Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

I refer to new clause 14 and to what, if it is passed, will become section 562B of the Education Act 1996. Subsection (2)(a) reads:""The home authority must—""(a) during the period of detention in relevant youth accommodation. . .take such steps as they consider appropriate to promote the person's fulfilment of his or her learning potential."" I wish to probe the Minister a little on resources for the fulfilment of that statutory commitment. I confess that the last time I looked at per capita annual spending on the education of young people in the secure estate, compared to per capita annual spending on a pupil at a state secondary school, was probably five years ago, in the previous Parliament. Let us add to the equation the amount spent by many local authorities for a tiny minority of children with very severe emotional and behavioural difficulties who are put in secure accommodation, not necessarily because of criminal acts of any sort, but because they are so disturbed that they need a very high level of support, to the extent that it is residential and often geographically outside the home local authority area. For example, Wolverhampton used to send children to somewhere in Devon. It is debatable whether that is good for the child. For most of them, it is better that they remain nearer where they live, although not in every case if they have a very disruptive family. I would not want anyone to think that these are exact figures, but for purposes of comparison let me give the figures, very roughly, a few years ago. For a child from Wolverhampton who was placed in such secure residential accommodation because of their emotional and behavioural difficulties, the average cost was £150,000 a year. For some, however, the cost was £250,000 a year, meaning that, if a child went into such an institution for four years, they could cost £1 million. It drained a huge proportion from the health budget and the local authority budget, albeit for children with very severe difficulties. Those were extreme figures. The approximate spending per capita per year—I am talking about five years ago—on an average child in a secondary school was £4,000 a year. That was for a child who went to school for roughly six hours a day, five days a week, 39 weeks a year. By contrast, the figure for a young person in a secure estate was lower; it was in the low £3,000s. It was difficult to form an idea of the figures, because, frankly, the Government did not keep them and one had to try to work them out as best one could. It was a slightly back-of-an-envelope calculation, because the figures that the Government started with involved taking the number of places in an institution, such as Pucklehurst where Stephen Fry was as a teenager, and dividing that by the budget. Then, one had the per capita figure, but, of course, that included accommodation—food, heating, lighting, security and so on. The comparative figure was just over £3,000 a year, as far as I could tell, for a young person in a secure estate, as opposed to someone in a regular secondary school, who cost about £4,000 a year. That struck me as absolutely potty, given that, as I understand it, a large plurality, if not a majority, of young people in a secure estate have severe difficulties with basic learning—with the three R's. It is one of the factors that can become an indicator of someone's being in a secure estate. I must stress that I do not suggest that a young person aged 13 or 14 who is not functionally literate will necessarily end up in a secure estate, but a disproportionate number of young people who are not functionally literate do.