Education, Skills and Training — House of Commons, 2016-05-25
Topic: Education
Stella Judith Creasy (Labour, Centre-left): My hon. Friend is right to point out that there are good opportunities to create a change in results to the benefit of young people, but the Government seem to have missed them. The student loan book is bust, and university is not the only door in the maze that our young people can open to unlock their potential. We should be asking the difficult question: why, in a time of tight resources, are young people who make it through their A-levels offered a loan to go to university, but we have nothing to offer those who have a great business start-up idea? When 30% of Britain’s young people want to start a business, perhaps wanting to be the Jay-Z or the Jamal Edwards of their time, we ignore their potential—the doors they want to be opened—at our peril. This Government are focusing on the 50% of kids who do the things we see as important, not the 100% of kids who need access to the bank of mum and dad to succeed. Money and contacts matter, as does flexibility, but none of these pieces of legislation will fundamentally tackle the inequalities that too many in our country face in accessing such skills and real-life work experience. We need to bring together not just the institutions, but the networks that can help our young people to thrive in the world to come. Ministers may tell me that the answer to the first point is their savings plan in the Queen’s Speech and all such proposals. It is certainly true to say, "Save more and you can make more choices about studying", but lifetime ISAs will mean nothing to families who have no savings at all—those who have no spare money in the week, let alone the month In 2010, I stood in the Chamber and fought for the child trust fund to be saved. It was a scheme proven to help those from the poorest income backgrounds the most. In 2020, the first of them will mature, giving all 18-year-olds something—perhaps not much, but something. Instead, with the lifetime ISA, such inequalities in wealth will become even more about the difference between having money to spare and having no money at all Recent research shows that the bank of mum and dad bails out grown-up children an average of four times, to the value of £6,000, even after they have left home. Indeed, one in three parents have been left cash-strapped after lending money to their children. One in seven parents have had to borrow money themselves to bail out their grown-up children. This Government are reinforcing inequality, wasting potential and failing one generation while locking another into debt to try to help them. If we want to stop lagging behind our counterparts, if we really want to give our children more life chances, if we want to benefit from their potential, we have to learn to compete in the global economy, not to capsize, and that means taking a completely different approach Instead of what this Government are doing, we need to bring different services together. We need to link universities, businesses, schools, further education colleges and communities, not segregate them. We need to break down the old divisions between education and working life, and between conventional academic achievement and lifelong employability. We need to move away from teaching functional skills that are outdated almost as soon as they are learned. Instead, our young people need real-world learning experiences and transferable talents, such as complex problem-solving and team-working skills, much as the hon. Member for Chippenham set out. We need fundamentally to rethink how we spend resources and share them, offering loans and support not just to 50% of young people, but to 100% of them. That will end their need to have the bank of mum and dad on their side if they are going to survive the 21st century I therefore urge Ministers not to assume that their own life choices should define the life chances we offer all young people, but I fear that plea will fall on deaf ears. That is why this Queen’s Speech proves that, under this Government, we will always be a nation playing catch-up with our present, not shaping our own future—getting the public further into debt to keep going, not to get going, and making the bank of mum and dad the only hope to the detriment of too many and to the cost of us all.