Careers Guidance in Schools

Debate between Christina Rees and Jane Hunt

Tuesday 11th January 2022 Westminster Hall

[Jane Hunt (Loughborough) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Rees, and also to point out to the hon. Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Mike Kane) that I was born on the council estate in Wythenshawe and made it to be an MP. So there we are: there is one already—more to follow.

We have a difficulty in Leicestershire in that all too often people get their first job, which is low paid and low skilled, and then remain in it. That is fine when people are living at home with their parents and single, but when they move on to have a family or want to move to another place, then it is more difficult. I have been working on a life skills project for a couple of years, alongside Barclays, Communities that Work and East Midlands Housing, to try and promote ways of being able to pay rent and move on in life by getting additional skills. Really, I am just following on from my predecessor, the wonderful Baroness Morgan of Cotes, who worked on a project with Loughborough College called Bridge to Work and is now on the board of the Careers & Enterprise Company, working along the same lines as Bridge to Work when it started out.

Since setting up the Careers & Enterprise Company and the careers hubs in the area, we have retrieved all sorts of good statistics that meet the Gatsby model. For example, more than six in 10 schools nationally are taught maths and English in a way that links lessons to jobs and careers—a 44% increase on 2019. Nine in 10 colleges also taught the curriculum in a way that highlighted the relevance of a subject to future career paths, and 84% of schools provided information about apprenticeships to their students. Those are some of the achievements that the Careers and Enterprise Company has highlighted.

I want to highlight three excellent examples in Loughborough. Limehurst Academy’s work is spearheaded by the proactivity of its wonderful head, Jonathan Mellor. It has embedded careers education across the academy’s curriculum, from subject areas right through to personal development, citizenship and targeted interventions, as has Rawlins Academy, which is also leading the way. It has rewritten its careers education programme from start to finish to build careers conversations into every subject area. Finally, there is the Careers and Enterprise Hub that is funded by the town deal fund in Loughborough. It is central to the town, providing careers advice and a way to access jobs and to meet with employers; there are interviews and seminars within the building, and it really works.

One of the points I want to raise with the Minister is access to careers advice from a younger age. I believe that the Careers and Enterprise Company focuses on years 8 to 13, but we should look at year 7 or even younger. After I passed my 11-plus, I went to a state grammar school in Congleton in Cheshire, and I had only been there a matter of weeks, when, at 11 years old, Mrs Hall said to me, “Which university have you thought about going to?” I had never even thought about going to university—I was the first in my family to do so—but these points need to be considered.

[Christina Rees (in the Chair)]

I call Mark Fletcher. Unfortunately, you have a very short time, but go for it.