Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment she has made of the adequacy of the work experience provision for 14 to 19 year-olds in education.

It is essential that we ensure young people leave school or college prepared for life in modern Britain. This will be achieved through a range of reforms, including improving the quality of existing qualifications and giving employers greater influence over the content of courses.

We ensure schools and colleges have the freedom and autonomy to decide how best to put in place work experience provision for 14-19 year olds. In August 2013 the government reformed the post-16 curriculum and funding system to incentivise education and training providers to offer high quality work experience to young people as part of 16-19 study programmes.

Work experience elements of study programmes and traineeships are now inspected and reported on as an integral part of the inspection of provision for 16-19 year olds (and up to age 24 for traineeships) against the Common Inspection Framework for Further Education and Skills 2015.

Our focus is on ensuring sufficient support is in place, and we have recently announced new funding for our careers strategy which will include continued funding for The Careers and Enterprise Company to help young people access the best advice and inspiration, for example by building on the national network of enterprise advisers to broker strong local links between schools, colleges and employers.