Careers Guidance

Alex Cunningham Excerpts

Thursday 16th May 2013 Westminster Hall

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

Mr Benton, it is a privilege to serve under your chairmanship in this important debate. I, too, welcome our Chair, the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), back to his role in the House.

I have no doubt about the importance to our country of a well-functioning and fit-for-purpose careers service for young people, although the transfer of responsibility to individual schools has resulted in mixed provision. I intend to concentrate on resources, quality and the need for a professional service.

During the evidence sessions on the Government’s reforms to the service, the Education Committee heard from many expert witnesses that the service was going downhill. There seemed to be little disagreement among them that the service has suffered since the changes took effect; things are going in the wrong direction and youngsters are the ones losing out. The subsequent report outlined compelling evidence that the service has begun to, and is likely to, continue degrading.

In written and oral evidence, we found ongoing concerns about the quality, independence, impartiality and availability of careers guidance. We also heard numerous concerns about an emerging postcode lottery of provision, with some schools and local authorities making a success of the reforms and others sometimes lacking the resources, expertise and perhaps even the will to do the same. One thing that stood out was the observation that effective guidance services will only support the complexity of needs if they are appropriately resourced and structured to do so. Although the Committee raised concerns, the Government have so far failed to address major funding issues in the careers service or the crisis facing the provision of careers advice in schools.

The funding provided for the careers guidance element of the former Connexions service totalled some £196 million, as the Committee Chair and other hon. Members outlined. Responsibility for providing careers guidance was transferred to schools as part of the Education Act 2011, but as has already been said, none of that funding was transferred with it. In consolation, if it is any consolation at all, the Department for Education funds the National Careers Service, for services for young people, to the tune of a paltry £7 million for a helpline, which we found that many young people do not even appear to know exists. I should like to know where all the cash has gone.

The staff need to be in possession of the requisite skills and knowledge to meet the needs of our young people. I remember my careers chat with Mr Harding, the deputy head teacher of Branksome School in Darlington, when I was 15. I thought I should like to be an engineer or maybe something else. “Okay”, he said. “Five O-levels, including maths and English for you”, and I was out the door. There was no real discussion, no exploration of my skills and no help. Perhaps if he had considered how incompetent I was with a piece of wood or metal, he might have been able to say, “Engineering is not for you, but you’re not so bad at English, you know. Maybe you should think about something along those lines.” The fact that I ended up as a journalist and politician probably speaks for itself.

Sadly, many young people today face the same level of support that I had, and it is simply not good enough. Some may be doing all right, but the evidence suggests that most certainly are not. My trade union, Unison, which has seen the number of members working in the careers service collapse, is worried for our young people and reminds us:

“The absence of regulatory rigour and safeguards within the new legislation and the cuts the service has faced have led to a postcode lottery on the type and level of careers advice available.”

I ask the Minister to consider doing more to promote consistency in the offer to young people, through a greater degree of central guidance to assist schools to adopt a consistent approach. That might arrest the slide into a full-blown postcode lottery that we are witnessing. I hope that the Minister will at least agree that our children deserve better than a postcode lottery.

As the quality of service slips, so too does the range of knowledge about potential career paths available to children. As the director of the Education and Employers Taskforce says,

“far too many young people are having to make vital and incredibly important decisions about their futures without enough access to good information.”

That is a worrying observation. The Government seem to have taken what is widely considered to have been an imperfect system and put an inferior one in its place. I am pleased that our Education Committee did not hold back in its criticism. In view of that, I find the Government’s response to our report puzzling. It is one thing for an Opposition party’s criticism to elicit a complacent response, but quite another for a Committee chaired by a Conservative MP, with a majority of Government MPs, to provoke such a tepid, lethargic reaction.

As a former chair of the Connexions service in the Tees valley, I know that Connexions was not perfect and that performance was better in some areas than others, with provision often concentrated on those with the greatest needs at the expense of the general school population, but at least we had professionals with knowledge engaged with our young people. Their numbers have been devastated and now they are simply not available in most schools. The Government’s response to our report seems to contain little appreciation of the negative impact the reforms have had on young people seeking to enter the labour market. Some of those who took part in our inquiry must wonder why they bothered, when it appears to have made so little difference as far as the Government are concerned.

We are told that we should offer an opportunity for the changes based on school-based provision to “bed in and evolve”, but the changes have been in place for long enough to see which way the wind is blowing. If the early signs are ominous, instead of allowing a pattern of failure and service degradation to set in, the Education Secretary and the Minister should see what steps they can take easily to arrest the decline. For example, the Select Committee report suggested that all schools should publish and review their careers plan each year, but we are told that this would represent

“the kind of bureaucracy that we have tried so hard to remove.”

Quite aside from the staggering amount of bureaucracy that the Education Secretary’s top-down reorganisation of English schools has brought to bear across the system, I do not think that asking schools to report on the kind of service they are providing represents bureaucracy that is worth removing.

Although I have a different vision of education and schools policy from the Secretary of State, I share with him a desire to see the reforms work, now that they are in place. The Education Committee provided a simple way of improving the system. It is mystifying why the Government would try to remove any ability for parents, representatives and the public to know what kind of provision is in place. I urge the Minister to reconsider that decision or, at the very least, to lay out in far greater detail why it was taken.

Not everybody agrees with me, but I urge a greater role for local authorities in the new system. It is logical that those institutions play a co-ordinating role to facilitate a flow of information about best practice, new ideas and resources. Bradford is one of the better examples. The Government should actively promote the schools and local authorities that do well, although I acknowledge, as have other hon. Members, that local authority resources are much squeezed these days, particularly in the north.

Research published in July 2011 revealed that of 144 local authorities only 15 would maintain what the researchers termed a “substantial service”. In six London boroughs, all the Connexions careers service offices have been closed. In Hull, the number of careers advisers has been reduced from 81 to 18. In other authorities careers staff have been merged into generic youth work. The Government’s attempts to simplify the system have led to confusion about the correct roles for members of staff, and resultant confusion about who is responsible for what. That is why the Government’s response is so disappointing. It is said that the Government want to wait and see what Ofsted says in the summer, once its review of careers guidance surfaces, but the Committee consulted Ofsted and found that the current inspection framework was

“not a credible accountability check on the provision of careers guidance by individual schools.”

A good quality, well-resourced careers service is one of the few levers that the Government have at their disposal to do something about youth unemployment. In my Stockton North constituency, youth unemployment stands at more than 1,000, and nationally it is around 1 million. If the Education Department is serious about ensuring that young people have a chance when they leave school, it needs to ensure that the careers system is up to scratch. The Committee realised that, the Labour party realises it, and campaign groups recognise it, but it appears to have passed the Government by. As my hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) said, the response to our report may be disappointing, but we now have a new Minister who will, I hope, chuck the earlier response in the bin and respond by taking the actions that employers, educationalists and, most important, our young people need him to take for their future.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Skills (Matthew Hancock)]

It is a pleasure, Mr Benton, to serve under your chairmanship. I will try to respond to all the points that have been raised, but if there is not enough time to respond to specific points, I will be happy to do so in detail in correspondence, as with the Committee’s deputy Chair.

I value the cross-party approach to the debate and the Opposition Front-Bench Member’s largely non-partisan approach. I invite him to the Department to give him a teach-in on some of the things we are doing on work experience because I agree that it is vital, and we are doing a huge amount to strengthen it. What matters is real work experience, not pretend work experience. The change is important and I am sure he will agree when he understands what is happening. I welcome him to his first Westminster Hall debate on the Front Bench.

During the debate, I noted a huge number of areas of agreement, not least on the value and importance of information, advice and guidance, but also motivation, inspiration and education in a world that young people can reach through their education and their choices of qualification. Several times, the motivating fact in my job was brought up. Youth unemployment is falling and this week, thankfully, the figures showed a further fall, but it is far, far too high. At the same time we have a skills shortage. To fill that skills shortage, we must make sure that the young people of this country have not only the training and qualifications, but the skills to get a job and hold it down. That is the motivation behind the massive increase in apprenticeships and the introduction of traineeships, which will start in the summer. There is agreement about the value and importance of that.

There is also agreement that Connexions failed badly, and that was mentioned throughout the Chamber, but that must be matched with recognition that if the activity that occurred under Connexions, which was poor value for money, has reduced, it is not the same as the amount of careers advice falling. The two are separate, and the reason for the cross-party, cross-sector agreement that Connexions failed is that it was poor value for money.

[Alex Cunningham]

I am interested in professional help. We have seen the number of professionals in the careers service collapse throughout the country. Does that not worry the Minister when he talks about the agenda for informing young people properly?

[Matthew Hancock]

I will come to that. The question is what we can do to provide information, advice, guidance and, much more broadly, motivation and inspiration. Times have changed since the Connexions service was opened up. Information is widely available, but it is obvious that information on the web is not enough; it is about the individual connection between human beings, with young people being inspired, usually by a practitioner who is doing something with their life. Young people look at them and say, “That’s the sort of thing I want to do.” Then the question is how to ensure that they are steered into the path of being able to do it.

Aspiration must be encouraged, but realistically. There was a time when I wanted to be an astronaut, and I am glad I was told that for someone who is British the chances of becoming an astronaut are close to zero, so I ended up in my second choice.