Clause 43
12:45 pm
Jim Knight (Minister of State (Schools and Learners), Department for Children, Schools and Families; South Dorset, Labour)
I shall be relatively brief. We have heard the intention behind the amendments, which deal with a power that has never been used by the Learning and Skills Council. We think that it is important that those powers remain to direct FE institutions to provide for a named individual, so that there is a motivation for those institutions, if there was a problem, to co-operate. They have never been used, and it is right for them to be transferred to the local authority, rather than the YPLA. If we did not do so, a local authority seeking to meeting the duties set up in clause 40 would find that if it needed to direct an institution to accept a learner, it would have to go through the bureaucratic burden—I know that the hon. Gentleman is concerned about the burdens, because he goes on about them a lot—of getting the YPLA to issue an instruction, rather than them doing it themselves. It is an important tool in local authorities’ toolbox, enabling them to deliver their obligations to rise the participation age.
It is not, however, about giving local authorities more control over colleges. The colleges will remain as autonomous as they are now—they will have their own governing body and business practices, with reduced inspection for good providers. Local authorities will have no more control than they do now. We want colleges to be self-confident, self-improving, autonomous bodies that can deliver a high-quality set of provisions—that is the vision that underpins the Bill. There is nothing in the direction powers which, as I said, have yet to be used, that would undermine that in any way, and I urge the hon. Gentleman to withdraw his amendment.