Education and Skills Bill
12:00 pm
Nigel Haynes: Your point about a conversation is essential. You also have to consider someone coming back from a long period of exclusion, absenteeism or, indeed, a sentence. If you ask them to attend a statutory number of hours a week you are not necessarily going to get that conversation. If you offer them two days as a pathway into the programme then you are more likely to be able to have the conversation, which is one not just of obligation and compulsion but one of personal need.
The sooner you can get a young person to recognise that change is important and that it is for their own benefit that they will gain education or experience and that they can succeed, then you will move it away from a mark of failure. You do not want marks of failure. I am talking about the cohort we work with. You do not need to reinforce failure. Goodness me, they know that it is there.
What you have to start doing is building value and that value comes from choice and it comes from being able to work in partnership with good choices and options and you will get them to move forward.