Education Bill

Lord Elton Excerpts

Wednesday 13th July 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Benjamin]

My Lords, I rise to support the amendment and to tell noble Lords a little story. Back in 1965, my mother and sister went to see the careers officer and my sister said that she wanted to work at a leading pharmaceutical company. The careers officer said: “I am sorry, Sandra. They don’t take coloured people there”. My mother said, “I brought my children to England to learn and to be educated, and they have worked hard to do so. Surely that is not possible”. The careers officer said, “I am terribly sorry. I can get her a job as a nursery nurse, but not one in a pharmaceutical company”. My mother proved her wrong. She got my sister to write for an interview. She got the job and she worked there for 30 years. But sadly, the myth still applies today, and there are many young people who do not believe that they will be accepted in certain places.

It is for that reason that I have set up an initiative called Touching Success. I get successful people to visit young people in schools and invite them into their organisations. This helps to help to inspire these young people to believe in themselves and understand that they can work and will be accepted outside their postcode. This is important because many of them do not often see role models they can identify with. That is why I believe we need experts to engage with young people, especially those from diverse, disadvantaged and lower-income backgrounds who do not believe in themselves. They do not see that they can succeed. Careers advice is essential to helping them understand that they will be accepted and can go beyond where they see themselves. We need experts to help them, as my mother did with that careers officer way back in 1965. Believe in yourself and the world is your oyster. Anything is possible. That is why I support this amendment.

[Lord Elton]

I shall speak, if I may, to Amendments 86E and 86F, about the age at which careers advice is made available. When teaching in a secondary school myself, I remember the agonies associated with seeing how early children had to choose which subjects to specialise in. All I would ask is that the Minister should bear in mind the advisability of having careers advice available early in the year when the first choice of specialism is forced on children.

[Baroness Sharp of Guildford]

I want to intervene briefly on this. I should declare an interest as, like the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, I am a member of the Skills Commission which recommended the development of an all-age careers service. I welcome the fact that the Government have moved in that direction. Currently, two problems arise. One is the rundown of the current service, particularly in light of the squeeze on local government finances and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Wall, pointed out, the reduction of money devoted to this service by the Department for Education; £7 million is a miserable sum and far too little. There is also the problem of transition, mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones.

Another problem is the shortage of professionals in this area. Not only have people trained to deliver careers guidance left the profession, but not enough people have been properly trained to provide the new service. One thing that the Government might do to show their earnest in setting up the new service would be to establish a crash course in training careers advisers. They are graduates who do a one-year master’s course to qualify and they are desperately needed. As I said, we have the transition problem from 2011-12; let us grab this opportunity and invest in the service as required. That would show the Government’s willingness to support it; they would be putting their money where their mouth is, so to speak. I realise that the question of money is very difficult.

[Lord Morris of Handsworth]

My Lords, I, too, support the group of amendments so ably moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones. I support them because as a group they correct a number of the anomalies inherent in Clause 27. The amendments are consistent with good learning and with the frequency of provision. Face-to-face opportunity to discuss career needs is of very high value, and the Bill is deficient in this area. We recognise the important contribution that trained and qualified professionals can make.

Of course, when a person chooses to have career advice, it is because they are uncertain of their direction of travel. The whole purpose of it is to examine the options and alternatives available with professionals who are honest, who test one’s capability and who advise. There are many people who start out wanting to take an academic route, and who finish up taking the vocational option, or vice versa: that is the benefit of career advice. I fail to see how you will get that interaction and that positive two-way challenge—because it can be a challenge—under what is proposed. What is being proposed is an all-age careers service. I have no difficulty with that as a principle. Indeed, I believe that the Careers Service should and can extend throughout one’s working life. That happens in industry, where managers and senior professionals are supported with personal trainers from time to time, who provide career advice on whether to continue or change direction. This is why the online provision is deficient, because it does not provide the opportunity for challenge and interaction. As with so many of the education proposals which are emerging, we get a lot of promises but some degree of under delivery. I see this career provision of the Bill as fitting that area of concern: much is promised, but little substance is delivered when it is tested.

The fact is that the people who will be denied the opportunity for face-to-face career advice are actually the people who may need it most. Not every child has access to the internet; indeed, in some parts of the country, that is for technical reasons, not just real poverty. That is adding to the reality of digital poverty from which some communities suffer disadvantage.

Careers advice is vital. You must get advice, you must challenge the provider and the provider must interact with your good self. What is so worrying about this aspect of the Bill is that, to the best of my knowledge, no one has seen the careers service as broken, deficient or not meeting the needs of students. All my experience is that career advisers care about what they offer and deliver.

The Secretary of State is taking away the duty to provide and replacing it with a duty to provide access. That is a fundamental shift in the culture, the duty and responsibility of the service. There is no way at this or any point that anyone can be certain that what is proposed will lead to better advice. Local authorities, who have that duty, will not be in the driving seat in procuring professionals to provide better advice but merely carrying through what is decreed by governing boards and the school. The bond between school, local authority and governing bodies will be broken when the all-age career advice service online becomes the norm.

[Lord Elton]

I know that the Committee is anxious to get to the point. The noble Lord has spent some time demolishing the Government's position, but we are discussing amendments to change that position. I wonder which of those amendments he is supporting.

[Lord Morris of Handsworth]

I indicated at the outset that I support the group of amendments moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones. That was my start point. Within the context of those amendments, the points I have made refer to issues that coincide clearly with the face-to-face provisions and the provisions about experience, and so on. I am clearly satisfied in that respect.

My point here concerns the shift from the duty to provide to the duty merely to give access. There is an opportunity in the amendments for real change to improve the Bill. I support the group of amendments moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff]

My Lords, I shall speak to my amendment in this group.

First, though, I shall address a small point just raised about relationships. In new Section 85B(1)(b), perhaps we should also insert, “bereavement reactions in grief and loss”. There are some fantastic programmes that help children prepare for the inevitability of experiencing bereavement, grief and loss, which are tailored for different ages. We know that by the time children leave school, 10 per cent of them are going to be seriously bereaved, but we are just ignoring that when we talk about other aspects of development. Those children do very badly if they do not understand their emotions.

My amendment is focused on community resuscitation. In the UK we have over 30,000 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests a year, and currently fewer than 10 per cent of victims survive to leave hospital. That means that we have 27,000 sudden deaths in the community. To put that in perspective, about 12,000 women a year die of breast cancer, 3,000 people die on the roads and 270 people die from knife crime. The number of sudden cardiac arrest deaths out there is huge. It takes around five to 10 minutes for an emergency ambulance to reach someone and for every minute that passes in cardiac arrest the chance of successful defibrillation decreases by 10 per cent, so time is of the essence. Immediately administrated cardiopulmonary resuscitation, which I am now going to call CPR because it is much shorter, will prolong the time that the patient remains shockable and therefore can be put back into a normal rhythm. It increases the chance of survival by a factor of around three. If there is a defibrillator nearby, survival rates of up to 50 per cent from a baseline of under 10 per cent have been reported.

Other parts of the world have already addressed this. It is part of the curriculum in Norway, Denmark and France. The American Heart Association has advised that no pupil should graduate from secondary school without being proficient in CPR, not just learning it. In Seattle, schools have taught CPR in PE lessons for over 30 years, so now half of the population of Seattle and the surrounding area are trained. In 2009 the survival rate for witnessed cardiac arrests was 46 per cent, while ours is under 10 per cent. The difference is dramatic.

Here in the UK, the British Heart Foundation has put Heartstart into over 2,700 schools, 700 of which are secondary schools or colleges. It trains thousands of children every year. British Red Cross and St John Ambulance also run training schemes, but the trouble is that the provision is patchy. There are 3.6 million children in secondary education in England, but only around 14 per cent have any training in CPR provided by one of these organisations. It is estimated that around 3 million secondary school pupils are not trained, even though the voluntary organisations are very ready to offer this training. By contrast, a poll taken by the British Heart Foundation at the beginning of this year found that 86 per cent of teachers, 70 per cent of parents and 78 per cent of children want to be trained. There is no resistance anywhere; it is a question of making the link. The campaign has wide medical, nursing and teaching support, as well as from the charities that deal with bereavement following cardiac death.

Training and support for teachers would enable them to deliver emergency life support. Currently, the British Heart Foundation spends around £800,000 a year on teaching resources, including mannequins, school packs, teacher supply cover and so on. It is estimated that it will be necessary to increase the provision of community resuscitation development officers, who are linked with the 12 ambulance trusts in England, by around five people to ensure that every child in every school is taught. With additional resources, the models could be successfully applied across all schools. There are over 3,000 local authority maintained secondary schools in England. The amendment aims to amend Section 84 of the Education Act 2002 so that this training becomes a community requirement at the first, second and third key stages.

I know that the Government can be much more prescriptive with the curriculum for maintained schools and I hope that they might consider adopting this training because that will influence the academies to take it up. However, I am well aware that the Government cannot be prescriptive for academies. Sadly, this is not part of PSHE at the moment. First aid training in the curriculum covers some parts of emergency life support but not emergency CPR, which is what can save lives. We could go from 27,000 sudden deaths in the community to approximately half that number if we spent a few hours on training all children in CPR. It has been estimated that the training takes only around four hours. It would mean that when they come across someone who has collapsed and is effectively dead on the street, they will know what to do.

[Lord Elton]

My Lords, I know that there are quite a number of people who, like me, should declare an interest in this, having been identified as a potential victim. I shall just tell my noble friend that he will have to argue very strongly against this amendment to stop me supporting it at a later stage.

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

My Lords, I do not have an amendment and I do not have a speech, but I have a question: how do we come to be where we are in this debate at all? The Government have made it absolutely clear that they have an agenda about well-being, particularly about well-being for children. They have also made it clear that, when findings show that children in our country are less happy than in other parts of Europe, they want to do something about improving that position. They, like the previous Government, have also undertaken that elements of PSHE are very important in the curriculum. With due humility, the Minister might do well to go away with those people who have long lists of amendments and talk them through. I do not think that the noble Baronesses, Lady Walmsley and Lady Massey, are likely to give up. We will get somewhere that way.

Many of the arguments I would have made have now already been made but I intervened to put one argument particularly for a group of children who, without this education, will not have any benefit in these areas—that is, very poor and vulnerable children who come from some of the deepest, darkest estates in our country and with whom I spend quite a lot of time. These children are subject to relationship breakdown or find themselves in care. They do not get this kind of education in their homes. People will try and give it in residential care—foster carers will give it—but they will have interrupted relationships and care. They will not have that kind of secure relationship and understanding that many other children will have. It is for this group of children that I plead. They are children who are in conflict.

As the chair of the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service, I work with a young people’s board. I do not give many anecdotes when speaking in Committee but those children often talk about teachers in school giving them some of the elements that help them hold themselves together through extraordinarily conflicted experiences in their homes. Teachers are at this moment attempting to give this kind of education. It needs space, skill and structure. I cannot understand why we are at this point in the debate because this is what the Government want as well.