Careers Service (Young People)

Barry Sheerman Excerpts

Tuesday 13th September 2011 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

Exactly, what have the Government done with that money? Where have they spent it? Those are questions for the hon. Gentleman to answer, not me.

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

May I correct my right hon. Friend? Is it not a fact that face-to-face careers advice will be available? It will be available in the public schools, the independent schools and the most elite and privileged schools in the country; it just will not be available to most schools.

[Andy Burnham]

That is the point, is it not? This well-connected Cabinet think that everyone’s lives are like their own and that everyone can just call on a friend, uncle or whoever in a law firm or in the City. Sure, they will open a door—ring them up and they will give the advice. They live in a world, and constituencies sometimes, where that advice is readily available through informal family networks. They probably do not see the need for careers advisers. They have used them themselves, but do not see the need for them. However, there are many young people in the constituencies that we represent who cannot draw on those family networks and connections, who do not have role models to whom they can go and who perhaps have never had family members in the professions. They are the ones who need help to enter these closed worlds run often by a self-perpetuating elite.

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[Mr Gibb]

I am not sure what service those people were receiving from Connexions, but there is no doubt that all the surveys showed dissatisfaction with the careers advice given by Connexions. There is more satisfaction with the advice that it gives to vulnerable young people on how to get back on track and back into the mainstream, and I acknowledge that that part of the service has been of a higher quality.

[Mr Sheerman]

Perhaps I can assist the Minister. When I was Chair of the Select Committee, whenever we considered that service we felt that it was very patchy up and down the country. That made us very angry in some circumstances, but it is, I think, called localism.

[Mr Gibb]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman that the service is very patchy.

Our starting point was that careers advice needed to improve, and I think that there is unanimity across the House on that. We decided to split the provision of careers advice from the provision of advice to vulnerable young people. They are very different disciplines requiring different skills and different knowledge bases, so the decision was taken to provide an all-age careers service—the national careers service. That is the responsibility of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, and the service will be up and running from April 2012. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning for the work that he has put in to delivering that service.

The duty to provide careers advice to young people will therefore be removed from local authorities and transferred, subject to the passage of the Education Bill, to schools from September 2012. That duty will require schools to secure access to independent impartial careers guidance for their pupils in years 9 to 11. As part of the consultation process, we are also considering whether there is a case for extending that duty down to year 8 or up to the age of 18.

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[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to be called in this debate. I shall start with a confession: when I chaired the Education and Skills Committee—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

May I just say that we have nine Members left to speak, and that if the hon. Gentleman limits his speech to eight minutes it will help everybody?

[Mr Sheerman]

I was going to confess that when I was Chair of the Education Committee I never did an inquiry into careers, but in 2008 I was co-chair of the Skills Commission and we undertook a major inquiry into careers. Lord Boswell, Baroness Sharp and I were on the commission and we produced an all-party report, “Inspiration and Aspiration: Realising our Potential in the 21st Century.” Dame Ruth Silver, whom the Minister and anyone who knows anything about careers will know, the former principal of Lewisham college, was a very important influence on our inquiry, and she now chairs the Government advisory organisation that fell out with the Government recently.

We found pretty simple things. We found that, yes, information technology is very useful and that it will increasingly be used by many young people and older people, but at that stage—three years ago—it was used by only about 17% or 18%, which is not a lot. We also found that it was not enough in itself—face-to-face experience and trusted professionals were vital. There was no doubt that all the research, all the evidence that we took, showed it could not be done by technology alone, and that we blanked out many people by relying only on the technology and the internet.

We also found that yes, the careers service was not as good as it should have been. Anyone who does a PhD in future about the Conservatives’ enthralment with localism will have a wonderful time with the Minister’s speech tonight, because what is this localism? I intervened and said, “The trouble is that Connexions was patchy.” It is true that in every local government service I know, much is good in some things, but less is good in others and things are pretty average too much of the time. So how does one, believing in localism, raise the bar for careers advice? It is a great challenge, as Conservative Members will find. Pushing the responsibility back entirely on to schools, they will find the service very patchy indeed, especially if there are very few resources to some schools and better resources at others.

The Skills Commission report was accepted by all three parties and influenced all three manifestos, so there was the start of a good cross-party agreement on the need for high-quality careers advice—absolutely everyone from whom we took evidence agreed on that. But how do we push that forward? When we found that all the manifestos had been influenced by the cross-party consensus, we were very hopeful. But how did we get to the Government advisory group on the all-age careers service? The Labour Government of 2008 did not want an all-age careers service. They were eventually persuaded—again, there was cross-party consensus. All three main parties agreed on an all-age careers service, and they reconstituted it under a different name—the national careers service advisory group. I understand that it is now in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, with the Education Department visiting, rather than its being in the Education Department. I have some concerns, and I think hon. Members will have some concerns, about careers being put very securely in BIS rather than in the Education Department.

Responsibility for providing face-to-face services is, however, being transferred to schools, without funding. I have the report from the advisory group on the all-age careers service and the comments by Dame Ruth Silver about the very real problems with it. It says:

“The new National Careers Service will include face-to-face services for adults, but not for young people. Instead, its service for young people will be confined to telephone- and web-based services. Responsibility for providing the face-to-face services is being transferred to schools, without any transfer of funding: the previous provision of around £200 million per annum for the service for young people has been allowed to disappear.”

That is the Government’s advisory group speaking. These are the leading people in the country advising on careers. The report continues:

“There are widespread concerns about the destruction of careers services across the country, with heavy staff redundancies. At a time when young people are facing massive changes in further and higher education, and new apprenticeships—as well as high youth unemployment—stripping out the professional help available to them is not only foolhardy; it is potentially damaging to young people’s lives and ultimately to the economy.”

What a damning report by the Government’s advisory committee! It cannot be right to go in this direction.

As a result of this kind of localism, schools with few resources will have very little careers advice. That is the truth. At the same time, local authorities up and down the land, under pressure of resources, are getting rid of their careers services or slimming them down to the very bone. We will not recreate a culture of high-quality careers service professionals in that way, even though the Government asked Ruth Silver to chair a committee to determine how to increase the professional quality of the careers service.

Everything was going in the right direction, with all-party consensus. Localism could have worked in this respect if the money had followed local responsibility and accountability. I worked closely with the Minister, who was a good member of the Education and Skills Committee for some years, when I chaired it. He is a reasonable man, and he will understand that this is not a party political issue. Good-quality careers advice is absolutely essential to everyone of whatever age. I am one of those people who believe that it is shame and a stain on our country to have a thing called NEETs. I believe that anyone who is not in education, employment or training of whatever age is a NEET, and we cannot have them.