Careers Guidance

Barry Sheerman Excerpts

Thursday 16th May 2013 Westminster Hall

[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to participate in this debate under your chairmanship, Mr Benton. As all the previous speakers have said, it is a very important debate.

It is also great to see our leader, the Chairman of the Education Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), back again. Obviously, all of us wish him all the best for a swift recovery.

It is good to see the hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) gracing the education world once more. We remain a happy if not always entirely united Committee, which is good for democracy. This morning, I was busy telling a conference just what the role of a Select Committee is. There seemed to be some confusion, with people thinking that we are just another adjunct of the Government, but if they came along here they would notice that members of Select Committees do not just simply salute the Government, which is another good aspect of Parliament that we should reflect on and be pleased about.

As the Chairman of the Committee mentioned, at our last meeting we talked about destinations, and the Secretary of State mentioned that he was sorry that he had not covered that issue properly in the accountability world. It is a critical issue and I want to say why it is so important that we know about destinations, and why that has an impact on schools in terms of careers. Obviously, if a school is to be measured by the destinations of its pupils in the future, it will show a great interest in finding the best destinations for its pupils and encouraging them towards those destinations. We need to bear that in mind as a stimulus for schools, particularly secondary schools. In other words, if a school is identified as good because of its record in getting pupils into good jobs or good pathways to further their careers and so on, it will establish the mechanisms that will help it to do that. We should work really hard to ensure that we have a destination measurement system in place.

I say that because whenever I ask companies in my constituency what we can do to help, there are usually three things. First, there are regulations; they are talked about by people in just about every organisation. Then, of course, there is criticism of high street banks, because they do not lend. But the commonest question is, “Where do we recruit from? Where are the skills?” We must start working out how we match the demand for skills with the output of our education system. Doing that is critical, especially when we are attempting to rebalance the economy, because while we are doing it we are effectively recalibrating the kind of skills we need. Therefore, we must ensure that people understand where the best opportunities are, both for themselves and for our economy. Business and education need to engage properly.

I have been having conversations with people from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, for example, and they make that point forcefully, because they are aware that there is a bit of a void between many schools and businesses. What do we have to do to improve the situation? First, we must send a signal that now that schools have the responsibility for careers guidance, which they will have for some time notwithstanding the discussion that we have already had today about resources, we must make sure that schools are actually going out to engage with businesses. Governing bodies will have a role, and head teachers have to accept that it is part of their responsibility. It is absolutely right that Ofsted should consider how schools deal with those challenges, and measure the performance of schools and comment on it as part of the inspection package.

Of course, business has to engage with schools as well; there must be two-way traffic. Businesses must communicate with schools, because it is no use their sitting on the sidelines and saying they wish that this or that would happen; they must ensure that they influence the schools. Academies, of course, are more autonomous, so they should be more responsive and more open to contributions from the business world, and certainly from local businesses.

That is an issue we must focus on and the hon. Member for Scunthorpe—

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

I was enjoying what the hon. Gentleman said, up to that point, but will he talk about resource? I still visit many schools and they would love to do the things that he has just been articulating, but schools are busy and strapped for cash and resources. When I chaired the Education Committee, the two things that we said a school needed were a person trained to be a careers adviser—it does not come from Buggins—and the resource to get out of the classroom to meet businesses. Does he not agree that resources are crucial?

[Neil Carmichael]

I will just finish my response to the point that the hon. Member for Scunthorpe made. He quite rightly said that local enterprise partnerships should play a role. They should, and we need to see an enhanced role for them. That would be a useful tool to encourage dialogue.

As for resources, of course everybody accepts that we do not have a bottomless pit. Having more resources would be better, but we must work within the framework we have. Businesses should engage with schools from self-interest, and we need to make that point more. I tried to provide some context by pointing out that, in some cases, businesses are concerned about where they are going to recruit.

In my constituency, I have a festival of engineering and manufacturing. I do so for two reasons. First, one in every five jobs in my constituency is connected with engineering and manufacturing; it is a big proportion, which shows we have critical mass. Secondly, I am aware that there ought to be more dialogue between medium-sized firms and schools, so I provide a platform for that dialogue to happen. We organise events, for example constructing electric cars, and various projects involving batteries, computers and so forth. Children come into businesses and find out what it is like to see a business, and business people go into schools and see what the situation is there. We had the festival last year; it was incredibly successful and that is why we are doing it again this year.

We want to see more such initiatives; it is all very well sitting around and saying, “This is what we need to do”, but we have to get on and do it. My festival is a good example. It is not something that everyone would necessarily want to copy, but people may want to consider the messages that it sends out and the mechanisms that it uses.

It is absolutely right that we get businesses into schools. The motivator could well be the destination measurements, and it is really important that teachers learn more about the place of work. That is something else that the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development talked to me about, and I intend to expand that dialogue to see exactly what else we can learn about the way forward.

I finish by discussing economic competitiveness, because as a country we have to be more competitive and make more use of the European Union. I do not want to go through the arguments that we had in the House yesterday, but in my contribution to the economic growth debate, I made a point about the role of the Mittelstand type of companies in Germany. They have linkages with their local community, knowledge of and involvement in local schools, capacity to plan ahead and an interest in ensuring that they get the right supply of skills into their firms, as needed, largely on the basis of knowing what their requirements are and having the contacts to ensure that they can be fulfilled. We need to arrive at such a situation. It requires not resources and bureaucracy but a change of culture, in which schools and businesses start working together to ensure that we have the right skill sets and the right environment for pupils and students to choose careers that suit them and contribute to the rebalancing of our economy and produce more economic growth.