Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2021-07-19
Topic: Education
Deborah Wilcox (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, as furlough ends, no community will be untouched by unemployment. It is vital, therefore, that a joined up, place-based employment, skills and careers system offers adults and young people the recovery they deserve by providing access to quality education and training opportunities. We know that all FE colleges and sixth-form colleges have been required to secure access to independent careers guidance since 2013. However, the quality of careers advice has been subject to frequent criticism and reforms have been made since that time including, as mentioned, the establishment of the National Careers Service and the government quango the Careers & Enterprise Company In 2019, the Local Government Association called on the Government to "end the patchwork of careers activity in England", and hand funding and control of employment schemes to local authorities, as they were responsible for providing a careers service prior to the Education Act 2011. It fell on deaf ears. In 2019, the Augar review of post-18 education stated that it believed secondary school careers support to be "still underfunded" and recommended that every secondary school become part of a careers hub run by the Careers & Enterprise Company to work with schools. My noble friend Lord Adonis has taken that idea much further and talked about individuals within schools. I was very lucky to work for 20 years with an inspirational careers teacher called Helen Lima about whom, in our last inspection, an Estyn inspector said, "That is the best careers lesson I have ever seen". So we were able to give the best hands-on, quality careers advice to our pupils My first question for the Minister is: why are schools not already allowing a range of providers to have access to young people as part of their careers education? The Government introduced something similar to this a few years ago in an earlier amendment to the Technical and Further Education Act 2017, introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Baker, who got the Government to accept his new clause as an amendment. However, having to bring this back again clearly demonstrates that it has not worked in practice, and that is why we caution so assiduously about so many parts of this unrefined Bill Many assurances have already been given by Ministers on previous days in responses to proposed amendments, saying that we should not be probing about this and seeking to improve the glaring deficits that can be changed only by further legislation. However, let us pause and look at what happened here with careers education. The noble Lord, Lord Baker, has had to revisit his earlier work from four years ago because, unless instructions are on a statutory footing, advice will be ignored This clause mandates schools and colleges to give training providers the opportunity to talk to students of certain ages about technical qualifications and apprenticeships. As mentioned by my noble friend Lord Adonis, UTCs have this is problem because they only start recruiting at the age of 14 In a report published in May this year, the universities admissions service warned that one-third of students are not told about apprenticeships, despite this being a legal requirement for schools. It claimed that only around half of those currently studying in FE colleges receive their entitlement. A survey by UCAS found that three-quarters of students said that it was "easy to find information" about higher education, compared to only a quarter who said the same about apprenticeships. Is this acting in the students’ best interests? I think not The UCAS report states: "While most people appreciate that apprenticeships are there as an option, they are not sure either how to get information … or indeed where they can lead." Oli de Botton, the chief executive of the Government’s careers quango, the Careers & Enterprise Company, told the AELP conference recently that it was "true historically that there hasn’t been enough access for ITPs or enough information about apprenticeships and technical routes for young people" The eight Gatsby benchmarks have been mentioned by several noble Lords. The first is "A stable careers programme". Despite assurances, I believe that we are some way off this stability On 16 June 2021, in the other place, the Member for Workington presented his Private Member’s Bill, the Education (Careers Guidance in Schools) Bill, which would extend the duty to provide careers guidance in schools. Mr Jenkinson stated that the Bill would extend the requirements to provide careers guidance to children in year 7 and would also implement the proposals in the skills White Paper Therefore, the key here is to ensure that the amendments proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Baker, and others in the Bill are as good as they can be after proper and considered scrutiny by Her Majesty’s Opposition. The key is also to ensure that the Government take full account of past mistakes when legislating in this area, ensure that it is properly put into practice this time and act in the best interests of students, instead of an ideology that serves little purpose or is not rooted in the reality of actual practice in education.