My Lords, the question I ask with Amendment 76A is: who is making sure, in this new world that we are creating, that the overall educational provision at sixth form and beyond is as it should be? I hope we are not dividing the world into academic and technical; there is such a broad stretch across that divide. I hoped that we were trying to heal that divide, but we seem to be creating new structures for driving technical education that do not obviously or easily fit into the structures we have for driving academic education.
On technical education, the Minister told me last time we were here that the Sussex Chamber of Commerce would be a trailblazer. That is an area that is not obviously different from the South East local enterprise partnership. The main differences for the constituent parts of Sussex are that this is a new entity unused to this sort of responsibility; that it has none of the old associations, familiarities and relationships that go with, in this case, either of the local enterprise partnerships that cover the area; and that it is not congruent in any way with the providers of ordinary education, which are, at that level, East Sussex and West Sussex. It is not clear how they will have a co-ordinated voice in dealing
with academic provision, because a lot of the academic provision in our part of the world is provided by further education institutions.
If we look at what is happening in Eastbourne, where I live, we are a town of 130,000 people with no substantial academic sixth form provision. There is one fine free school, but it is small. There is an excellent FE college, whose A-level provision consists of business studies, English, history and sociology. In this new arrangement that we are looking at, who will be responsible for making sure that the young people of Eastbourne have the educational opportunities they deserve? It is not clear to me that there is anyone effective to do that without making a change, such as I have suggested in this amendment, to ensure that the FE colleges sweep up where the schools have failed to provide. I beg to move.