Careers Guidance

Tristram Hunt Excerpts

Thursday 16th May 2013 Westminster Hall

[Tristram Hunt (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Benton.

What brings us together in the Chamber today is a collective sense that we could probably have had better careers advice ourselves, and that we care passionately about young people’s careers advice in the future. That is why the Labour party welcomes the Select Committee report and, in particular, the devastating third paragraph of the summary, which announced that the “decision to transfer responsibility” was “regrettable”, going on to state that the Committee had

“concerns about the consistency, quality, independence and impartiality of careers guidance now being offered to young people.”

Labour acknowledges that careers guidance for young people was in need of reform, which is why the previous Labour Government were committed to a review of the IAG—information, advice and guidance—strategy in 2011, following our response to Alan Milburn’s report. The Committee has produced a typically thoughtful and comprehensive contribution to an important issue. Transferring the statutory duty for careers guidance to schools is a radical and untested departure in the history of careers guidance in the United Kingdom, deserving of close scrutiny. Furthermore, the report arrives at a moment of crisis. That young people in this country are more likely than the elderly to be unemployed is a shocking situation and the exact opposite of what is happening in, for example, Germany. Youth unemployment in this country remains around 1 million, so this is exactly not the time to undermine effective careers advice. The Labour party, however, will try to approach the debate in a bipartisan spirit. Young people are not well served by tit-for-tat exchanges or by apportioning blame. The truth is that youth unemployment and social mobility are deep-seated challenges. We look to work with the Select Committee and the Government where possible.

The previous Labour Government stated:

“High-quality information, advice and guidance is crucial in helping young people to develop ambitious but achievable plans, which are more likely to lead to positive outcomes.”

That has also been recognised by a wide range of professional bodies, from the CBI to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. It is pleasing that the Government recognise the Committee’s findings that good-quality, independent careers guidance is “essential” for all young people. However, we believe that the Government could be doing more to drive aspiration, boost our competitiveness and stop exactly the kind of waste pointed out by the Chair of the Select Committee, when he mentioned the young man seeking to forge a career in the fire brigade.

We are pleased that the Minister has belatedly persuaded his colleagues of the importance of a technical baccalaureate, although it remains disappointing that, unlike Labour policy, which it attempts to imitate, it does not include a commitment to a proper work experience placement or a course structure developed by business. One of the strongest criticisms made by the Committee report is the removal of a statutory duty to provide careers education and work-related learning. In the public consultation on the Wolf report, nearly 89% of respondents did not believe that the statutory duty should be removed. With employers routinely complaining —as the hon. Member for Calder Valley (Craig Whittaker) explained—about the lack of workplace knowledge and poor employability of young people, the Government must consider whether scrapping work experience is a good idea. It would not be so bad if different routes to employability, vocational education and apprenticeships were well advertised by the careers services under the new regime, but, as both Government and Opposition Members have explained, that is simply not the case.

I strongly urge the Government, therefore, to respond with greater clarity than they did to the Select Committee report on how they will ensure that young people are made aware of the full range of post-16 options available in their local area, as my hon. Friends have discussed, including apprenticeships. Pupils need an independent and impartial system of advice. The problem is an element of over-concentration by the Government on the 16.4% of state school pupils who achieved EBacc results. We all want as much academic achievement as possible in our schools; we all want that excellence and rigour, but we also need to be aware of different learning and career pathways. That is the difficult situation that the Minister faces. His colleagues do not seem to share his concern for rigorous vocational training.

Unfortunately, the sloppy approach to evidence appears to have seeped into the reforms as well. The international evidence for the statutory transfer of the careers service to schools is, at best, thin on the ground. The Select Committee is clear about that, and it cites the OECD, which has highlighted the limitations of the school-based model—“lack of impartiality, inconsistency” and, perhaps most damaging, “weak links” with the labour market—also emphasised by hon. Members. Labour is not dogmatic on the location of the statutory duty. Quality of delivery is what counts, not who holds the responsibility. We agree with the Committee’s findings that further upheaval and uncertainty, after everything schools have been through, might have a detrimental impact upon young people at a difficult time.

In the current fiscal climate, we also agree with the Committee that additional direct funding to schools is unlikely. Schools need to make careers guidance a priority within their budgets. The Chair of the Select Committee’s figures about five in six not providing the same level of allocation are terrifying. As the deputy Chair of the Select Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for North West Durham (Pat Glass), pointed out in her speech, that does not mean that the Government should present the withdrawal of £200 million of funding as consequence free. In his evidence, the Minister suggested that the Government have protected school spending, but schools are having to invest about £25,000 each for something that was previously allocated funding, and we can see from the report that levels of provision have simply fallen off a cliff.

All that comes at a difficult time. Teaching morale is at an all-time low and, for better or worse, the change comes when our education system faces enormous structural upheaval and fragmentation. The Government are asking schools to take on a commissioning role, but if we have learnt nothing else over the past 30 years of public policy, it is that commissioning services is not easy and requires a complex set of skills and capabilities. Extraordinary demands are being placed on our schools, and the simple question that the Minister must answer is whether his Government are doing enough to provide guidance and support and to disseminate best practice. The Committee report seems clear that the answer is no. In the words of Professor Tony Watts of Careers England, it is

“not delegation to schools; it is abdication.”

We need careers services with strong links to employers, good local labour market intelligence, impartial advice on different routes and a robust system of accountability. We should not stifle innovation with over-prescription and bureaucracy, but we must not abdicate responsibility to provide clear and rigorous standards to drive performance. Like the Chair of the Committee, what most concerns me about the report is the accountability dimension. The report merely reveals the widespread sector concern, echoed by the Government’s social mobility adviser, that the accountability measures for the new regime are nowhere near robust enough. There is now near unanimous support for an enhanced role for Ofsted, and I am pleased to note that Sir Michael Wilshaw told the Committee that there is a need to

“recalibrate the schools framework to focus more on careers advice.”

We have Ofsted’s thematic review in the summer and the National Careers Council report this month, but I remain concerned that they will not result in delivering the robust accountability that we need.

I started by saying that I would approach the debate in a non-partisan way, and I am pleased to put on record our support for the Government’s extension of the statutory duty to year 8s and to 16 to 18-year-olds in college. There is a case for going further.

I welcome the Minister’s enthusiasm for increasing employer participation in schools and the commitment to develop destination measures further, although I note the Education Secretary’s failings on that. Finally, I note the Committee’s interesting recommendations on the potential for a brokerage role for the National Careers Service, which has rightly been criticised for not doing enough for young people. The Labour party will look at that recommendation as part of its ongoing policy review, and the One Nation Skills Taskforce, chaired by Professor Chris Husband, which we should implement in about two years.