Social Mobility

Lord Aberdare Excerpts

Wednesday 29th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Choudrey, on his well-timed maiden speech.

The CBI’s Carolyn Fairbairn says, in a report out last week, that

“the need to close the opportunity gap and maintain business engagement with young people is imperative to social mobility.”

So I will focus on access to the workplace. The Sutton Trust’s Mobility Manifesto emphasises the importance of high-quality careers education. When I ran a business preparing at-risk young people for employment, many had few friends or family in work and little idea of the opportunities available or how to pursue them. We give them what the trust calls essential life skills, covering things such as appearance, punctuality, confidence, communication, team-working, problem-solving and resilience. Would it not be better to teach these skills in school, starting at primary level? Children’s ideas about careers begin to form between the ages of six and eight, yet only a few primary schools have careers-related learning strategies. Will the Government encourage more to do so, preferably involving parents?

The Government’s laudable careers strategy requires pupils to have seven employer encounters between years 7 and 13 and two workplace experiences by the age of 18. How will they ensure that enough employers, especially SMEs, step up to meet this need? According to the Youth Parliament, work experience is one of the top concerns of 11 to 18 year-olds, so a group of young British Youth Council members recently produced a toolkit for SMEs interested in offering placements. How will the Minister promulgate good advice like that to the SMEs that need it?

The manifesto rightly promotes apprenticeships, especially for disadvantaged young people. How will the Minister make teachers and parents more aware and more supportive of the opportunities and benefits of apprenticeships, and will she take up the idea of a UCAS-style portal for apprenticeships? I hope she will acknowledge that issues relating to career aspirations and skills are central to any successful strategy for improving social mobility.