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6 pm
Baroness Sharp of Guildford: If the full-time education is delivered by a voluntary body, such as Barnardo’s or Fairbridge, and there is no accreditation at the end of it because it is an access course helping young people to begin to learn how to learn, would it be recognised? The Minister is saying that this only applies where the young person goes into part-time work with some training off the job. I was moved and interested the other day when we had a session with the Rose project, which works closely with further education colleges to place young people with considerable learning difficulties in jobs where they would acquire skills and self-esteem but would never be able to sit down and write an examination. I know the Government are introducing the foundation tier of qualifications, but the testimony we heard indicated that these young people would find it quite difficult to meet the requirements of those qualifications yet they were learning a great deal in these placements. Could the Minister clarify the situation for young people with learning difficulties in full-time education, either in a further education college or with a voluntary organisation, and where there is placement into a job?
Lord Adonis: I can confirm that the kind of provision specified in the noble Baroness’s Amendment No. 28 —appropriate full-time education or training which is not in a formal educational institution, is not accredited and includes personalised support for non-educational needs—is within the current scope of Clause 4.
Baroness Verma: I thank the Minister for taking us back to the land of milk and honey and clarifying the term “otherwise”. As usual, he ensures that we will all go away and read word for word his response in Hansard to ascertain whether we are indeed satisfied. My noble friends Lady Perry and Lord Lucas are right that the provision required for that difficult-to-reach group with learning disabilities must be appropriate
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As the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, said, we had the pleasure and privilege of meeting some young people with learning difficulties from the Rose project who would be completely excluded from employment if they had to have paper qualifications. I hope the Minister agrees that we need to have a serious look at those young people who, whatever method we put in front of them, will not be able to fulfil the criteria of a paper qualification. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
[Amendments Nos. 27 and 28 not moved.]
Clause 5 [Full-time occupation]:
Clause 6 [Relevant training or education]:
[Amendments Nos. 30 to 34 not moved.]
Clause 8 [Sufficient relevant training or education]:
Baroness Walmsley moved Amendment No. 35:
The noble Baroness said: I will also speak to Amendments Nos. 37 and 39 to 48 inclusive. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, for introducing us to the Rose project which raised issues about a group of young people who I had not thought about and who could be affected by the Bill. I encourage the Minster to find a way of looking into that.
The purpose of this group of amendments is to probe the meaning of the phrase “guided learning” and to have a debate about whether a young person’s duty to participate could be fulfilled by learning and practising for part of the time away from their instructor, whatever skill they are studying, as long as that work was specified by the instructor. If the instructor gives homework or work to be done in the library or on a building site or in a hairdressing salon, surely it might be legitimate to count that as qualifying learning.
I think there will be much confusion about what qualifies under Clauses 3 to 9. For example, is everyone going to have to add up the number of hours that they do throughout the year to know whether or not they qualify as participating? These amendments are designed to clarify the situation that might reasonably arise in the workplace so that we do not put the student outside the duties of the Bill.
I accept that all students will do homework, research, preparation—call it what you will. However, we must remember that we are not dealing with PhD students or even undergraduates but 16 year-olds who are often very disaffected and might not have stayed on in education at all had they not been compelled to do so.
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Every time we try a new skill, we fail the first time. This morning I coxed an eight on the river at Putney for the first time in my life and I did not do it perfectly. There was a bit of zigzagging going on. I am pleased to say that I did not hit anything, but I was very aware that there were eight men watching me fail. So I have sympathy with young people who are trying a skill for the first time and are perhaps a little bit self-conscious. It may help to build up their self-confidence if they are allowed to do some of the work somewhere else, as long as it is specified by the tutor and proof is given that it has been done. I beg to move.
Baroness Verma: Leaving out “guided learning” and inserting “learning time”, as the amendments would do, would allow a far more flexible approach to what is considered “relevant training or education”. Individuals may spend valuable time adding to their knowledge and skills in a way which is not possible in formal or guided learning, yet the Bill would not take that into account. The amendment recognises that preparation and private study time are important. All elements of study and learning play their part in a successful outcome. However, the implication of “guided learning” is important, suggesting that the training in question should be directed and mentored. Surely that is what we all want from the Bill. Mentoring is crucial to the success of the schemes. The young people we are talking about will not necessarily benefit from being left to their own devices; they may need someone to guide them towards achieving their potential.
Training should involve systematic training under a skilled mentor and should not end up simply as a work placement with the young person hanging around with nothing to do. Placing somebody in a workplace or training environment and leaving them to it is not the same as providing them with training or education. It is not enough to tick a box saying that another hour has been accounted for if nothing worth while takes place during it. A guided, mentored system is essential if we are to get anywhere with our aims. We hope that a balance can be struck in the Bill that recognises the importance of guidance but is not unimaginatively prescriptive about it.
I have had a meeting with the Association of Accounting Technicians, which worries that the Bill puts too much emphasis on input and not enough on output and takes insufficient account of different modes
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Lord Lucas: I am interested mostly in hearing the Minister’s explanation of how he will construe the phrase in question to take on board the various modes of computer-assisted learning that are available these days. Under the 280 hours-a-year rule, most courses at most British universities would fail.
Baroness Howe of Idlicote: After listening to this conversation I feel that both are required. Would it be too much to ask the Minister to see whether what is in the Bill can accommodate not only learning time but also guided learning? I hope it will be possible, because the flexibility which the noble Baroness’s amendment offers in allowing every form of learning and accreditation to be taken into account is important.
Lord Adonis: As the job of a cox in a rowing eight is pre-eminently one of guidance, I am sure that the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, did an excellent job. I shall seek advice on whether she was providing guided learning hours—I think it depends whether the course of instruction was properly accredited. There are ways in which she can seek accreditation if she wishes it to be taken into account for her relevant qualifications in future.
The noble Baroness seeks to probe the meaning of “guided learning hours”. I am happy to be able to tell her that, unusually for legislation, it does mean what it says: it means learning hours that are guided by a teacher or instructor. The guidance can be provided online but it has to be genuine guidance. It cannot simply be the provision of a course without guidance being provided online.
Guided learning hours are currently assigned to all qualifications, providing an easy and objective way for young people, employers and local authorities to tell whether a young person is meeting the requirement. It is not our policy that private study time should count towards this requirement although, as noble Lords have said, private study will be a valuable component of any overall course. We do not wish to allow private study to count not least because it could enable employers to avoid releasing young people for any training at all by claiming that they are doing all their learning unsupervised at home in the evenings or outside the normal working day.
The noble Baroness asked whether everyone will bureaucratically have to add up their number of guided learning hours. The answer is no. That is the purpose of Clause 8(2), which makes reference to a course or courses leading to an accredited qualification which has or have been assigned enough guided learning hours. The student will be able to tell whether their course has enough guided learning hours on that basis; they will not have to count up the number of learning hours that they experience.
6.15 pm
Baroness Perry of Southwark: I understand the Minister’s difficulty with bad employers who might wish to claim that time spent at home thinking about
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I taught for many years in American universities where one assumed that for every hour spent in the classroom there would be three hours of private study, leading to accreditation and credits. One did one’s teaching and lecturing on the basis that the students would have at least three hours of private study time either before or after the lecture. I am shocked at the idea that properly structured private study time will not count. Rather than excluding private study time, we need a better definition of properly structured and guided private study time.
Baroness Walmsley: I thank all noble Lords who have contributed. We are perhaps straying into the area of wanting to clarify exactly what we mean by “guided”, not just “guided learning”. I understood the Minister to mean that if a tutor, lecturer or teacher asked a young person to go away and do or read something, it could be regarded as “guided”—in which case private study, as long as it was sufficiently guided under the terms which the Minister used, could be regarded as “guided learning”.
The example of music students springs to mind. They may spend one or two hours a week with their teacher but they spend hundreds of hours a week practising. I suppose that if the tutor says, “These are the scales you have to practise; these are the pieces that I would like you to learn”, and the student does so, then that could be described as “guided”. But every hour that the student spends learning the instrument does not happen under the nose of the tutor, watched or assessed by him.
That is just one example that springs to mind. Despite the Minister’s attempt to clarify the issue, I am still confused by what would qualify as “guided learning”. I see that he has received another note. I wonder whether he would like to allay my confusion a little, or perhaps we should leave the matter until Report. Would he like to intervene?
Lord Adonis: I would like to intervene only to say that the words mean what I said—that guided learning must be learning that is under the guidance of an instructor or teacher. I was trying to tot up the hours in my head but have not succeeded. However, I am advised that it is inconceivable that a sixth form student of the kind that the noble Baroness mentions would not have more than seven hours’ teaching time a week, which would satisfy the hours requirement in the Bill. We can continue to bat this backwards and forwards,
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Lord Lucas: My noble friend is quite right. I would not expect a student in the second year of three A-level courses to sit in front of teachers for 21 hours a week, which is what would be required. Two hundred and eighty hours a year is essentially the time it takes to do an A-level; that is the time allowance. Noble Lords mentioned accreditation and the hours that come with the course. My memory is that 280 hours is assigned as the guided learning time for an A-level. But a lot of that guidance in the second year is, “Go away and do this”. If that is what is meant by guidance then we would have far less of a problem with it than we would if it meant that they should be sitting in front of a tutor.
If you are using a computer-based learning programme, you will be sat down in front of it. The teacher will probably come back at the end of the period to review briefly what you have done and to pat you on the shoulder and say, “Well done. We’ll look at that next week”, or, “Would you like five minutes on this particular thing that is causing you difficulty?”. The teacher interaction is performed essentially by the computer, and it is done extremely well especially in mathematics. There are also some very good language courses and no doubt similar ways of doing it.
We are introducing computer-assisted learning to the Prison Service as the way in which prisoners will learn. Presumably there will be some pretty low-level courses taught through computers there, and it will not involve an interaction with teachers other than occasionally. What is happening is under guidance, because much of the guidance is provided by the programme. Much of the measurement and assessment is also provided by the programme. In a way, the teacher just supervises that. If that is guidance, we may be less worried about it than the idea that there should be a teacher, as the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, says, sitting there looking over people’s shoulders for seven hours a week. That is essentially what this provision requires, with a 40-week learning year, which I suspect is about what we would have. It is a question of what is meant by guidance. It affects the whole question of how this part of the Bill is understood.
When they get to university, many students will be lucky to have six hours a week in front of a teacher. Many get less, maybe four or five hours. In a 36-week university year—and that is stretching it when you take out the time allocated to examinations—there is far less than 280 hours of teaching taking place on a whole course, let alone for an individual examination. This concept of guidance needs filing down so that we understand what is meant. If the only way of establishing the number of hours is through what comes packaged with the course, we will come back to accreditation and the course having to go through some process that establishes the number of hours associated with it. Much of the education that I hope people will take under the Bill is not of that form.
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In a way we are with the Minister in not wanting to impose a system that allows people to escape around the sides by being unsupervised at home yet still being educated. It has to be interpreted constructively. Something along the lines of “under the supervision of” rather than “guidance” is needed. If the cox only steered the boat for five minutes in every hour, we would be in trouble, but a teacher who has given instructions or uses a computer to help the student follow a course of instructions does not need to be there all the time. Indeed, they probably should not be there all the time. We should allow for that sort of flexibility in the way that we interpret this phrase.
Baroness Walmsley: I thank the Minister for that further clarification. I have to accept what he says about A-levels. I hear what the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, says about university courses, but we are dealing here with 16 to 18 year-olds, not university courses. I still worry about somebody who might want to study a musical instrument between the ages of 16 and 18, rather than stay on in some other kind of course, because they would fall foul of this specification. I tentatively suggest that the Government’s mistake is to specify a number of hours. Elsewhere, the Bill simply gives the number of hours required to provide an accredited course. I think that the word used is “sufficient”. Clearly, I will have to read this debate again and think carefully about whether I need to probe further. I am somewhat reassured by what the Minister said about “guided” meaning “guided”, because some of my concerns would be covered by a reasonably liberal interpretation of the word. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Lord Layard moved Amendment No. 36:
The noble Lord said: I will speak also to Amendment No. 38, because both amendments are about the definition of education and training. This is crucial to the Bill. When we first heard about the Bill, the Secretary of State said that it would require at least one day a week, or the equivalent, of off-the-job education or training. That is why many of us were excited by, and welcomed, the Bill. Yet when one looks at its detail, one finds no reference to off-the-job education or training, nor any guarantee of one day a week or the equivalent. These amendments seek to rectify those omissions, and thus to implement the Secretary of State’s original promise. This is not a minor issue; it is central to the character of the Bill. If this is to be a landmark Bill that reduces the huge educational inequalities in our country, it has to do more than simply improve the very specific skills of those affected by it. It must also raise their general ability to think about what they are doing, to analyse a problem and to communicate in writing. In a world in which specific skills rapidly become obsolete, it is these transferable skills that are important if we want to raise the educational level of the country’s less educated people.
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