I beg to move amendment No. 160, in clause 65, page 35, line 22, leave out ‘may’ and insert ‘must’.

Mr. Bayley, I apologise for my late arrival at the sitting.

I say at the outset that the proposed amendment is probing; I will not be asking the Committee to vote on it this afternoon. Also, some of the ground covered by the amendment has been covered previously in Opposition amendments. I was encouraged by some of the assurances that my hon. Friend the Minister was able to give and the importance that the Government attaches to the position of young people with special educational needs in the context of the Bill and specifically in the context of assessments.

The amendment comes from the Special Education Consortium. I emphasise that the fact that it is a probing amendment in no way diminishes the importance of the subject matter. The purpose of the amendment, which deals with some of the issues we have discussed from a different direction, is to give local education authorities, which, through the transfer process, are taking on onerous responsibilities for the first time, a duty to conduct a school-leaving assessment for all young people who have learning difficulties, not just those who have an SEN statement.

As we have already heard, currently the Bill contains only a power for LEAs to assess those young people with SEN but without a statement. It was the poet Stephen Spender who said that power ends in weariness and duty, but in the context of the amendment, power and duty are separate: power, is only a pale imitation of duty. It is the concern that that power will not empower young people with special educational needs that brings the various organisations in the Special Educational Consortium, including Barnardo’s, I CAN, the Royal National Institute of Blind People, the Royal National Institute for Deaf People and the National Autistic Society to voice their concerns. My hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood (Roger Berry) and I expressed those concerns when the Bill that became the Education and Inspections Act 2006 was going through Parliament, so this is not new territory for me.

The consortium is concerned because the proposal to extend to the age of 18 the requirement to stay on is a crucial one for disabled pupils and pupils with special educational needs. It is decidedly not the case that all those young people who fall into the category of having special educational needs have statements. We have heard again some of the arguments for that. For example, the Disability Rights Commission found in a 2003 survey that non-disabled young people are twice as likely as their disabled peers to transfer to sixth form or college at 16-plus. That has a significant impact on their life chances. According to DRC statistics, by the age of 19, 9 per cent. of non-disabled young people are not in education, employment or training, whereas three times as many, 27 per cent. of disabled young people, are NEET. Because of this, disabled young people and young people with SEN have the most to gain from participating in education and training between the ages of 16 and 18.

The former Select Committee on Education and Skills considered those matters. We have heard previously how important it is that the support that is given to young people with special educational needs is continued post-16 in a way that it has not been in the past. The direction of Government policy is to reduce reliance on statementing. The guidance issued by the  Department for Education and Skills in 2001 highlighted all the advantages of that approach, but the Department showed its concern about the statementing by asking the Select Committee to look again at the question of separation of funding from statementing. We have heard in a previous debate about some of the pressures that may bring some local authorities to duck out of statementing.

Overall, however, there is no doubt that new legislation needs to support and not undermine the cultural shift against statementing. LEAs do vary in their policies on issuing statements. It is not always the case that, for example, young people who come under School Action or School Action Plus have missed out of statements. It is not as simple as that; the process is much more complex. Furthermore, there is great variation in LEA statements in practice. I can confirm that from the evidence that was taken in the Education and Skills Committee’s SEN inquiry.

What I am asking the Minister to do this afternoon is to reflect further on some of the points that have been made and to go away and talk with his officials about how some of the guidance might be beefed up. There is a real concern in the SEN community that, as an unintended consequence of the transfer process, the situation in which we have first-class and second-class special educational needs young people—those who go through a proper assessment process and those who do not—could, in some cases, be at risk of expanding. I know that that is not the Government’s intention, nor the intention of anyone on this Committee, but because those concerns exist in the community, I ask the Government to reflect further on what more they can do to ensure that those fears do not become a reality.