My Lords, I almost feel that the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield—indeed, as we discovered in a debate in this House, my noble kinsman Lord Lingfield—should be the one opening this debate, because he has the more substantive amendment. Having said that, I think that I know better than to try to put words in his mouth.
My Amendment 41 concerns a part of the Bill that says, and I think it is best if I quote it, although I am beginning to wish I had put my glasses on:
“The governing body of an institution in England within the further education sector must … from time to time review how well the education or training provided by the institution meets local needs”.
I tabled the amendment because I do not know what “from time to time” means. I have absolutely no idea what “from time to time” means. Does it mean once a decade? Every six months? I have absolutely no idea.
5.15 pm
This is a small point that starts before the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, comes in. Put simply, I would like to know what the Government think “from time to time” means. Does it have a timeframe on it, or is it something that will be inspired by events—for instance, if you lose an employer or another one is coming in? Are they having a look at what the needs are in these situations? That is really what we are trying to get at. If we can establish that, then we will be able to assess whether further action should be taken on this. Because the fact of the matter is that it is basically a recipe for confusion at the moment, if you are looking in from
the outside. However, I hope that the noble Lord does not take this as a criticism of his amendment, which uses the same wording.
I remind the House of my interests yet again in special educational needs. If you get special educational needs wrong, you are effectively cutting out X number of people from training. It becomes very difficult to train them properly if you do not take this into account and you do not have the training processes in place that allow you to reach those students. To look just at the neurodiverse conditions—dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia, et cetera—they all have different learning patterns, and these are patterns that apply differently to different subjects.
For instance, “Dyslexia does not affect maths.” Yes, it does, because you have a bad short-term memory, which means that you do not remember things like equations. I know this—I have the maths retakes to prove it. Dyscalculia is probably not officially recognised by the Government, but it is one where you have a difficulty with the concept of maths. If you know how to deal with this in your structures, and if you have people who can address this in the way they are working, life gets easier. Other conditions have other things—there are various gradings when it comes to autism and other things such as learning difficulties, et cetera. It is a very complicated structure. If you can learn if you have spikes in certain groups and communities going through, I personally feel that you should always try to find out exactly what you are dealing with. It is a very straightforward thing, but one that has very big implications. You are talking about slightly changing the way you deliver lessons, with flexibility, I suspect.
I do not know whether my noble kinsman thinks that this is exactly the same thing that he is implying, but I look forward to finding out. I beg to move.