Education: Careers Advice

Baroness Wilcox Excerpts

Tuesday 17th January 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to improve careers guidance for under-25s.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (Baroness Wilcox)]

My Lords, in April the National Careers Service will be launched in England. It will provide high-quality information and advice on careers, online and by telephone. For those aged 18 and over, it will provide a face-to-face service in the community. From September all secondary schools in England will have a legal duty to secure access to careers guidance for pupils aged 14 to 16. Subject to consultation, this duty will be extended to 16 to 18 year-olds in schools and in further education.

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno]

I am grateful for the references to England and I only hope that we speak to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland as well. I appreciate that careers advisers in the new development will be independent. Are we certain they are going to be trained at the top level and that the interviews they conduct will not just be online or by computer but be face-to-face discussions with the youngsters, who are often among the 1 million unemployed? In respect of the face-to-face discussions, do we realise that only 7 per cent of young people know the meaning of apprenticeships? What are the Government going to do to make apprenticeships far more widely known about and better accepted?

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Wilcox]

The National Careers Service is being put together to answer pretty well everything that the noble Lord, Lord Roberts of Llandudno, has just suggested. We know that the careers advice that has been given up until now has been very patchy, and neither parents nor children have understood what their choices are. We hope that the training and monitoring that we will do will make absolutely sure that schools will get the right advice for children in their area.

[Lord Young of Norwood Green]

My Lords, having visited a comprehensive school this morning and talked to the lower sixth form, never have I been more reminded of the importance of careers guidance when young people begin to make choices about further education and careers. Is the Minister worried about the comments by the president of the Institute of Career Guidance? He said:

“In reality, the National Careers Service is an illusion, and not a very imaginatively branded one either, and is a clear misrepresentation with regard to careers services for young people … The likely reality is that hundreds of thousands, and possibly millions, of young people will never get access to personalised impartial career guidance”—

I stress those words—

“having to rely on the national telephone helpline or website and school staff”.

I do not expect the Minister to agree with that, but I would expect her to assure the House that there will be a review of the current approach to careers guidance and to ensure that the right level of personalised careers guidance is available to young people.

[Baroness Wilcox]

We take this issue very seriously. We are putting new money towards it and ensuring that the youth contract will provide nearly 500,000 new opportunities for young people, including apprenticeships and work experience placements. The important thing as far as we are concerned, and our aim, is to get every unemployed young person earning or learning again. We do not think that careers advice has been good in the past and we think it can be improved upon. We are using the original Connexions system to help us to provide a better outcome than we have had thus far. With 1 million youngsters out of work, we know how important this is.

[Baroness Deech]

Does the Minister appreciate that the cuts in legal aid proposed by the Government will devastate the career prospects of young people, many of them from ethnic minorities, who wish to become lawyers? The possibility of earning a living with legal aid in interesting areas such as immigration and family law has been wrecked, not to mention tuition fees.

[Baroness Wilcox]

We are giving schools the power to decide in their area what is going to be right for the children in their schools. This is a very empowering thing to do. We have enormous confidence in our schoolteachers. We believe that our schools should be given this opportunity. Perhaps the noble Baroness would like to speak further on this to me. We will ensure that every opportunity is available to our children.

[Lord Mawhinney]

My Lords, in her Answer my noble friend referred to the service thus far as “patchy”. Many of us who have been privileged to be Members of Parliament over the past 30 years would not be nearly so generous as she has been. What are the radical changes that are planned that give my noble friend confidence about this bright new tomorrow?

[Baroness Wilcox]

Local authorities deliver both universal careers guidance and targeted support for vulnerable young people under the Connexions brand, and there is widespread evidence that a lack of focus on careers guidance led to provision of variable quality, which is what I was referring to. That is why we have decided to end the Connexions area-based grant that the noble Lord is referring to. Local authorities retain the responsibility to help young people not in education, employment or training to re-engage. We are concerned about children at every level: children in schools, and children who have just left school and are wandering the streets with no training and no work to go to. Do not worry, we are really on top of this, and any advice that the noble Lord can give me, I am happy to have.

[Lord Taylor of Blackburn]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Roberts of Llandudno, mentioned the independence of these advisers. Will they really be independent or will they just be yet more teachers who find themselves with a little spare time in their timetable and are given this job to do?

[Baroness Wilcox]

That sounds a bit like the careers guidance when I was at school all those years ago. No, the whole point is that these are going to be specially trained careers advisers. They will be external to the schools. It will not just be—forgive me—the teacher who maybe has time to go to the library for the couple of rows of books that we used to get pointed towards. This is real careers advice; we need it now, and we are determined to provide it.