Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

I am glad to support the noble Lord, Lord Addington, in that and to offer my support for the amendment. However, we need to recognise that we are looking at the problem from inside the Bill, as it were, and ought not to blinker ourselves to the fact that this problem goes much wider, and needs wider remedies, than are available in the Bill. I wonder whether the noble Lord has read the report on this matter by the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists. It has eight simple recommendations, some of which fall within the Bill and some of which do not. As they are brief, I will repeat them. It says: ""1. Every PCT should have a speech and language therapy specialist lead with a remit to develop speech and language therapy services for vulnerable young people in the community.""2. Every youth offending team must have at least one full time speech and language therapist who would also provide a service to community provision such as units for children excluded from school, probation, mental health and drug misuse services.""3. The ASSET assessment must have a section on communication skills to identify those with speech, language and communication needs"." Where it says "must", we would say "should". ""4. The intermediary schemes should be extended to support defendants.""5. A speech and language therapist should be appointed to work within each of the … secure training centres.""6. There is at least one full time specialist speech and language therapist working in every young offender institution.""7. Each young offender institution should provide a communication support worker to support and carry over the work of the specialist speech and language therapist.""8. Establish a national professional lead to oversee and coordinate this new service"." We should think of ourselves as trying to provide part of a larger provision that will reach children who are not under the aegis of the education service in its various forms but out in the community and often passing through the hands of the National Health Service. I offer this as a gloss on what has been said before, because I think that we ought to come back to it in this Bill in detail and in other Bills on later occasions, but I support this amendment wholeheartedly.