Written evidence to be reported to the House
Education and Skills Bill
12:00 pm
Martin Ward: We could be accused of willing the end but not the means here. We would emphasise a point on which I think we all agree: we should start by persuading or enticing young people, and we should make sure that a wide range of suitable provision is available to them all. Until that is the case, it would be quite wrong to compel them or to penalise them in any way for not going along with our desires. We need to start at that end. We would argue that that will, in practice, bring in virtually every young person.
Who will be left? Some young people will be in a sort of crisis, as we have described before; some will have mental health problems and will not be behaving rationally. It seems to us that those remaining categories of people deserve not punishment, but more help. It would still be possible, then, to say that we expect everybody to be involved, but that we will not actually lock them up. Now I know that is not actually in there.