Social Mobility Debate

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Department: Department for Education

Social Mobility

Lord Laming Excerpts
Monday 20th February 2017

(7 years, 2 months ago)

Lords Chamber
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Lord Nash Portrait Lord Nash
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The noble Baroness is quite right to point to the Careers & Enterprise Company, which seems to have got off to a great start. It is very ably run by a bright young woman called Claudia Harris, formerly of McKinsey. We have made £90 million available over this Parliament for the Careers & Enterprise Company and for programmes that use the mentoring approach. The CEC has already appointed 1,300 advisers across the country to help improve links between employers and schools.

Lord Laming Portrait Lord Laming (CB)
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My Lords—

Earl Howe Portrait The Minister of State, Ministry of Defence (Earl Howe) (Con)
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My Lords, it is the turn of the Cross Benches and then, if we have time, we can hear from the Labour Benches.

Lord Laming Portrait Lord Laming
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My Lords, does the noble Lord agree that it is a real challenge to help these young people to recognise the talents that they have, to give them a sense of ambition and to nurture those ambitions through these important years in their development?

Lord Nash Portrait Lord Nash
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I agree entirely with the noble Lord on that. Increasingly we are seeing schools develop what is sometimes called a “raising ambitions” programme to raise their pupils’ horizons and ambitions. All too often in the past schools have not been ambitious enough for their pupils. I recently attended a very inspiring event run by Ormiston Academies Trust, which is developing a raising aspirations programme, and we are seeing many more of these kinds of programmes being developed.