Education and Skills Bill

Part of the debate – in a Public Bill Committee at 12:00 pm on 22 January 2008.

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Professor Alison Wolf: It is partly the first point. This is not a group to get so worried about that you need risk what I think could be a very harmful backwash from the Bill. It is also something else. These young people are citizens; they should have exactly the same entitlements as their more academic peers who stay in school full-time to do A-levels and go on to higher education. They should have exactly the same entitlement to education and training later, but they should be able to take that when they want, in the courses that they want and at a period in their careers that makes sense.

At the moment, the choices, the bureaucracy and the restrictions leave the 50 to 60 per cent. who do not go on to higher education seriously disadvantaged in many ways compared with their favoured A-level-taking, and sometimes BTEC national-taking, peers. The message is not that 16-year-olds who leave school should never even think about doing any education or training. Quite the opposite: we cannot second-guess when that education or training should take place, so they should have that the chance to take up that entitlement when they need it. There is no particular reason to suppose, in many of those cases, that 17 is the age at which they most need it. That is what I would like to see happen.