Education and Skills Bill
12:00 pm
Jim Knight (Minister of State (Schools and Learners), Department for Children, Schools and Families; South Dorset, Labour)
A final supplementary, before I finish with Nigel, is on the research. Clearly your research had a slightly different answer from the Government’s research. Do you agree that it has been quite difficult within the nature of the public debate to differentiate a raising of the school leaving age, which a lot of the media and some people believed we were proposing, and the reality of what we are proposing around a duty to participate? Under our proposal, leaving school at 16 and going to work, for example, as long as you do 280 hours of training, is one of the options that would be available to young people. Do you think that might have corrected some confusion and explained some of the difference perhaps?