Introduced by Barry Sheerman (Lab/Co-op, Huddersfield), the Bill would provide a guarantee to an ‘holistic’ assessment of every child’s time in education, a mentor for every child between the age of 16 and 18, vital guarantees for children with special educational needs, and a minimum of two weeks’ intensive training in community leadership for every young person between 16 and 18.

During second reading Sheerman said, “It is a modest Bill, but it will make a tremendous difference to many young people leaving school at 16. There is already the Children Act 1989 and we also have “Every Child Matters”, which deals with five major outcomes for children. However, we still live in a country and society in which those outcomes seem to desert children at 16. We seem not to care very much about what happens to some children at 16. Many of them become NEETs—not in education, employment or training—and some go into routine, mundane jobs that have no training attached to them.”

Junior education minister Parmjit Dhanda responded; he said the government has a ‘number of measures’ in train at the moment, including the Green Paper on increasing the leaving age.