Education and Skills Bill

My Lords, I have added my name to this amendment. Like the noble Lord, Lord Elton, I am extremely grateful to be given the opportunity to raise points that I have raised before in this House. I make no apology for raising them again. I very much appreciated the meeting that the Minister and her officials arranged last week to discuss these issues and the detailed letter that she has sent to those of us who took part in the meeting. I say that because, in this amendment, I do not just include the learning difficulty, dyslexia; other learning difficulties are mentioned in subsection (3) of the proposed new clause. Noble Lords will not be surprised that my concern is very much based on those who come into custody. I have already explained to the House that in 1999, thanks to having a speech and language therapist carry out an assessment in a prison in Scotland for the first time ever, I found that discipline, education and healthcare staff were made aware of a whole range of problems faced by young offenders. Armed with that, they were able to institute proper programmes to help to give those young offenders a start in life. I then began campaigning to have speech and language therapists on the staff of every young offender establishment, secure training centre and youth place of custody, to make certain that that assessment was given to every young person. The great thing that came out of all this assessment in the young offender establishment was the realisation that this should have happened a long time before, preferably before all these young people started school. Without people being alerted to their difficulties at that stage, the young people were frankly unable to engage with the teacher and, therefore, with the education system. The implications of all this have been stated over and over again. I could list the number of Ministers to whom I have referred this matter since 1999, in many cases twice: Mr Charles Clarke, both as Education and Home Secretary; Dr John Reid, both as Health and Education Secretary; and Mr Jack Straw, both as Home Secretary and Secretary of State for Justice. There have been numerous Ministers, including Hilary Armstrong, the previous Minister for Social Exclusion. All listened, all agreed, but nothing happened. The nearest that we got to anything was when in 2005 Mr Paul Goggins, then the Prisons Minister, was charged by the Secretaries of State for Education and Health and the Home Secretary to examine the question of money. It all boiled down to who was going to pay the £33,000 a year to fund a speech and language therapist in each young offender establishment. Of course, the cost savings of having a correct assessment made that £33,000 pale into insignificance. I gnashed my teeth when I heard the Prime Minister at the time demanding £90 million for his respect agenda, £30 million of which came from the Home Office, because less than £1 million would have funded these speech and language therapists—and what is more respectable than to be able to conduct relationships with your lips rather than with your fists? I hope very much that the Minister, in considering the new Bill, which I understand will include new arrangements for juveniles, will review all the evidence put to her and other Ministers and officials over the past nine years to my certain knowledge and probably longer. Evaluation has been carried out by academics; observations have come from people working in the field. Advice comes from all quarters, all of which seems to be disregarded. We owe a duty to these young people to let them engage with the education system. We have an opportunity to do so in the next Bill. I hope, therefore, that having reviewed the evidence, the Minister will ensure that measures are in that next Bill to make certain that every child has this assessment to enable them to set off on the road that we would all wish them to be on.