Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for that, and particularly grateful for her early mention of consideration before Third Reading. This Bill has sometimes felt like a shotgun marriage, because we have been instructed to go down this route, knowing that the Learning and Skills Council has already received its demolition order. Nevertheless, it is important that we should raise all the issues right down to the wire—particularly those that affect young people. I will speak to Amendments 46, 51 and 52, which refer to young people in detention. I will leave Amendment 55, which I support, to my noble friend Lord Elton. Amendment 46, as the noble Baroness hinted, refers to the business of what and how that I raised earlier. We are nearly at the what, but not quite there. I am confused by new subsection (6) in Clause 48, which adds the following after Section 18 of the Education Act 1996: ""In performing the duty imposed by subsection (1), a local education authority must have regard to any guidance issued … by the Secretary of State"." What concerns me is that it does not state which Secretary of State. There are at least two—for the Department for Children, Schools and Families and for the Ministry of Justice. When I asked the Bill Office whether it could be precise, the answer was, "No, this is the language of Bills, it is just ‘the Secretary of State’". I am very concerned. My experience of going round the estate where this happens is that there is a lack of direction. Nobody is in charge of saying what should happen. Therefore there is no consistency in what happens all around the system. Surely that is what we are after. My proposal, guided by the Bill Office, was to be more specific about what guidance the local authority should have regard to. The guidance is on what is to be done—what courses, what programmes, what education and for which people. Otherwise, there can be no provision. As the discussion on the Bill has gone on, I have become more concerned about where we are going. There is complexity after complexity. Three words have sprung to mind—they say that soldiers can only think in threes, and this proves it. Two of them are German and come from the battlefield. The first is "Auftragstaktik", which means "mission-orientated orders"—in other words, everyone knows precisely where they are going, without any doubt at all. The second is "Fingerspitzengefühl", which means "fingertip feel"—in other words, those who are doing the job know precisely what they ought to be doing, when and where, because the instructions are abundantly clear. The third word is a government word—"simplification". I see us breaking away from clarity, clouding the issue for people on the ground and getting more complicated as more organisations and methods are added to the system. This is lunatic when we are dealing with young people, particularly young people who are in touch with the criminal justice system. I am also concerned that while we are talking about that in the context of a Bill coming from the education ministries, two other things are happening. One is that something called the National Standards for Youth Justice Services is being produced, in which people make comments to the Ministry of Justice. They are talking about communication problems and the fact that 60 per cent of these young people have communication difficulties. They are saying that staff need training and support to manage these people, and that if you start trying to assess their processes verbally, they tend to withdraw, not co-operate and deny problems in order to finish the processes quickly and reduce the stress. It is essential that early risk-assessment processes include identification of communication difficulties so that their impact on risk assessment can be managed. This issue links Amendment 46 to Amendments 51 and 52. The Minister has assured us that in statutory guidance there will be instructions on this. However, for 10 years I have been trying to impress on the criminal justice system that until and unless the communication difficulties of these youngsters are properly assessed, there is no entry to any literacy, numeracy or other assessment. The communication problem is the scourge of the 21st century. It has crept up on us and we must stop it. There has been a mass of assurance that this is going to happen—this regulation and that instruction—but I am cynical about this and dearly wish to see it in the Bill. People will know then what is required and can begin to cost it. My last point is that I am very concerned that Clause 48 passes the buck of education provision for those in youth detention to LEAs. On 21 July, I handed a document called Young Offenders: A Secure Foundation to the Minister, Maria Eagle, in the Ministry of Justice. It was published by the Foyer Federation and concerns the costs of youth offender institutions. It proves that the Government are consistently understating the costs of managing young offender institutions. Instead of the quoted cost of between £48,000 and £67,000, the true cost is £100,000 a year and possibly more. Therefore, the Youth Justice Board’s budget is currently £120 million less than the true cost. What worries me is that when the true cost is passed to the local education authorities, they are going to find that there is not enough provision to do all the things that have to be done. This Bill is making that situation worse because it lacks any clarity as to who is to do what, other than mentioning all these new organisations which are going to assume funding responsibilities. I know I have said this over and again—I have been banging on for 10 years now—but I hope that at last the Government will listen and put something right which could have been put right years ago.