Education (16 to 19-year-olds)

Part of Prayers – in the House of Commons at 12:15 pm on 17 May 1996.

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Photo of Mr Andrew Rowe Mr Andrew Rowe , Kent Mid 12:15, 17 May 1996

I am deeply grateful to the hon. Gentleman, who is a paragon of new Labour. The media, and sometimes even a few doubting Thomases on the Conservative Benches, occasionally question the extent to which new Labour differs from old Labour. I should have thought that the Labour party would welcome the clear demonstration of the yawning gulf between old and new Labour characterised by the quotations that I have just offered the House.

The subject of 16 to 19-year-olds is one of the most important that faces our nation. It involves the whole question of how we create a society in which, under all the pressures of modern life and the fragmentation of households, young people can enter school and enter training sufficiently self-confident in themselves to be able to take full advantage of those opportunities.

I shall end with a plug for what we shall do next Wednesday, when some 800 people will go to Coventry cathedral for a day of discussion, with the assistance of young people themselves, about the kind of world in which they are growing up and in which they want to grow up. I hope that that occasion will send a message to the nation. If we do not look after our young, we are looking after nothing.