Education Bill

Baroness Jones of Whitchurch Excerpts

Wednesday 13th July 2011 Grand Committee

Moved by

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch]

86A: Clause 26, page 27, line 13, at beginning insert “Subject to subsection (7),”

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch]

My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendments 86B, 86C, 86D, 86E and 86F. These relate to concerns about the future of schools careers advice and to the increasing concern of professionals and employers that the Bill is failing to meet the real challenges facing this sector.

Before I continue, I acknowledge with thanks the letter of 8 July that I received from the Minister, which set out in more detail what is envisaged in the new career guidance service. I shall paraphrase it, although I am sure that the Minister has his own version. It says, first, that Connexions was not providing a consistently high-quality service to all young people and that it had to change. To a certain extent, I would agree with that. Secondly, the letter also goes on to argue that schools should be left to organise their own careers provision and be held to account only through what is described as a “destination measure” of where young people go when they leave school. We very much disagree with this approach and I shall explain why shortly.

First, I will deal with the end of the ring-fenced funding for Connexions and the transition to the all-age careers service, which is covered in our amendments to Clause 26. All the evidence shows that Connexions careers services around the country are closing as we speak. A desperately worrying scenario is developing of a cohort of young people being left with no careers advice at all, as one service ends and nothing substantial is yet in place to replace it. The department appears to have passed the buck on to individual schools rather than have a coherent transitional plan. As the ASCL has said:

“More than 2 million young people aged 16 to 19 could lose out on valuable careers services while the Government overhauls the national careers advice service at a time when young people’s unemployment is reaching record highs”.

Meanwhile, we are all still awaiting the detail of the design of the new all-age careers service: its duties, the services it will provide, where it will be located and how it can be accessed. In the Commons debate, the Minister said that the new service would be ready to go this September, with the full service in place from April 2012. In the mean time, the Secretary of State has stated that in 2011-12 school budgets will not rise to take account of their new legal responsibility to provide careers guidance for young people, as set out in this Bill. This lack of ring-fencing means that schools will be forced to find funds from existing budgets, leading to the inevitable conclusion that the Government intend to provide careers services on the cheap. Perhaps the Minister could explain what interim provision is being made for those young people awaiting a full careers service next year. I am sure that he will acknowledge that this is particularly fraught given the current high levels of youth unemployment. Our first set of amendments would achieve the simple but important aim of delivering continuity by requiring the Secretary of State to report to Parliament on the details of a transition plan before the new careers service can take effect.

We move on to the next set of amendments in this group, which define and improve the package of careers advice young people should be able to access in the future. Our amendments are set against a backdrop of increasingly complex careers choices being faced by young people and evidence that lack of information is seen by young people as one of the main barriers to their participation in education or training post-16. We do not accept that the quality careers guidance that we all know is necessary can be delivered simply by the publication of data on pupils’ post-school destinations. For example, there will be a terrible temptation for providers to push young people into destinations which score more highly rather than those that play to their individual strengths and interests. At the same time, there will be a real challenge to keep accurate statistics and track the longer-term destinations of young people. There may be statistics on their destinations immediately after school but surely what we are interested in is the longer-term careers choices they make as a result of the careers guidance that they get.

The Government have indicated that going forward the duty to provide careers advice may be satisfied by phone or online services. While we recognise that this may have a role, we absolutely do not accept that this is enough to ensure that young people get tailored guidance in tune with their talents, abilities and aspirations. Young people are happy to talk on the phone to their friends for hours, but when it comes to talking to someone older or someone in authority, all too often they pass the phone to their parents and ask them to make that phone call for them. I genuinely do not think that young people will be confident enough to deal with quite complicated issues on the phone. In the same way as they require a face-to-face environment for mentoring or indeed teaching, this type of contact is just as necessary when young people are discussing their future job plans and their future life. Therefore our amendments would require schools to provide high quality, face-to-face careers advice.

This advice is particularly important to children from backgrounds where they do not have access to a social network of people in a variety of jobs, and even more so when the parents do not work or where there is intergenerational unemployment. Good careers advice can make a big difference in driving social mobility, expanding pupils’ horizons and helping them to see themselves working in different environments. We believe that these matters are too important to be left to schools’ discretion. We also foresee the possibility of a postcode lottery developing, with careers services around the country varying considerably depending on the resources available, thus mirroring some of the problems we have already identified with the Connexions service.

Our amendments also address the age range when young people should be able to access advice and the frequency at which it should be provided. The Bill limits careers advice to those aged between 14 and 16. That is not good enough. EngineeringUK, for example, has identified the need for much earlier advice through what it calls the “Year 8 dip”, which is when the appetite for tough science and maths decreases in young people. The organisation goes on to say:

“We believe that at this point, and at other critical points along the academic pathway, we need well informed careers advisers in schools able to inspire and inform young people about careers in engineering and other science, technology, engineering and maths areas”.

We agree with that analysis, and it could equally apply to other subject areas. One careers advice session held during the term when a student leaves school is too late. It should be provided at regular intervals before key milestones in a pupil’s academic life, and our amendments would provide for that.

Finally, the amendments also seek to ensure that only those trained in careers guidance can provide the formal careers advice to which pupils are entitled. Without these amendments, there is no guarantee that advice would be provided by a trained professional or that it would cover the full range of options, including academic and vocational options. I accept that in the guidance the noble Lord may well refer to that it is seen as something that is “desirable”, but our amendments would make it an explicit requirement.

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Overall, the arrangements for careers guidance that the Government propose are based on trusting professionals and freeing schools from bureaucracy, trying to give them the opportunity to secure the specialist support they need from the market, which is characterised by choice and diversity of provision. Points have been raised about age, which we will reflect upon, about reporting and about quality. I hope that noble Lords will recognise that we are taking those steps and that the underlying point of moving responsibility to schools, originally recommended to the Government in reports and which has been widely welcomed, will help take that forward. On the basis of that further information, I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, will feel able to withdraw her amendment.

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch]

My Lords, we have had a very good debate on this issue. If anyone was in any doubt before we started about the complexities of children’s lives and the choices that confront them, some of the examples that we have heard from around the Room will certainly have helped to open our eyes to just how difficult it is to be a child in school today, facing, as my noble friend rightly said, 85 years of career choices that they have to make. People say—this is a well known statistic these days—that you can now face three different careers in your lifetime. It used to be that you went into one job and that was your job for life, but now people often change careers two or three times during the course of their life.

The choices for young people facing their life ahead are complicated and require specialist knowledge. To give a quick example of that in terms of giving careers advice, wearing one of my other hats, young people who qualify with a degree in film studies think that they are all going to go off to be film directors, but fewer than 1 per cent of people with a degree in film studies ever get a job in that sector. A statistic said that about 34 per cent of those young people end up working in the retail sector. All the factors that have been mentioned today underline how important it is that we get this right.

The Minister has said that there will be a professional service. We understand that we may have a professional service, but the people who are providing the actual advice, online or face-to-face, would not have to be qualified under the Government’s scheme. Our point is that young people’s future lives are so important that these people should have some sort of qualification.

I underline that again. My noble friend Lord Layard has not commented on this—I am sure that he does not like people constantly making reference to him as being the happiness tsar—but if people at this age get this wrong then it is not just about them making the wrong career choice; it has an effect on their health and their mental health. The consequences of their making wrong choices are real and serious, and that underlines the need for people to be qualified before they are let loose on children in schools.

At the heart of our dilemma here is that the Government want to be enabling and we want to lay down duties on schools and rights for pupils. There is not so much of a difference between us, though; the Government have already said that there are some duties on schools regarding what they will provide. The Bill says that there will be duties for the service to be independent, which I think we would all agree with; to be based in schools, which I think is the right place to focus careers guidance; and to have a mix of academic and vocational provision, and a number of voices around the Committee have echoed the importance of both academic and vocational choices.

All we are attempting to do is add a few more duties, and the principle that we have already established is a way of going forward. Those duties include specifying the frequency of the careers advice, looking at a wider age range at which children can access careers advice and the whole issue of people being professionally qualified. We have established that there will be some duties, and we want more. I hope that the Minister will see that we are not so far apart in all this.

I am pleased that the Minister said that he will take the issue of the age range away and look at it further. We look forward to hearing about the outcome of that in more detail. I think that I understood him to say that he would be bringing forward some more short-notice guidance. Perhaps he could specify whether that will be available to us before Report, at least in draft form, so that we might know where we stand on that.

I like to feel that we are moving closer together on these issues, but there remains the issue of what happens in the transition. The noble Lord, Lord Boswell, said that he was not convinced there was a crisis, but I hope that he has heard some of the voices around the table saying that it is perhaps more of a crisis than he might have identified. Our understanding is that hundreds, if not thousands, of people who currently have training qualifications in careers advice are being made redundant around the country, so we are losing those skills and that expertise. It seems pretty strange to set up a new structure that starts from scratch when everyone has been scattered to the four winds, so to speak, with all the knowledge and experience that they retained beforehand. We need to look again at the transition and what else we can do to make it a smooth and well resourced one.

We have had a good debate. We would welcome some further discussions on this, but in the mean time I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 86A withdrawn.