Careers Guidance in Schools

Robin Walker Excerpts

Wednesday 13th July 2022 Westminster Hall

[Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Weaver Vale (Mike Amesbury) on opening the debate, and on a very well reasoned and well argued speech, and I welcome my hon. Friend the Minister to her place. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Broadland (Jerome Mayhew), I am excited about the opportunities for young people in my constituency, and I want to make sure that careers advice in our schools engages with the breadth and richness of the opportunities.

As the hon. Member for Weaver Vale said in his opening remarks, we all have to accept that there was never really a golden age for careers advice. He gave a good example of bad careers advice and limited options being presented. During my time at the Department for Education, I was pleased to contribute to a White Paper that took forward the argument for having careers advice in all our schools, but particularly in primary schools, as my hon. Friend the Member for Southend West (Anna Firth) mentioned. It is very important to set those aspirations and open up opportunities for people earlier.

The hon. Member for Weaver Vale directly addressed the challenge of people being presented with too limited opportunities. Something that I have seen done really well in some schools, but that could be done in many more of them, is opening up to young children a range of opportunities and different places where they could work, and I want to talk about a few of those opportunities in my constituency. There is a wonderful school in one of the most deprived areas of my constituency of Worcester called Cranham Primary, where the excellent headteacher Mr Cale—I think he was the deputy head when I used to go in and support him in his careers lessons—holds a “careers with Cale” session. He gets different people in, such as policemen, postmen or the local MP—most famously, he held one session just before Christmas with Father Christmas, which is an unusual career to get people to aspire to—to talk about what they do, and to raise aspirations by discussing the range of activities that people can do.

Perry Wood Primary School in my constituency also holds primary careers fairs, and gets a whole range of people—from engineers to police officers and farmers—to talk about the span of opportunities. We should support that. The schools White Paper says:

“We want all children to be inspired by the options available to them when they leave school or college. We will launch a new careers programme for primary schools in areas of disadvantage and are extending the legal requirement to provide independent careers guidance to all secondary school children, as well as increasing the opportunities for them to meet providers of apprenticeships and technical education.”

My hon. Friends the Members for Southend West, and for Broadland, pressed that point hard, and it is essential that we deliver on that. I hope that we can ensure that the programme supporting primary schools in areas of deprivation is backed not just in education investment areas, and areas in which we are setting out additional policy initiatives, but in pockets of deprivation in every constituency in the country, because we all have schools in areas where there are greater challenges, and where career aspirations are perhaps more limited.

Ahead of the debate—this is one reason why I was keen to speak in it—I was fortunate to talk to the organisation Primary Futures, which is engaging with schools up and down the country. I heard about the work it has done at Hollymount School in my constituency. I happen to be very familiar with the school, because before I became an MP, when I was a parliamentary candidate, I used to volunteer to read with the children. Primary Futures describes the school as “a non-selective state primary school serving an area of severe social deprivation in the Tolladine area of Worcester”. It has been doing some research with the University of Warwick, talking to the children about their aspirations, and there are some welcome findings. The vast majority of pupils surveyed—37 out of 44—believed that:

“English, Maths and Science can help me when I grow up”.

A similar number believed that:

“Learning at school is important for my future job”,

and a significant majority—nearly 30 out of the 44— agreed with the proposition that:

“There are lots of different jobs for me to do when I grow up”.

So far, so good.

Particularly pleasing is that, on the question whether

“Girls and boys can do the same job”,

more than 90% said yes, and not a single pupil said no. I was pleased because one of the last things I did as Minister for School Standards was give evidence to the Science and Technology Committee about girls in STEM. It is clear that there are no barriers to girls succeeding in STEM—succeeding in maths or physics—barring those that are artificially placed in front of them. We must keep on challenging those artificial barriers and encouraging people to pursue those careers.

In opening the debate, the hon. Member for Weaver Vale made many very good points. I absolutely agree with him about encouraging more employers to provide work experience placements. Where I perhaps disagree with him, along with my hon. Friend the Member for Broadland, is on the need for centralisation in this space. I think that the Careers and Enterprise Company has done some very good work; it has encouraged businesses from across the private sector to engage with schools in a way that they perhaps were not doing a few years ago. Organisations such as Primary Futures also do great work.

I happen to know—from my own patch but also from speaking to people in the Department for Education about it—that we have a fantastically well-functioning careers hub in Worcestershire, which is successfully getting that connectivity between schools and the private sector. It is bringing businesses in to talk to primary and secondary schools. If we can do it in Worcestershire, I am pretty sure that it can be done in other areas of the country, with the right support from organisations such as local enterprise partnerships, chambers of commerce, businesses and councils. I would like to see that happening much more widely.

[Mr Perkins]

I, too, have seen some excellent provision through careers hubs, but the hon. Member is right that it is inconsistent. Does he know whether those hubs are actually leading to different work experiences for young people? Far too often, I see a form sent home with the child: “Find your own work experience and write the name here. We’ll make sure that you’re not going to die while you’re there.” That is basically all that schools want to know. What we really need to see is not the milkman’s son going to work with his dad, and the politician’s son going with his, but people getting experiences that are different from what they are already used to. Is he aware of those kinds of experiences in his hub?

[Mr Walker]

I do not disagree at all with what the hon. Gentleman has said. Absolutely, we want to give people those experiences. I talk to a lot of my engineering companies in Worcester, and one of their frustrations is that they feel that the image that people have of engineering is of where it was 30 or 40 years ago, with the traditional, metal-bashing image. What they are doing now is much more exciting, and much more engaging for young people visiting from schools. The working environment is also much better than it was.

Absolutely, getting people into a workplace that they might not necessarily know about must be part of this. That is something that our careers hub in Worcestershire does very well, and we have seen that, in particular, in the cyber-security sector. Nobody learns that at school, but they can learn the maths, computing and skills that can take them in that direction. Those companies are getting into schools to run code clubs, and they are getting children from the schools to come and do work experience. They tend to be the small businesses that, traditionally, careers advice did not look at.

I absolutely recognise that the box-ticking approach that the hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins) described was sometimes a problem in the past, but I think it is actually more likely to be a problem in a centralised system than in one that encourages direct engagement between schools and employers.

I very much welcome this debate and am grateful for the chance to contribute to it. I urge my hon. Friend the Minister to take forward the opportunity for work in the White Paper, to continue to engage with apprenticeships and employers, and to ensure that we also take the opportunity to raise aspirations in primary schools.