Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

I think I understand the reasons why the Government want to bring sixth-form colleges and other colleges back under the wing of their local authorities in order to integrate the provision for 16 to 19 year-olds, and even beyond for those with special needs. Everything should come under one optic and be dealt with an integrated and sensible way. For the sake of this amendment, I shall take that as a given and say that what I am after is preserving some of the virtues that have been gained over the past decade and a half as a result of liberating sixth-form and further education colleges from local education authorities. Certainly the best of them have become national enterprises. Prisons in Kent are managed by Manchester City College, for instance, while many FE and sixth-form colleges have gained national reputations for what they do. The virtues of Hills Road Sixth Form College in Cambridge are well known, as is Greenhead College in Huddersfield, which attracts students from the south of Manchester, Hull and right up from the far north of Yorkshire and Lancashire. People travel a long way and make great efforts to attend good sixth-form colleges, particularly where they have developed expertise in certain subjects. Where a subject is not particularly mainstream, it is very much to the advantage of students and the educational system that the expertise becomes concentrated. They can then afford to develop long-lasting links with industry, both to inform what they are teaching and to provide the routes by which their graduates go on to obtain employment. The better of these courses now have 15 years-worth of graduates in the industries that they supply and an enormous reputation, as I say, in many cases countrywide. I do not want to see that destroyed or jeopardised as a side effect of the virtues that the Government are trying to achieve by bringing these colleges back under local authority control. It would be a great pity to lose what we have won merely in order to gain something else. That is the burden of my amendment. I hope the Government will enlarge on the technicalities of it so that I can understand better how colleges can continue to assert their independence, innovate and head in the direction that they want to head while at the same time being subject to what I read as, as the noble Lord knows, the quite draconian powers under Clause 40 and elsewhere which a local authority will have to decide what provision is to be made in its locality and how. I beg to move.