Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill — House of Lords, 2021-11-17
Topic: Education
Alexander Carlile (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord German. I know that he has an immense amount of experience in matters around education, from both his personal experience of teaching in earlier decades and his work in the Welsh Assembly Government. I probably support his amendment, but I am much less interested in the amendments here than in achieving a shared purpose, which is that children who are in custody have the chance of a quality education which will enable them to go on to higher education, where appropriate, good apprenticeships and other forms of training which will give them a decent chance in life—most of them not having had a chance in life. I am afraid it is a truism, at least in my experience of visiting many institutions holding children, that for many of them, that institution is the most comfortable and secure place, emotionally, that they have ever lived. That is a sad commentary on their situation I carried out some voluntary work for the Howard League some years ago, and it involved visiting Oakhill, Rainsbrook and, indeed, Feltham—a place which has been through good and bad patches over the years but, from what I hear from people who work there, is at the moment pretty challenging and not providing children with a particularly good education The ambition that we surely all share is that there should be a consistent level of good education throughout those institutions. I will give an illustration of why. When I was doing the voluntary work for the Howard League, of which the current president is another Member of your Lordships’ House, the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald of River Glaven—I am very happy to see him in that role—I went to one of the institutions that I have named. I was taken around and a boy of about 16 asked me to go into his room, as he called it. I went into his room and all over the wall there were maths certificates, including a grade A GCSE maths certificate. I said something really silly like, "You must be very good at maths." He said, "I love it, sir. I want to be a maths teacher when I leave this place." I do not know what happened to him, but he certainly had the ability to be a maths teacher. The reason he got that maths GCSE was because there was one really inspired teacher in that institution who spotted his talent at maths and had taken it to that level. I said to this boy, "Did you like maths when you were at school before you came here?" He replied, and I will never forget these words: "I never went to school, sir." The capacity of education in these institutions and the opportunity it provides are enormous, but it has to be consistent. Charlie Taylor, who has been referred to in this debate, did some very valuable work. I was very fortunate in that I was a consultee for him from time to time. He absolutely shares the views I expressed in the last few minutes. I ask the Government to accept that the ambitions I have expressed are shared by the Government too and that, whatever we call these institutions, whoever runs them—I do not really care, to be frank, as long as they reach the requisite standard—will try to reach standards that have been reached in the past. Noble Lords will remember Peper Harow, which was a very fine institution run in the voluntary sector by a number of trustees who would have been familiar in some way or another to Members of your Lordships’ House. It came to a slightly abrupt end because there was an accident there, but people who left Peper Harow, having had their education, commonly went straight to university and achieved university degrees, or did other training that gave them a good life after custody I say to the Minister: please can we have an assurance that we are not getting bogged down in process and the name we give to these educational institutions, and that we are actually trying to achieve a gold standard of quality with young people who are bored of being in an institution and for whom education is a really welcome change if it is good enough?