Education and Skills Bill
12:00 pm
Nigel Haynes: Yes and no. To a certain degree, you have to start by looking at the NEETs base and coming up with a pretty good definition of who is in the deep NEETs spectrum—the persistent offender, the drug user and so on—and what you are going to do about it. The guys you met, if you met them on the first day, will be very different from the guys you met subsequently. You are right to say that the programme is cost-intensive. We work on a one-to-four basis, and keeping the participants interested and engaged is important.
But I put it to you, what are the options? If you make it compulsory, they will not turn up anyway, so you will be dealing with a problem on the street. The evidence from our group that compulsion works is not very strong at present, but the evidence for getting them to want to participate is very strong. This will not apply to everybody. As I started, where I am coming from, are those in deep NEET—the exclusion bracket for which you must make some provision. It will not apply to everybody, and I think that compulsion works in the majority of cases if there are interesting courses.
May I say one more thing? I totally agree with what Mr. Knight said about the publicity surrounding the programme. A lot of it has been about extended school, not extended opportunity for learning, or tracks into employment. A bit has been missing in the communication, in the fact that, for the majority of people—not all of them—you are opening up something that has not existed before. We know that 16 to 18-year-olds have always been difficult because they are out of education, not on benefits, and not into new deal. What are they doing?