Clause 10
Education and Skills Bill
1:30 pm
David Laws (Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, Children, Schools and Families; Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
I certainly agree with the first point that support outside the school or educational setting is as important, and we welcome many of the measures in that area. Our point, and that of many of the bodies that have made representations to us, is that there is still a big gap in reality between the level of support needed and what is available.
In the final part of its representations, the Special Educational Consortium says that it recognises
“that the duties set out in this amendment could not be implemented until the funding and the responsibility are transferred to local authorities”.
That obviously requires further legislation. The consortium wants a commitment from the Minister that when the Government introduce legislative proposals, they will include a duty on local authorities to secure sufficient and appropriate provision.
Other groups that gave evidence to the Committee have made many similar points. TreeHouse, a charity for those with autism, said in its representations that there was a need to strengthen the responsibilities on local authorities.
We received detailed representation from Barnardo’s, which gave oral evidence to the Committee. Sadly, its detailed amendments came to me slightly too late to be included, but they seek a similar effect to amendment No. 165. Barnardo’s approaches the matter from a slightly different perspective from that of Conservative Members because it is more sympathetic than we are to the compulsion and criminalisation elements. However, it agrees strongly that the Bill will work only if there is appropriate provision for those hard-to-reach young people, and that it needs to go beyond education and training.
The paper from Barnardo’s to the Committee details the four priority areas for expansion of existing services. It refers to the need for more work-based learning— particularly transitional provision to reconnect the most disaffected and disengaged young people and to help them to address barriers. It suggests that at the moment, support services are not adequate for young people, which includes teenage parents, young carers, young people with learning difficulties and disabilities, and those with mental health problems. It also wants to see an expansion in provision, with suitable routes for progression, for young people with learning difficulties, many of whom drop out at 16 or take repeated courses.
There is widespread concern—among both those who do not support the existing compulsion and criminalisation and those who do—that there must be a greater acceptance by local authorities of their duties to provide. There must be adequate funding, not only from central Government but also from local authorities, to provide those services that can often be very expensive.
In earlier sittings, the Minister acknowledged his willingness to open up the possibility of a fourth option that does not restrain us to something that looks like education and training in its narrowest sense. The clause indicates that the obsession with activities to do with what we regard as education and training, is very much there in the Bill. We want to ensure that that is widened out so that young people who need other routes back into education and training can have those routes opened up to them— in exceptional cases, even for long periods of time—and to ensure that there is a realistic pathway back into education and training.