Further Education

Baroness Stedman-Scott Excerpts

Thursday 4th February 2016 Grand Committee

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, on securing this debate. It is important because it affects our young people and their potential life. I declare my interest as I was CEO of Tomorrow’s People for 30 years, and much of what I have learned in this field has come from that. I am patron of the Rye Studio School, which serves a large rural area, and governor of a Bexhill Academy.

None of us would be here today if we did not care. I take great comfort from the fact that we all care that the right thing is done for our young people. However, even in better fiscal times, any business worth its salt will look at what it is doing and ask whether it is doing the best it can and whether there are things it should or should not do. I look on this review as an opportunity to do what anyone would to ensure that we are giving the best we can to our young people in colleges. I hope the review will enable us, within those confines, to give up the best to get the better for people.

Rural areas face a variety of issues, and depending on how rural they are, those issues are exaggerated to various degrees. Noble Lords have already raised the issue of the cost of travel, but is the transport going to the right place at the right time to enable people to get to their college? If it is not, how are we going to get them to work? We need to look at this. We have to make sure that people can learn and get to work, and that is where innovation and opportunity come in.

The other issue they face is in making decisions about their lives. Sometimes in a rural area it is all doom and gloom: “There are no jobs”. But in the areas I have been involved in, that is not what we found to be true en masse. I will come on to that more later.

What should young people study for? Is the right thing being laid on? That has already been referred to. What will help them secure work? Who is helping them understand the labour market in which they live to make sure that they undertake the right training? There is a place in East Sussex called Heathfield. It is not as remote as some of the places that the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, referred to, but there are issues there. A partnership between East Sussex County Council, the Heathfield Partnership, Tomorrow’s People and the business community has been a real eye-opener. It has been about local solutions and trying to sort the issues that each individual faces, rather than people telling you that you cannot boil the ocean. It is about people and local solutions. They told us that there were no jobs, but the minute we went round the rural community we found jobs. Then we were able to match young people to those jobs and, in all of that, to ensure that they could get to those jobs because there were distances to cover.

One way that was resolved was that the council, the police and crime commissioner and the Heathfield Partnership bought into the Wheels 2 Work scheme, where funding was made available to young people for the loan of a scooter to enable them to get to work. We had a young lad who wanted to become a landscape gardener. An employer took him on and taught him to drive—at his expense. The young lad now has his own van and goes round doing his work. When the boss met him, he took great delight in telling him that every time that van goes out for a day there is £60 in VAT for the Exchequer.

So these are challenging times. The review is challenging but it creates opportunities, including ways to do things in different ways, responding to the needs of young people. If noble Lords had been here earlier for the waste debate, they would have heard the noble Lord, Lord Young of Norwood Green, refer to sell-by dates. Too many young people have sell-by dates on them and I hope that this review will create opportunities and that we can overcome the challenges to make sure they can be at the right place at the right time and achieve their destiny.