Education Bill

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Tuesday 14th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton]

My Lords, I add my congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Edmiston, on his maiden speech. He and his schools demonstrate the importance of ensuring that education really prepares pupils for the world of work—a matter very close to my own heart. I warmly support the comments made by my colleagues on these Benches on the Bill’s focus on decentralisation, which will give schools and colleges more autonomy. I also echo my colleagues’ concerns today. I shall focus particularly on the further and higher education issues covered in the Bill, and the Careers Service proposals, with which I shall start.

We on our Benches welcome the Bill’s intention to move to an all-age careers service, but we have some concerns that the Bill in its current form will not provide that, especially for the under-19s. I confess that I was cynical in the mid-1990s when we moved to an independent Careers Service outside county council and metropolitan council control. However, it heralded the professionalisation of staff and removed the temptation from schools to encourage students to stay on at school whether it was appropriate for them or not. The Labour Government’s creation of Connexions certainly had its strengths, but it also had some weaknesses. While it is right that we move on from Connexions, I am concerned that we shall lose the strength of the inverted pyramid, which provides for children who are at risk of becoming NEET—not in education, employment or training.

The problem with Connexions was that it was sometimes at the expense of brighter children, who still needed advice about the right course for them when they went on to sixth-form and further education college so that they could then make the right choices for their higher education. The real strength of both Connexions and the previous Careers Service was their independence from schools and the statutory right of careers advisers to go into schools. Will the Minister consider why the Bill proposes the removal of the duty on a local authority to provide careers guidance, while also giving local authorities the duty to look after NEETs and vulnerable students and to address the apparent contradiction therein? We also have considerable concerns about the lack of quality assurance in the new Careers Service proposals. I ask the Minister to consider a statutory professional qualification for careers advisers as well as QA arrangements to protect this.

Others have mentioned worries about the loss of a face-to-face service. This seems to be a case of the baby being thrown out with the bathwater, especially for the 14-to-19 age group, many of whom need proper conversations to explore and draw out their interests. With the best will in the world, that cannot be done either by a call centre or online unless the young people know what they are looking for. I suspect they face a Donald Rumsfeld moment: “They don’t know what they don’t know”. Professional advisers can guide them through this maze. We on these Benches echo concerns about the loss of expertise as current careers advisers lose their jobs. Will the Minister please provide a transition plan, with funding to bridge the imminent loss of the old service, prior to arrangements for the new one coming in next year? The future choices of our young people currently considering their prospects are too important to be lost by this mistake.

On Clause 15, I echo the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Perry of Southwark, and the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths of Burry Port, about ensuring the widest possible arrangements for teacher training, especially the involvement of higher education institutions. Their record, as has already been noted, is better than those of teaching schools. We need a wide range of training, including traditional pedagogic courses.

In Clauses 28 and 29, I regret the loss of the diploma if it means the vocational offer to our 14 to 16 year-olds is either reduced or lost. I sat on the east of England diploma gateway. We began to see some very effective and popular vocational courses, which pupils and employers valued. Our educational system must be able to offer both a vocational and an academic curriculum to meet the needs of all our pupils and students.

As a founding chair of the Cambridgeshire Learning and Skills Council and deputy chair of the East of England Development Agency, I have learnt that public bodies come and go. However, it is important not to lose appropriate and effective functions. Therefore, following the abolition of the YPLA, will the Minister confirm that the very effective stakeholder board—an exemplary body within the YPLA—will continue once the YPLA’s successor emerges within the Department for Education?

We on these Benches also have concerns about the further education level 3 fees for those aged over 19, with the shift to loans. Will the Minister please examine whether certain courses can be exempt—for example, access courses that help non-traditional mature students to get the right qualifications to go on to university?

On Clause 73, we welcome the proposals that should ease the way for part-time students. However, the proposals that—inadvertently, I hope—force part-time students to start repaying their loans after three and a half years, often before they have finished studying, are short-sighted and, frankly, against the principles of the higher education offer in the agreement. Those principles stated that all study—fees and living costs—should be free at the point of study. Will the Minister please discuss this with BIS as a matter of urgency?

There are many items in the Bill. I shall return to these issues and others in Committee.