Careers Advice (14 to 19-Year-Olds)

Debate between Nick Boles and Graham Stuart

Wednesday 25th February 2015 Westminster Hall

[The Minister for Skills and Equalities (Nick Boles)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Williams. This has been an excellent debate. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Eastbourne (Stephen Lloyd) on securing it and congratulate all hon. Members on their contributions. However, I am clearly not able to respond to every question asked and every point raised.

I start by observing that, as the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright) said, there has never been a golden age of careers advice and guidance. I think we can all agree about that. He is a former Minister in this field and took office at the end of a long Government full of largesse, so I think he will have noted that large Government budgets have not proved to be the solution to the lack of advice and guidance. He made a perfunctory reference to Connexions, but nobody has come up to me, either since I was elected to Parliament or since I was appointed to this job, and mourned the scrapping of that service. There may well have been good intentions behind it, but the reality is that it achieved very little, with a relatively large budget. When we faced the largest peace time budget deficit in our history, it was a right and proper economy to make to get rid of Connexions as it was then constituted.

There was never a golden age and, certainly, the previous Government did not manage to produce a system of careers advice and guidance that led to high-quality advice for young people throughout the country and in all schools. We as a Government have recognised that, thanks to the good work done by my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), the Chairman of the Education Committee, and others, and have taken steps to ensure that schools are more focused on their responsibilities. Hon. Members have mentioned the introduction of statutory guidance requiring schools to provide independent advice and guidance. We certainly recognise that too few schools are doing so. There were many calls from Opposition Members for proper resourcing for this. However, there is a difficulty here, because proper resourcing means more money either dedicated to or ring-fenced for the provision of careers advice and guidance and the employment of more careers advisers. In that case, Opposition Members have to answer questions—I know they never like doing so—about what other things they are going to cut, what taxes they will raise or what borrowing will be increased to provide that resourcing; otherwise, that resourcing will have to come from within the existing schools budgets.

The reality is that good schools of all kinds—grant-maintained schools, academies, and all kinds of schools—realise that it is critical for them to make an investment from their budget and employ a careers adviser or co-ordinator. Lots of different models work. Good schools realise that this is a priority and there is nothing stopping any school deciding to invest some of their resource in proper advice and guidance.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Just for the record, the Committee did not call for additional money. It recognised that, in an ideal world, it might have been a good thing, but that the most important thing was to change the incentives for schools, because the fact that 20% of schools can find the budget—they tend to be successful schools delivering outstanding academic results as well—shows that it can be done. In fact, those things are mutually enhancing.

If the Minister wanted a crude proxy for the success of the education system—I remember saying this to the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright) when he was a Minister in the Labour Government—it would be how many young people end up as NEETs. I am pleased that the number in the shadow Minister’s constituency has gone from 900 when Labour left office to 140 today.

[Nick Boles]

Of course, I am always particularly grateful to my hon. Friend the Chairman of the Select Committee. I will come on to his point on incentives, which is a good one.

Probably the most useful thing I can do for hon. Members who participated in this debate is to answer some questions about the new careers company, because I understand that although people are broadly and in principle supportive of it, they question how it will fit into the landscape and particularly what its relationship with or functions relative to the National Careers Service will be.

The key point about the new careers company is that we observed that there is no shortage of organisations offering high-quality activity. Straight after this debate I am meeting the people who run Inspiring Futures, which is an excellent programme with speakers for schools and any number of online resources. Of course, the National Careers Service provides high-quality advice to lots of young people as well as to adults. There is no shortage of provision, but schools face great difficulty understanding what is available, what is high quality and what would really meet the identified needs of their young people.

The point of the careers company, under Christine Hodgson, is to create a structure whereby every school has somebody it can ask to help it through this forest and identify the resources and the providers who will help provide a much better range of experiences and inspiration to young people. It will focus initially on mapping what is out there, because people have to know that before they can start offering guidance. It will then focus on Lord Young’s excellent idea, in his report to the Prime Minister, of appointing an enterprise adviser. That person will be a current or recently retired local executive from the public or private sector, who will be attached to a school and whose role will be to help it identify local businesses and employers that can come in to the school and provide work experience, and resources relating to programmes relevant for the school. A school will identify that local enterprise adviser with the help of their local economic partnership.

I agree with those who have said that local economic partnerships have an obvious role to play in helping schools understand who out there can help them deliver on their duty. I do not think many teachers or head teachers are failing to provide careers advice and guidance because they do not believe in it; it is because they are busy and not particularly qualified to do it. It is no criticism of them to suggest that. They need some help. As we have heard, a plethora of local business executives is only too willing to get involved. However, we need some structure of brokerage in that regard and some guidance to schools on how they can give better advice and guidance to their young people.

Those will be the two main priorities for the careers company. It will have a small pot of money of about £5 million—a small part of the £20 million—from which it will be able to back new ideas for new kinds of experience and advice and guidance. That will act more as a sort of seed fund or a venture fund. It will also work more long-term on Lord Young’s other idea, which is for an enterprise passport that would probably be an online record of all of the non-formal educational achievements of a young person—all the volunteering and holiday jobs they have done, all the clubs they have joined and all their other extracurricular achievements at school—so that employers have an objective record of the full range of a young person’s contribution to their community when judging their fitness for school.

In the final minutes of this debate I should like to focus on the point of careers advice and guidance, although I am happy to answer in writing any questions from colleagues about the careers company. The point of careers advice is to lead to a career, and the point of every career is to have a series of satisfying and fulfilling jobs. I hope that every hon. Member of every party will recognise the signal achievement of this Government, which is to have created more jobs in Yorkshire—as my right hon. Friend the Minister for Employment reminded us—than have been created in France, and to have created more jobs in the United Kingdom than have been created in the whole of the European Union.

The key to a career is having an economy that creates jobs—new jobs in new sectors, requiring new young people with new skills. Of course, they need advice and guidance, and of course they need clear data that help them understand which choice of qualifications leads to which possibilities regarding a career. However, ultimately, without an economy that is creating employment at the speed we have been doing so in this country, there is no point having even the best careers advice and guidance in the world. Right now, even with fantastic careers advice and guidance, someone who has the misfortune to be a young person in Spain will have a pretty small chance of having a fulfilling career because youth unemployment there is pushing 40%.

Let us remember the point of careers advice and guidance, which is to guide people on to a path that will give them a satisfying range of jobs in the economy, creating jobs like no other.