Debate on the Address

My Lords, we shall shortly hear the first of the maiden speeches, which we eagerly anticipate. In order not to delay the House for too long, I shall focus most of my remarks on the proposed Further Education and Training Bill. The Church of England has a long history of engagement with skills education, dating back to the early days of apprentice education in the medieval period, when the chaplain was responsible for the teaching of literacy and numeracy skills to young people in the guilds, trades and chapels, as they are still called in the print trade in London. The first FE college was in London—the Working Men’s College in Camden—which still dispenses an excellent range of skills courses to mainly adult students. It was founded in 1854 by Christian socialists F. D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley, and throughout the 19th century other educational initiatives for young people and adults were developed, usually with secular partners. Last July, the General Synod debated further education and produced its own report, Pushing Further. The opening sentence of that report states: ““FE changes lives””. Many will bear witness to the effect that FE can have in rescuing a young life going off the rails, encouraging young adults to develop the specialised skills to reach their full potential or enabling a single mother or a refugee to start on the road to fulfilment and employment. FE is important but it is often undervalued, which is why we especially welcome the Bill and the Government’s commitment to raising the profile of FE. We also salute the national skills strategy, so vital for the future of this country’s economic interests but also for the benefit of each young person. We wholeheartedly support the Bill’s main purpose, which we understand is to enable the provision of the full range of 14 to 19 education for young people—vocational and skills options as well as academic opportunities—through partnerships in every area between healthy, thriving FE colleges, excellent sixth forms and sixth-form colleges, and employers. However, we have one or two other comments and one major concern. Our comments refer first to the consultation mechanisms. The Learning and Skills Council’s strategy, Framework for Excellence, identifies three constituencies where consultation is vital—employers, learners and communities—but proposes consultation mechanisms for only two: employers and learners. The Bill repeats this limitation. Why cannot a mechanism be devised for consulting community interests, where the church and faith communities would be happy to play their part and would have much to contribute? Secondly, we are disturbed by proposals announced earlier this month by the Learning and Skills Council that free further education and English language courses are to end for asylum seekers over the age of 18. These measures will also impact on those under 18 in asylum-seeking families. If parents are not entitled to language provision but their children are, the burden of translation and interpretation will fall more heavily on the children. Because of the disruption in their early education, many teenage asylum seekers start their further education late. To have their studies disrupted when they turn 19 seems a waste of talent and resource. Our major concern is that we had hoped that the opportunity would be taken in the Bill to correct a historical anomaly. In schools, 16 to 19 year-olds have an entitlement to provision for their spiritual, moral, social and cultural development, while those in FE colleges do not. In its draft form, the Bill makes no reference to extending this entitlement to FE students. The implication, which is that the Government do not consider that young people in FE colleges have spiritual and moral needs and that colleges have no duty to meet those needs, does not bear thinking about. We are sure that this anomaly is a historical accident, in that the Education Act 1944 and the Education Reform Act 1988 which underpin this entitlement did not cover FE colleges, and FE students were, in the past, mainly on a part-time or day-release course. This argument is not about chaplaincy. We welcomed the endorsement of multi-faith chaplaincy arrangements in the White Paper earlier this year, and we are working with many of the 50 per cent of colleges that have not had chaplaincies to bring this about. This entitlement is about equality of esteem for vocational and academic students, something that the Bill is designed to achieve. Even more importantly, it is about supporting colleges in ensuring that students of all faith backgrounds and those of no religious faith are enabled to explore—and challenge where appropriate—their faith background. The exclusion of faith from college campuses makes students more vulnerable to outside influences, which can sometimes be extremist, with all the potential dangers that that has for social cohesion and even security. It is when educational institutions celebrate and validate faith—in festivals and chaplaincies, certainly, but also in their overall provision—that students are encouraged to reject extremism and develop a sense of real meaning and purpose in their lives, with values appropriate to our multi-faith society. I turn briefly to the Mental Health Bill. There is undoubtedly a difficult balance to be struck between the rights and liberties of mentally ill people and the protection of the public. But the potential dangerousness of a relatively small number should not skew the conditions for the application of compulsory powers to a much larger group. To detain mentally ill people to impose treatment that does not have a therapeutic benefit in arresting or improving their condition risks turning psychiatrists into guardians of public safety, which is not their proper function. We should beware of using mental health legislation as a pretext for preventive detention. Of course, we fully acknowledge that there is a strong case for some form of supervised treatment to deal with patients who relapse in the community, but the proposals in the Bill are too widely drawn. They need to be targeted on a smaller number of vulnerable and in some cases dangerous patients or they will be counterproductive in making it more difficult for community mental health services to engage with people who need care and treatment. Finally, we regret that the Bill, in its predominant emphasis on public protection, fails to include earlier proposals for patients who are detained to have access to independent advocacy and that it fails to guarantee a right to assessment of mental health needs before a crisis is reached. Such provisions might have helped to avert some of the tragedies that have resulted from failure to heed the desperate warnings of patients and carers. In the end, we believe that public safety will be better served by effective and properly co-ordinated care than by unnecessary and damaging restrictions on liberty.