Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

My Lords, like the noble Baroness, Lady Wilkins, who has just spoken, and the noble Lord, Lord Rix, who spoke earlier, I want to speak about the aspects of the Bill that concern the education of disabled young people. My interests as chairman of the Royal National Institute of Blind People and president of SKILL, the National Bureau for Students with Disabilities, are fully declared in the register of interests and are well known to the House. The RNIB also provides me with an assistant in my work here. It is not on behalf of any organisation that I speak but on the behalf of the disabled young people they represent. I do not apologise for concentrating on the Bill as it relates to disabled people. Its impact on the system of provision for disabled people is potentially quite significant, so it is important that we get it right. Let us not be mealy mouthed about it: the reign of the LSC, which this Bill brings to an end, has seen real progress in the further education and training of young people with learning difficulties and/or disabilities. That is the technical term used in the business. It is a bit of a mouthful so your Lordships will understand if I shorthand it in order to get through in the time. We have made real progress with the further education of disabled young people in the past 10 years. Between the Tomlinson report of 1996 and the Little report, Through Inclusion to Excellence, of 2005, the number of disabled young people in colleges of further education rose from 165,000 to somewhere between 400,000 to 450,000. That is something to celebrate, and anything I have to say about the Bill should be seen against that background. The progress we have made gives us a real momentum on which to build. The Bill should therefore be welcomed as a real opportunity to do that, and anything I say is simply about making the most of that opportunity. However, none of that should blind us to the fact that we still have a long way to go. There is a raft of statistics to show the close association between disability, poor educational attainment, lack of skills and employment with social exclusion, poverty and disadvantage in adult life. By raising the age of participation to 18, the Education and Skills Act 2008 put in place the framework for beginning to address these problems. We must see that this Bill, which after all simply purports to complete the job begun last year, facilitates achievement of the objectives of the 2008 Act, and does not put unnecessary barriers in the way. In fact, as others have said, this is a very complicated Bill to get to grips with. For a start, it contains a number of Catch-22s. You cannot understand apprenticeships without understanding the SASE—the specification of apprenticeship standards for England—but the SASE cannot be finalised until the Bill is passed. I am grateful at least that it will apparently be published in draft early on during Committee. I also take the points that have been made about ragbag, mishmash, bureaucracy and administrative musical chairs. Again, there has been a lot of confusion over how the provisions relate to young people in different age groups and concern about a so-called 16-to-18 gap. It has been unclear how far disabled young people between the ages of 16 and 19, who are not in possession of a learning difficulty assessment under Sections 139A and 140 of the Learning and Skills Act 2000, are covered by the twin duties to provide apprenticeships and facilities for apprenticeships, as it may depend on how constructively each local authority interprets its duty to have regard to any learning difficulties its learners may have. The Minister has kindly written to me to point out that a consultation is currently taking place on learning difficulty assessments. Her letter contains the following statement: ""A local authority should arrange for an assessment of learning difficulties to take place for: (a) any young person with a learning difficulty but without an SEN statement ... who is believed likely to need additional support as part of his/her future education or training and who would benefit from an assessment"." That is certainly reassuring. Unfortunately, the consultation closes after the Bill is likely to have left this House, so in Committee I shall want to probe questions such as how the quality of these assessments will be maintained and who will carry them out, how the data will be shared, and whether transport needs will be considered. For now though, it would simply be very helpful if the Minister could confirm that it is the Government's firm intention that young disabled people aged 16 to 19 without a learning difficulty assessment will unambiguously be covered by, and get the full benefit of, the duties relating to the provision of apprenticeships. Finally, the legal status and accountability of the Skills Funding Agency are obscure. Should it not be subject to the single equality duty when that comes in with the Equality Bill, instead of just being loosely covered by that of DIUS? I turn to the question of apprenticeships. No less than for non-disabled young people who are not particularly fired up by the more academic kind of education at school, apprenticeships offer a potentially more attractive and rewarding route from education into employment. This will be in much the same vein as the noble Baroness, Lady Wilkins. Apprenticeship schemes, if I may put it this way, need to be disability-proofed to meet the access and other needs of disabled young people in advance, and not leave employers having to find out for themselves, make it up as they go along, reinvent the wheel and retrofit their schemes to accommodate the needs of the disabled, probably at unnecessary expense, or leave disabled young people having to fall back on the Disability Discrimination Act to get what is due to them. Thus I want the apprenticeship scheme clearly to lay out what providers need to do to enable disabled apprentices to benefit from their schemes and what support is available. I am glad that, following discussion, the department has agreed that Access to Work will be available to apprentices. However, there remains work to do to ensure that it has the practical effect intended. Apprenticeships are different from ordinary employment, so we need to look, for example, at the requirement for employers to pay a proportion of the cost. We need also to ensure that Access to Work equipment and support can be available very quickly; and, most of all, we need to make sure that all apprentices and apprenticeship providers know about the scheme. There are other issues I would mention in more detail if time permitted, from the treatment of young offenders to specialist residential colleges, which are concerned that, in transferring responsibility to local authorities, Clause 45 weakens the duty which rested on the LSC to secure boarding provision in appropriate cases. We will be moving amendments on this in Committee. There is one further matter to which I must refer. The issue of disabled students between the ages of 19 and 25 who have a place but need help with transport to get there has been a vexed question for many years. In last year’s Education and Skills Bill, the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, and I pressed the Government to place a duty on local authorities to make appropriate provision. The Government said that they would go away and do more work with the help of SKILL. The result is Clause 55, which places a duty on local authorities to make such arrangements for the provision of transport as they consider necessary, or as the Secretary of State may direct, and requires local authorities to publish transport policy statements. This is a welcome step forward but I do not think that we have got it quite right yet. What are we to do if the local authority sees no necessity and the stated policy is not to provide transport? So far as young people aged 19 to 25 with a learning difficulty assessment are concerned, the duty relates only to specialist provision. We will have to return to this in Committee. We have a Bill which potentially contains many opportunities to develop the provision that is made for disabled young people. Some rationalisation would clearly be helpful, but I doubt whether we will get it. However, with some obscurities removed and some strengthening in the places I have indicated, I think it could turn into a Bill that we will be able to work with.