Young People

Lord Adonis Excerpts

Thursday 13th December 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the passionate speeches of the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley, and my noble friend Lady Armstrong.

I have always regarded policy on education and youth as, in principle, straightforward—the principle having been set out by the great philosopher RH Tawney:

“What the wise parent would wish for their children, so the state must wish for all its children”.


If the principle is straightforward, the problem is that what the wise parent would wish for their child is emphatically not delivered by the state for all children at the moment. I know that the Minister shares the great sense of urgency about the change and improvement needed. In the short time I have, I wish to raise three issues where I believe the state is not remotely living up to the expectations of the wise parent.

The first is exclusions from school. We face a crisis at the moment in the rising number of exclusions from schools, which lead directly to serious social disaffection and, in many cases, to the youth and adult justice systems. The figures are alarming. Permanent exclusions from school have gone up in each of the past five years. There were 4,630 in 2012, 4,950 in 2013, 5,795 in 2014 and 6,685 in 2015. Then, last year, there were 7,720. That is a rise from 4,600 to 7,700 in only four years—a totally unacceptable situation.

Fixed-period exclusions, which tend to escalate to permanent exclusions, have risen by just as much. I will not go through the figures for every year but there were 268,000 in 2012 and 381,000 in 2016. As a percentage of the pupil cohort, that is a rise of 3.5% to 4.8%. If you extrapolate from that, you get a social crisis that is truly alarming.

Edward Timpson, a former Children’s Minister, has been looking at this issue for some months. It needs intensive and urgent examination and we await his report with keen interest. I hope the Minister will be able to tell us something about it.

There is also the problem of off-rolling—of large numbers of pupils simply being taken off the rolls of schools. This practice is not properly policed and is becoming a rising problem on top of the figures I have already set out to the House.

My second issue is apprenticeships. The wise parent would wish for their child to have equality of opportunity whether they go on to university or a non-university course. We in this House and beyond have been going on about this issue now for at least a generation. The problem is that there is not equality of opportunity at the moment. The quality of provision and the amount of state investment are, out of all proportion, greater for pupils and young people going on to higher education than for those taking non-higher education routes.

I applaud the Government’s introduction of the apprenticeship levy in principle—it started two years ago—but it has not been properly managed. The number of youth apprenticeships on offer is declining, not rising, even as the apprenticeship levy has been introduced. The levels of youth unemployment, youth underemployment and inadequate training for young people are alarming, particularly in the more deprived communities, which also, as the Minister knows only too well, suffer from poor-quality schools. This also generates disaffection.

The third issue, touched on by my noble friend Lady Armstrong, is citizen engagement and how we train our young people for citizenship. I use the word “trained” deliberately because, like all social skills, it can and should be taught. I hugely regret that this Government have dismantled the citizenship education provision put in place by the last Government, but the issue is now becoming urgent because of Brexit. There is massive interest among young people in the Brexit process. I address meetings up and down the country on Brexit at the moment and I have never known larger meetings of young people. To put it bluntly, young people do not want to be excluded from the citizenship of Europe and they are expressing their views in numbers that I have never seen before in politics. To come to the nub of the issue, if we are to have a referendum next year, 16 and 17 year-olds should have the vote, there should be a ballot box and a polling station in every school, college and university in the country, and 16 and 17 year-olds should be automatically registered so that they do not have to go through the labyrinthine process of individual registration, which is keeping a large proportion of young people off the roll.

We face big and urgent issues and I have able to highlight only three. However, I would be grateful for the Minister’s comments on them at the end of the debate.