Ofsted (14 to 17-year-olds)

Rushanara Ali Excerpts

Wednesday 16th July 2014 Westminster Hall

[Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Caton. I welcome the Skills Minister to his new role. This is a vital debate, and I hope it will inspire him to charge ahead and make the difference. As my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen) so powerfully highlighted, that is desperately needed by young people who fall into the NEET category, which has rapidly come to be talked about very pejoratively.

I congratulate my hon. Friend on the work he has been doing for many years. About seven or eight years ago, when I worked at the Young Foundation, he came to pitch his ideas. His work was inspirational then, and it remains inspirational now. The need to tackle the challenges he highlighted is something we should all identify with if we want to create a socially mobile, highly skilled, strong economy and to maximise the economic potential of all young people, and especially NEETs.

My hon. Friend identified the need for pre-emptive, targeted intervention. As his work has shown, that needs to happen not only in education, but from the very early years—from early childhood. That should be done by supporting child care and through interventions inside and outside school. Other hon. Members have mentioned that issue, which I will come to later.

The latest figures show that 975,000 young people fall into the NEETs category. Although there has been some progress in getting some of them back into training and employment, that is not enough, and the situation is not satisfactory for any of us, whichever side of the House we are on. If we look at European comparisons, we find that about 14% of young people in the UK are classified as NEETs, but the proportion is as low as 4% in the Netherlands and 7% in Denmark. That shows that we should aim much higher, because we can achieve similar figures. We should aim to beat those countries and be a leader in tackling such youth inactivity and unemployment.

My hon. Friend talked about early intervention and powerfully highlighted the possible economic gains. I was struck by research that found that if we fail to engage 120,000 young people who are aged 13 today and who are at risk of becoming NEETs, they will collectively lose £6.4 billion in lifetime earnings. The argument is not only about fairness; it is about economic benefits, as has been noted.

Clearly, we need to identify and improve mechanisms to find out who is likely to fall into the categories in question, and track them. More work needs to be done through the agencies, including schools and further education colleges, as well as charitable organisations, which play a vital role, as hon. Members have said, in supporting those who are at risk. Youth offending teams are also among those whose work is relevant. We need more collective working across Departments to address the challenges for young people who are likely to be at risk, who could be diverted through the interventions—in school or as part of the work-readiness or other programmes—discussed by my hon. Friend.

I was encouraged by the remarks of the hon. Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) about the need for pre-school support. My party supports an increase in child care hours and I hope that the Government will match that. The hon. Gentleman also talked about troubled families. The previous Labour Government introduced the relevant programme and I am glad that he supports it. He mentioned pupil referral units. They are important, and successive Governments have at best done minimal work on them, and at worst neglected them. Often, talented young people are excluded; I saw that in my work, before I was elected to Parliament. We need to do more to make sure that they can get access to the sorts of opportunities that my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North described, in programmes such as those he is developing in Nottingham, which I hope could be scaled up for other parts of the country.

We need to consider suggestions such as those that my hon. Friend made about work-readiness. There are great examples around the country involving many organisations, including City Gateway in London. I was involved in setting up a programme called Fastlaners, which works with 16 to 18-year-olds and is currently working with Jobcentre Plus and JP Morgan. Another programme supports graduates who lack employability skills; that is a lack that exists throughout the system and it is significantly related to disadvantage, social class differences and the lack of social capital. The Minister has done a great deal of work on those issues in his previous life, and I know that he will understand how serious they are, particularly for young people who get free school meals and who are disadvantaged by lack of connections, whether to employers or to people with a professional background who could mentor and support them.

My hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North talked about the importance of careers information and guidance. We have made it clear how damaging the situation is, and I hope that the Minister, in his new role, will address some of the major concerns of the CBI, which described careers information guidance and advice as being on “life support”.

Concerns were also raised by the Select Committee on Education, as well as by Ofsted, about the need to deal quickly with the situation. I hope that the Minister will make it an urgent priority that schools should provide proper guidance and advice, which should be independent. It should also be much more creative, as hon. Members have discussed—linking with employers but not expecting them to be a substitute for independent guidance and support. The work should also involve the further education sector, among the other institutions that can play a vital role in careers guidance.

A related issue is work experience. Since it was, in effect, scrapped, 15% of young people cannot obtain a placement. There is a social class effect, in that the families of well connected young people can arrange work experience for them, while the rest are left high and dry. I hope that the Minister will attend to that, because there is a link to the points that my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North made about indirect disadvantage and discrimination, which kick in, often, on the basis of class. I know that the Minister will be concerned about that and want to rectify it.

I was particularly struck by something that the hon. Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson) said about taking over school and other public buildings to provide facilities, which resonates with programmes introduced by my party through extended schools. He made a powerful point about the need to make sure that those facilities are available without charge. I hope that the Minister will look into that, because there are huge gains to be made if we can open those facilities up and maximise the potential for work with the group that we are now considering, in particular—but also with young people more generally.

That is very much what has been done by programmes such as Futureversity—a national charity that I was involved in setting up. It worked with universities and schools, and took over the facilities, helping to raise aspiration. It also worked with young people at risk, and a famous alumnus is Dizzee Rascal, who was excluded from a school in Bow. His tutor identified that he had musical talent and put him in touch with the organisation; he could then develop his talents. That goes to show what is possible for young people who are totally at risk. Dizzee Rascal has said that he could have ended up in the criminal justice system. With early intervention, and if there are facilities, and mentors and inspirational people available to give support, someone’s life can be transformed. That is what we are interested in; that is what we are in the business of.

I hope that the Minister will consider the key issues that my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North raised and the innovative projects and programmes, in Nottingham in particular, but also in other constituencies, where many in Parliament do impressive hands-on work on improving the life chances of young people—both in the category we are considering and more generally. I hope that the Government will listen, and learn from those examples, and consider how they can use their influence, power and resources. I do not necessarily mean, as others have said, investing more; I hope that they will use resources effectively to address the challenge of getting young people who do not now receive the support they need into work and meaningful activity, and into making a contribution to society.

If we pull together and organise our resources—our connections with the world of work—and leverage our support with Government resources and local employment partnerships, as my hon. Friend powerfully described, there is no reason why this country cannot compete with other countries that have reduced the number of people who fall into the appalling category that we should all, whatever party we belong to, be ashamed to have in our country.

We should make a united, collective effort to agree on interventions that work, and make sure that the Government can scale them up. I know that the Minister will be interested in new ideas as part of his new brief. I look forward to working with him and my hon. Friends to make sure, once and for all, that we have a long-term plan that is rapid and immediate in ensuring that we can abolish the terrible category of young people defined as NEETs. It is degrading and demeaning, and not fit for a society that is one of the largest economies in the world. We can do better if we work together on that important issue, as my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North said.