Careers Education for Students

Baroness Bull Excerpts

Thursday 6th September 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bull (CB) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, it is a great honour to speak here for the first time and to follow such a passionate and cogent case for the creative industries from the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert of Panteg. The welcome I have received from all parts of the House could not have been kinder. The support from Black Rod, the Clerk of the Parliaments, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, and all their staff has been invaluable. At every turn, I have had cause to thank the omniscient and omnipresent doorkeepers and I have already benefited from the excellent service of the Library staff. I am indebted to my supporters, my noble friends Lady D’Souza and Lord Hall of Birkenhead, and my noble friend Lord Clancarty for acting as my mentor and meeting all my questions with patience and sound advice. I also pay tribute to the late Baroness Jowell, who did me the great honour of supporting my nomination to join this House.

My route here has been somewhat unconventional. For 20 years, I was a dancer with the Royal Ballet. I progressed, via a career in the media, to the Royal Opera House, where I became creative director. I then went to King’s College London, where I serve as vice-principal for London. I now have the great privilege of joining your Lordships’ House. Mine may well be an unusual career trajectory but this life of careers, in contrast to a career for life, could well prove the norm for young people in future. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Aberdare for securing the debate and allowing me to make my debut on this stage on a subject that is so close to my heart.

As we have heard, good careers guidance is about so much more than helping young people to get a job. It is about an individual’s well-being and fulfilment. It is about meeting the needs of future employers and ensuring the success of the economy. It is about reducing the costs on society of people not in employment or training. Crucially, it is about equality and fairness: we are all created equal but we are born into a world that is not.

Our ideas about what we might do in our adult lives are shaped by our experiences and by the examples around us. If you are brought up in a community where the majority of employment, where it exists, is in low-skilled sectors, your expectations are likely to be shaped accordingly. How else can we explain the fact that in 2017 only 4% of doctors, 6% of barristers and 11% of journalists came from working-class backgrounds? We know that just 24% of pupils eligible for free school meals go on to higher education, compared to 42% of their peers from better-off families. Over a quarter of this gap in participation relates to students with the same levels of attainment at GCSE, so this is not a question of academic ability but of the choices that these pupils perceive as being available to “people like us”.

For this reason, good careers advice is of disproportionate value to pupils from disadvantaged families. It does not just open doors—by exposing young people to a variety of previously unimagined professions, to self-employment or entrepreneurship as a viable career, it reveals that those doors exist. It connects students with individuals who have themselves broken the mould—people whose lived examples help to raise aspirations, tackle stereotypes and challenge choices that may be based on gender, ethnicity or class. This is why I take part in Robert Peston’s excellent Speakers for Schools initiative, which puts inspirational speakers into state schools. It was set up in 2011 when he noticed that all the invitations he received to speak came from independent schools.

In addition to this important role in enabling social mobility, good careers guidance is vital to help young people navigate the changing employment market, and to ensure that the skills they gain during education match the needs of the jobs that they will go on to fulfil. Now, more than ever, it is very difficult to predict what the future of work will be. According to the World Economic Forum, 65% of pupils entering primary school this week will find themselves working in a job that does not yet exist. One of the key skills they will need in order to thrive in this uncertain future is creativity—the capacity to imagine and then to invent the roles that they themselves will fulfil. Too often, creativity is seen as the preserve of artists—of people like me—but it is as important to the scientist or the engineer as it is to the musician and the dancer. The world’s most pressing challenges will never be addressed by technology alone, but when creativity is employed to imagine how machines can best serve human needs, the results can change the world. It is notable, and no coincidence, that many of our leading tech entrepreneurs and Silicon Valley CEOs are graduates, not of science and maths but of arts and humanities. All the evidence shows that arts-based learning is key to developing the creativity that drives innovation.

Much airtime has been given to STEM subjects in discussions about looming automation, but with machines set to take on the more routine elements of work, human skills such as creativity will be at a premium. The global innovation foundation, NESTA, has concluded that creative occupations—not just artists, but roles that depend on a high degree of originality and the production of new artefacts and ideas—will be much more resistant to automation than other jobs. And they are likely to grow: workforce projections used in the industrial strategy suggest that creative jobs will grow at double the rate of the UK economy as a whole over the next six years.

I know that it is not the business of a maiden speaker to court controversy but, given everything we know about the future of work, can it really be controversial to challenge the prioritisation of STEM subjects in the otherwise laudable Gatsby benchmarks that the Government’s 2017 careers strategy adopts? The statutory guidance issued in January encourages schools to arrange meetings with a range of professionals that,

“should emphasise the opportunities created for young people who choose maths or science subjects”.

Why only these, when we know that creativity will be such a vital skill, and that creative occupations will be the most futureproof to computerisation?

Mine was an education in which careers advice had no part, focused as it was, from the age of 11, on a singular destination. I was among the 1% who the noble Lord, Lord Storey, alluded to: I dreamt of becoming a ballerina and I became one. I come from a family with no history of participation in higher education but I had the benefit of powerful role models in my parents, to whom I am eternally grateful: a mother who was determined that her four daughters would imagine a world beyond our own backyard, and a father with the courage to enter further education at the age of 30, moving a young family from Derby to Kent to take up his hard-won place at Rochester Theological College. I also had the inestimable benefit of an education in which arts and culture were never considered as secondary or an inferior choice.

I promise not to fulfil a role in your Lordships’ House as some kind of cultural “Thought for the Day”, inserting arts or creativity into every possible debate. But if I look back over the journey that has brought me here today, it is clear that what has sustained me in a career beyond the arts are the skills I learned through an education in which arts were integral: collaboration, communication, originality, resilience and creativity. These are exactly the skills that the Federation of Small Businesses is calling for in future employees and they are the kind of skills that NESTA predicts will be most in demand in 2030.

Given all this, we surely need to recognise that any advice that fails to position on equal terms careers in both STEM and creative occupations can never be considered either high quality or fit for the future.

I am honoured to have had the chance to contribute to this debate and I look forward to working as a part of this House on this and many other issues.