this issue, did not say in his concluding remarks that there should be no check; he was proposing a different check from the one in place. He thinks that local authorities themselves should play the accreditation role. That is an issue for discussion. It is not a proposal I had heard before. We would be concerned about the capacity of local authorities to undertake that role, but I am happy to respond to him on that point when I have been able to consider it more fully. I would simply point out that that is effectively a different form of accreditation; it is not saying that there should be no accreditation.
Lord Lucas: Local authorities do this sort of thing all the time. They build all sorts of inspectorates, which they run very successfully. I do not see that they cannot be trusted. Most of the time they will use formally accredited qualifications, but there will be times when something else is right for an individual. Under the Bill, local authorities are focusing on individuals because they are ultimately responsible for bringing prosecutions against individual young people. They will be very focused on individuals’ needs. I do not want to see them tied to offering only courses that are
1 July 2008 : Column 176
The big providers such as FE colleges can offer any course they want. Will they get funded for them, though? Most of the funding mechanisms in FE rely on the qualification being accredited. It was a hard enough battle, when the system came in of funding A-levels according to points, to allow any space within the FE funding mechanism for all the extras that sixth-form colleges had traditionally offered students. Although some funding was kept, there was noticeable shrinkage at that stage, and there is little, if any, allowance for activities outside the strict curriculum for vocational qualifications. Enrichment does not seem to be part of the funding mechanism. If an FE college wants to offer level-zero qualifications to improve people’s employability, sociability, management of money or any of the problems that young people present with, from where will it get the funding if the qualifications are not accredited?
| Next Section | Back to Table of Contents | Lords Hansard Home Page |