Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendments 128, 133 and 134. The first amendment seeks simply to make local authorities apply the same standards and supply the same support to detained young persons as they do to other persons of the same age. Amendment 134 is designed to ensure that any existing knowledge about the special educational needs of a detainee is known to the host authority and acted on by it at the earliest possible time. The whole group, in fact, has been largely overtaken by the lengthy letter that the Minister sent us over the weekend, so I need not elaborate on the detail of this except in one respect: Amendment 128 is less of a probing amendment than the rest because it requires that there should be a standard format in which information about a child’s or young person’s educational progress is kept and transmitted. The noble Lord mentioned the e-Asset system; I would like to know whether that is uniform not only throughout England but also in Wales. I am aware that there are transfers of prisoners across the Severn as well as between regional boundaries, and it is important that the same format of document should come with the arriving inmate from wherever he has come and to wherever he is going, so that everyone knows what to look for where. I have set out a system for doing this that is perhaps simplistic but that I think none the less would work. So far as I am concerned, it could be electronic, on hard copy or both. I would advise that it was not put into service until the system for transferring, electronically or otherwise, was uniform throughout England and Wales—also, ideally, in Scotland and Northern Ireland, but we will leave that aside for the moment. I await the Minister’s reply.