Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

My Lords, I am very grateful that the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, has left disability to the noble Lord, Lord Addington, otherwise there would have been very little for me to say. I am glad to welcome this Bill to the House, in particular for the attention that it pays to the wishes of learners with a learning disability, who will be entitled to education and training up to the age of 25 and whose needs will be substantially considered by local education authorities. It is therefore a Bill that is consistent with the welcome focus of the Department for Children, Schools and Families in recent years on children with special educational needs, through Aiming High for Disabled Children, the children’s plan and the more recent Bercow review. The Bill quite rightly recognises that disabled people, particularly people with a learning disability, have been desperate for more education provision that leads them to meaningful, full-time, paid employment in adult life. Only 17 per cent of people with a learning disability are estimated to be in employment, while 65 per cent want to work. Sadly, this is almost starting to feel like a permanent statistic, as I have been highlighting it continuously in my role as president of Mencap, the charity representing the United Kingdom’s 1.5 million people with a learning disability. The past decade has seen many plans and policies put forward that are intended to help people with a learning disability to find work. It is a tale of sound and fury signifying nothing, for employment levels have remained stuck at around 17 per cent, compared with 49 per cent of all disabled people. I look forward to the day when I can stand up in this House complaining about the employment of people with a learning disability being at only 40 per cent or 50 per cent, and I hope that this year’s legislative programme will help to take us to that point and beyond. The new focus of the work capability assessment, on what disabled people can do rather than what they cannot do, is an important shift in thinking to achieve this aim. The added specialist support for disabled people announced with the Welfare Reform Bill will be integral to helping people with a learning disability into work. Clearly, however, welfare reform is just one piece of the jigsaw in achieving this aim. Alongside it, progress is essential in changing employers’ attitudes, as is, of course, appropriate training for the workplace. I therefore look forward to the Government’s forthcoming learning disability employment strategy, which I hope will have considered exactly how these developments in further education will address this chronic unemployment problem. Just as it has taken a long time for the Government to realise the scale of the commitment needed to reform the welfare system and support people into employment, so this Bill seems only to scratch the surface of the skills agenda, which I hope will develop far more in the years ahead. I should have liked a stronger and more radical commitment to support lifelong learning for people who are far from the labour market, such as people with a learning disability—including those over 25. I am particularly concerned that the qualification requirements of the apprenticeships scheme will create unnecessary barriers for learners with a learning disability. It is perfectly understandable that entrance requirements should be applied to the scheme, but it seems unnecessarily inflexible, for instance, to require learners with a learning disability to hold these specified qualifications at level 1 in order to access level 2 or level 3 apprenticeships. Put another way, why should somebody need a GCSE in maths to become a hairdresser? I would like to hear from the Minister how these blanket requirements comply with the public sector’s duty in the Disability Discrimination Act to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people, which may include treating them more favourably to promote equality of opportunity. If entry requirements are not made more flexible for people with a learning disability, we may well see further exclusion of those who should really be one of the main beneficiaries of the Bill. Given that local education authority budgets are bound to come under much pressure for apprenticeship funding, I am concerned that local authorities will be severely tempted to use as a get-out clause the requirement not to incur "disproportionate expenditure" to avoid making provision for disabled young people. Perhaps the Minister could explain why the Government feel that this provision is necessary, given that it simply relates to a duty to secure "suitable education and training" to meet the "reasonable needs" of persons in the area. The Government indicated in Committee in the other place that individuals can challenge LEAs if they believe "disproportionate expenditure" is wrongly used as an excuse, but I am deeply concerned by the responsibility that it places on people with a learning disability and fear that failure to provide them with the most suitable education and training may frequently go unchallenged. Rather than indicate that suitable provision may not be possible, the Bill should go further to ensure sufficient provision. The briefing from the Special Education Consortium, of which Mencap is a member, draws attention to the sufficiency duty, with a robust needs analysis and audit provision, which is in the Childcare Act and which ought to be mirrored in this Bill. That process would go to the heart of ensuring that the apprenticeships scheme led to truly positive outcomes for people with a learning disability and avoided the past mistakes of many courses which ultimately lead nowhere. The Government argued in Committee that the performance management system and Ofsted will oversee LEAs and ensure a strong focus on outcomes. I, however, share the Special Education Consortium’s view that the system will not be robust enough. If LEAs are not compelled to assess and meet needs, I hope that the Minister will explain why the Bill does not go as far as the Childcare Act rightly did three years ago. It has been made quite clear that apprentices will be considered as employees, so I am very pleased that apprentices with a learning disability will be entitled to Access to Work support. More clarification, however, will be needed around how Access to Work will interact with an employer-led apprenticeships scheme and therefore join up with Additional Learning Support, which is limited to operate with education providers. Those of us who want to see all adults with a learning disability prepared for the workplace would really wish to see provision extended to over-25s. While we would settle for the age extension that the Government have made in this Bill, I hope and envisage that over the coming years those over 25 who have not been so lucky will enjoy similar rights to be trained and given the opportunities that they deserve. Meanwhile, people under 25 with a learning disability may fare better under this Bill, but I fear that having a learning disability may continue to go hand in hand with unemployment, unless central government takes a strong lead to argue that we must respect those people who follow longer learning journeys, need additional investment in their skills and support and need local government to be far more proactive in guiding them through education that leads to employment. If LEAs and others shy away from that commitment, people with a learning disability will lose out and there will be a net loss to our economy. This Bill has indicated an understanding of these issues, but it must go further by truly recognising the needs of people with a learning disability and other vulnerable people and ensuring without any question whatever that those needs are met.