Careers Advice (Schools)

Esther McVey Excerpts

Thursday 13th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Esther McVey (Wirral West) (Con)]

I am delighted that this important matter is being debated in the Chamber today. However, as it is an important and complex matter, I would very much like this to be the start of a discussion on careers advice for all ages, so that we can create a much greater awareness of the issue as a whole.

It is because of the scope of the topic of today’s debate that I shall focus on careers advice for those at school and the importance of specialist careers professionals as a separate practice and distinct occupation, pushing the sector towards professionalism under a unified body and voice. At the outset I welcome the Government’s plans for an all-age careers service, but it is important that all Members can discuss the matter before any further steps are taken. I therefore welcome the time that we have been given in the Chamber this evening.

It is an apt time to examine careers advice for the young given that the latest figures for those not in employment, education or training are at an all-time high. At the end of the third quarter in 2010, the figure for those aged between 16 and 24 in England was 1.026 million. Of those, 160,000 are in the north-west—the highest figure of any of the UK regions. Of particular concern to me is the fact that, in Wirral, 16.8% of those aged between 16 and 19 are not in education, training or work.

Added to that is the ever more sophisticated array of choices of job, training, education and routes to work. It requires the accompanying sophistication of knowledge and know-how to enable students, at the right juncture in their lives, to choose the right subject so as to follow the right education path, preferred course or apprenticeship training, or fill out the right job application form. It is not only providing up-to-date information that will allow every student the best opportunity to pursue subjects and interests that best suit their talents and aspirations, but ensuring that young people and their parents are well informed about the potential of the decisions and the positive ways in which they can influence their future working lives.

All young people, of all backgrounds, abilities, interests and ambitions need good careers education information, advice and guidance so that they can achieve their best and fulfil their potential. However, that is currently not happening with sufficient consistency for every child throughout the country. That has led to comments such as those by the Local Government Association, which said that careers advice was found to be “not useful” by

“the majority of young people”.

The Institute of Career Guidance said that the provision of careers services in England was “patchy and inconsistent”. Although the National Foundation for Educational Research recognised that Connexions was making a significant contribution, it was for a small number of people in a very specific situation. Again according to the LGA, the majority of young people were

“more likely to ask their parents, teachers and youth workers”

for careers advice than to seek formal careers services.

If those points are added together, we have a lot of young children who are not getting the service that they require. I therefore agreed wholeheartedly with the Secretary of State for Education when he said at the annual conference of the National College for Leadership of Schools and Children’s Services in June:

“We are clearly, as a nation, still wasting talent on a scale that is scandalous. It is a moral failure, an affront against social justice which we have to put right”.

The question for all hon. Members is how we are going to put that situation right. How will we find a system that works for all children of all abilities from all backgrounds? How will we provide a flexible system with underpinning standards and requirements? Today, I will make a few suggestions, welcome others, and await the Minister’s replies.

I want to make it clear at this point that, when I pass comment on the failings of the current system, I am in no way passing comment on the thousands of careers staff, educational welfare or youth service staff, who work tirelessly throughout the year, dedicated to their chosen profession. The debate tonight is a constructive overview of careers advice; it is not a question of the staff, but a look at the current system, asking how best that focus should be directed, as well as how best the staff, resources, infrastructure and intelligence already in place can be used to achieve what is best for our youth today. There is also a key question about the transition from the current to the proposed system which I would like the Minister to address.

A quick look at the history of careers advice might provide a useful insight. From April 1974 to April 1994, local education authorities had a statutory duty to provide a careers service under sections 8 to 10 of the Employment and Training Act 1973. The purpose of the service had been mainly to provide guidance and counselling to young people in full-time education in order to help them make the best of their abilities when selecting a career. It had also helped adults requiring information on retraining and in promoting schemes directed at unemployed young people.

In 1990, the Conservative Government undertook a review of services to consider the effectiveness of existing organisational arrangements, with the aim of recommending the most relevant system for delivering careers information, advice and guidance for young people. The review led to proposals to introduce legislation that would facilitate a mix of provisions, including direct management by training and enterprise councils, joint TEC-local education authority provision and a local service contracted out to the private sector. That amended the 1973 Act and transferred the responsibility for the careers service from LEAs to the Secretary of State.

Under the previous Government, in 2001, Connexions was implemented and the careers service subsumed completely within the new Connexions structure. Subsequently, in line with the social inclusion agenda, the emphasis for careers advice was shifted away from universal schools provision to those not in education, employment or training. However, in July 2009, Alan Milburn published a report commissioned by the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown) into social mobility that was highly critical of the previous Government’s provision of career services, in which he judged Connexions an expensive failure.

Similarly, the Sutton Trust, the education charity, found that only 55% of pupils had a formal career action plan meeting with a careers adviser or a teacher—down from 85% in 1997. Recognising that the Connexions service was not working, in October 2009 Labour published “Quality, Choice and Aspiration: a strategy for young people’s information”. Criticism focused on the fact that poor or non-existent career advice had allowed many people to take A-levels inappropriate to the university degrees to which they aspired or to choose degrees unsuitable to their ideal career. Some were encouraged to go to universities when advanced apprenticeships would have been better or had gone for unsuitable short-term jobs from Jobcentre Plus. The National Council for Educational Excellence noted that

“state school teachers are often ill-equipped to offer adequate advice to students”,

leading to unjustified divisions of provision between different types of school.

Such criticisms of a system would lead me to believe that the advice being given was too little, too late, to too few, and of a varying quality. One of the questions being raised tonight is whether we need to start tackling careers at a much earlier age to discover where a child’s passions lie. We do not need anything prescriptive or pre-suggestive when a child is young; we need initially to allow a child to go on a natural discovery of his or her favourite subjects, and then to build on that love of a subject to explore career options constructively, asking, “Where would that subject lead?” We are talking about the application of education and appreciating the building blocks of school, work, employment and, most of all, life fulfilment.

In my mind, that falls in line with the recent report from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, which stated that science, technology, engineering and maths—STEM subjects—are not being highlighted until later in the educational process, by which time students may have bypassed those career options. It added that there is evidence that

“engaging with young people before they reach secondary school has the potential to create more positive attitudes towards STEM”.

Potentially, therefore, we are missing out on a section of children who might have gone into a science career. Inadvertently, we have closed a career path to a swathe of children who may well have gone on to excel in and relish such a career. Most importantly, that affects the individual, but the wider picture is that it affects society as a whole.

As chair of the all-party group on the chemical industry, I am repeatedly told the same story, which is that we are losing valuable talent—so much so that reports are coming to me that we are losing and have lost generations of young technicians and engineers. Not only that, but the industry is crying out for posts to be filled. That equates to career opportunities and jobs that are not being taken. Those are employment gaps that we could easily be filling now, especially at a time of high youth unemployment. There have been so many wasted opportunities. The Institute for Manufacturing and Professor Allport, who is the head of particle physics at Liverpool university, co-ordinating projects at both Daresbury science and innovation campus and CERN in Geneva, confirm that point.

I hasten to add that I cannot believe that the current situation is unique to STEM subjects. It must span across a range of subject areas, the message being: if we can engage young people and children in future career options and get them interested from an early age, they can connect with a broad range of choices of which they might not otherwise be aware. If they have a particular interest, they can tailor their education to that interest. Young people often miss out on important opportunities because they do not take up the correct subjects and are not adequately informed early enough about the choices that they need to make for their careers.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

rose—

[Steve Rotheram (Liverpool, Walton) (Lab)]

rose—

[Esther McVey]

I have two hon. Members seeking to make an intervention—like buses, two have come along at the same time. I will give way first to my friend from Walton.

[Steve Rotheram]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing this Adjournment debate on an issue that is close to both our hearts: making certain that young people get the best possible careers advice, so that they can make informed choices—something that, unfortunately, I do not believe I got when I was 16. She asked how we were going to put the system right. Does she agree that sacking careers advisers and slashing funding would not achieve her aim of doing just that?

[Esther McVey]

I do not believe that that is what is happening. Not only have I read out quotations from other people, but when the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath commissioned a report into the matter, he said that the project in question had been expensive and had not worked. I also specifically said that I was not looking at the staff individually, because so many of them are well qualified, believe in the job passionately and are completely dedicated. The focus of this evening’s debate is where things are going wrong. Where do we need to focus our future direction so as to capture people with the infrastructure and the systems that are already in place, so that we do not lose anything, but instead take things forward?

[Bob Stewart]

I thank my hon. Friend for letting me get off the second bus. Does she agree that the focus in recent years has been far too much on pushing young people down the academic route, towards university? Many of the vocational ways of getting full-time work, including apprenticeships, have simply not been helped—I will not say “overlooked”—by the system. I want pupils in Beckenham, along with those in every other constituency, to be given more opportunity—a broader scope; a full range of options—so that they can choose the route that best suits them and their skills.

[Esther McVey]

My hon. Friend makes a key point, which I was going to touch on a little later. Did the requirements on schools perhaps produce some distortion, pushing children down a university route that might not benefit them all? That is why I am asking for far more sophisticated careers advice, so that each child gets the career outlet that is best for them, and not necessarily one that produces extra positive statistics for the school concerned. It is always about the child and how that child moves forward.

What sort of advice are we talking about, and who will provide it? In his review of higher education, Lord Browne stated that careers guidance should be

“delivered by certified professionals who are well informed, benefit from continued training and professional development and whose status in schools is respected and valued.”

However, in times of austerity, with ever-decreasing schools budgets, we need to ensure that we are able to make such a commitment. We need high-quality guidance for all children that can help young people make the right choices.

Added to that, a survey of young people from workless families found that 70% struggled to find work, that 25% felt that their parents did not have the knowledge to help them find employment and that 49% said that they did not have the role models to look up to or respect. That implies the need to bring such role models into schools to meet young people. In fact, the Deloitte Education and Employers Taskforce found a “substantial” divide between what young people wanted from their careers advice experience in school and what they actually got, including levels of involvement with employers. The findings showed that 95% of young people agreed that they would like employers to be more involved in providing advice and guidance about careers and jobs.

We therefore need to look at the interface between schools, other organisations and the professional careers bodies. I concur with the general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, Christine Blower, who said that the conclusion she drew from the Ofsted report on careers advice was that

“Not every teacher should be expert in careers advice, but… young people should know who to turn to when they need guidance on future learning or on employment. Careers education in secondary schools should not be an also ran. Schools should have the resources to employ staff who can give dedicated and knowledgeable advice.”

I would add that careers advice requires a co-ordinated interface of individuals and bodies working together, which requires standardisation as well as flexibility, aided by the creation of accredited professional organisations bringing real business examples into the schools.

My points for the Minister are these. We have to look at the new proposals, particularly the fact that schools will have a legal duty to secure independent and impartial careers advice for their students. Schools will be free to decide how best to support young people to make good career choices. It might be perceived that that could lead to a gulf in the provision of careers advice among schools, councils and areas. I would like to think that that will not happen, but I would like some clarification. Some children could be getting better advice than others, so we need to ensure that that does not happen. We need to ensure that what we have said about universal specialist training happens.

[Dr Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing this debate. Like her, I feel strongly about the importance of careers advice. She makes a strong case for how to reform the careers advice system, but does she not accept the concern of some Opposition Members that our ability to provide the new careers service that she wants will be severely damaged by the fact that many careers professionals currently face redundancy? I understand that in Merseyside alone 130 places are due to be cut. In my borough of Waltham Forest, the careers service is at risk because of the cuts to local government. She might have great ambitions for an all-age careers service, but the people necessary to support it will simply not be there by September this year to facilitate it.

[Esther McVey]

What the hon. Lady has said is vital, which is why we are here today. We are saying that such a situation could be on the horizon, so we need to capture the people I mentioned. However, when Members on both sides of the House have said that Connexions is not working, failing and an expensive experiment, it shows that the system is wrong. It is not the people who are wrong but the system, so how do we get those people into the right system? That is what we are trying to do.

Moving on, we have to look at the transition stage. All Members are deeply concerned about that. We need to look at the age and the scope of career awareness. As my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) said, we also need to look into a possible distortion from within schools to push people into career paths down which they should not go—to university, for example. My hon. Friend is a champion of apprentices, and we know that there will be 75,000 more of them during this Parliament. How will people find out about that? That is why I am asking for a professional body with sophisticated knowledge which uses all the outlets—whether face-to-face or through the internet. There should be every opportunity.

[Steve Rotheram]

Thank you for allowing me to intervene, Mr. Speaker.

The hon. Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) made an important point. Apprenticeships are not just about careers advice: people do not embark on them just because someone has pointed them in that direction. It is true that there are real problems related to careers advice, but there is also the problem of the culture of apprenticeships and the lack of parity of esteem. In other countries, such as Germany, an apprentice is seen as the equivalent of someone who has taken an academic route. It is not just a question of those working in careers services pushing people into apprenticeships; it is a much wider issue. People should not be pushed into an academic route which might not be the best option for some individuals.

[Esther McVey]

The hon. Gentleman has hit the nail on the head. He has identified one of the key flaws in the careers advice that is currently provided. As he says, apprenticeships have equal standing. Careers advice should take account of the abilities and capabilities of the individual, and should aim for the complete fulfilment of that person. We need to increase understanding of the status of apprenticeships.

We have touched on many important points this evening, on which Members on both sides of the House have been able to agree. We all want children from all backgrounds and with all abilities to be able to fulfil their potential.