Technical and Further Education Bill

Debate between Baroness Wolf of Dulwich and Lord Aberdare

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 22nd February 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Aberdare]

My Lords, as a vice-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Apprenticeships, I meet a lot of apprentices and am constantly surprised and shocked at how few have either heard about or been directed towards the apprenticeships that they are on through their schools or any formal careers education. As we have heard, schools have an in-built bias towards promoting the academic route and I do not need to say any more about that.

However, with the best will in the world, teachers and parents may have only a limited understanding of the sorts of jobs and careers available in today’s job market, the opportunities they offer and the routes available to access them. Again, as we have heard, the careers education system, if one can call it that, has been at best patchy and at worst shockingly poor. Some good initiatives are beginning to emerge. The National Careers Service offers a valuable central online resource; the Gatsby benchmarks have defined what good careers education looks like, which is important; and, as the noble Lord, Lord Storey, has said, the Careers & Enterprise Company in particular is creating a vital network of enterprise advisers and co-ordinators to support schools.

However, all those initiatives need to be properly linked, and the gaps that even they allow in provision need to be identified, measurement systems need to be put in place and we need a strategy driven by government. Indeed, I am delighted that the Government are committed to producing a strategy later this year. However, there is real value in including a provision for that in the Bill. Part of that strategy, as we have heard, should be a much better, UCAS-like system for identifying and applying for technical education and apprenticeship opportunities. I am delighted that that is promised in the industrial strategy but support the idea of it being incorporated in the Bill through Amendment 9.

I also support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Baker. The careers system provides a bit of supply push but unless there is some demand pull, and unless schools want or are required to allow those systems to work, and young people and their parents are aware of them, the system is not going to work.

Finally, I was delighted that the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, reminded me of my visit to the Skills Show some years ago because that was one of the most inspiring ways in which to promote apprenticeships and technical education that I have come across. There was a real buzz about it; there should be skills shows all over the place. There needs to be an incentive to ensure that schools do what we need them to do. I therefore support Amendment 61 to ensure that only colleges with good careers education can get good or outstanding Ofsted ratings.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, I can only second what has been said this afternoon. I was interested to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Baker, that he started off with a five-line amendment that seemed to encapsulate what this issue is about. Will the Government reconsider whether they need to put all of Amendment 11 into primary legislation?

I will give the Committee an example of why I read the whole thing with mounting grief, after thinking that the five lines were splendid. I am the governor of a small specialist sixth-form academy. We have a small group of young people who have already chosen a specialist route, in this case mathematics. I am very proud of the fact that our first class included one young lady who went off to be a Dyson apprentice at 18 with her extremely good A-levels, and your Lordships will not be surprised to hear that we have been visited by people from the Dyson Institute of Technology who are very keen that we should send them some more apprentices.