Education and Skills Bill

I support the amendment, although I think it is wrongly placed. It seems odd to place it after Clause 18 at the beginning of the section relating to employers when, in Part 2, Clauses 54 to 70—particularly Clause 66—are expressly concerned with issues of the Careers Service. It would have been better to have placed the new clause somewhere within Part 2 rather than at this point. I declare an interest as a member of the Skills Commission, which has recently published a pamphlet about careers education. It advocates, among other things, an all-age careers service and to some extent criticises the Government for having failed to listen to those who advocated such a service at an earlier point. I share the reservations of the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, about the present capabilities of the Connexions and Careers Service. The Connexions service was set up under the Learning and Skills Act 2000, which was the very first education Bill on which I led for my party in this Chamber. I remember our discussions then about the proposed changes to the Careers Service. The idea was to set up the new Connexions service specifically to concentrate on the more vulnerable young people who were not in education, training or employment and needed to be brought within the net. We pointed out the difficulty that that would involve. It would require a very labour-intensive service. If the attention of advisers in the Careers Service was being switched to the more vulnerable young people, it would leave pupils in schools with very little in the way of careers guidance, information and advice. Precisely that has happened: many schools have little access these days to information, advice and guidance about careers. However, given what is happening—particularly the introduction of the multiple pathways at age 13 to 14, in terms not just of what choices to make at GCSE and A-level but, increasingly, of choice between the GCSE and A-level pathway, the diploma pathway and the apprenticeship pathway—a group of people who are trained to work with young people but who understand the employment world and an increasingly complex educational world that gives young people a choice of pathways is all the more necessary. For all that, the Connexions service has done a surprisingly good job with some young people, its success varies greatly from area to area. We have to be aware that the old Careers Service has largely disintegrated and that, in order to meet the requirements of the Bill, we will have to rebuild it and retrain many people with capabilities which are currently being lost. In any case, times have changed. What kind of information, advice and guidance service is now required? Young people get their information from the internet. There have developed a number of extremely successful careers information services, such as that run by Ufi’s learndirect, which is followed up with telephone guidance if it is required. Those services have proved to be extremely successful. Therefore, in terms of straight provision of information, an internet-based service available to all comers is necessary. I think that the Government recognise how important such an internet service would be. However, an internet-based service alone is not enough. Young people in particular need advice and guidance from a trained professional. I turn to the case for an all-age service. The noble Baroness, Lady Verma, mentioned Wales and Northern Ireland, where such all-age services have been established extremely successfully. Because of the degree to which there is permeability between the 16 to 18 and the further education, on into the adult skills sector, it would be far more satisfactory if there were an all-age service, and within that some that concentrate on providing for schools. Within schools there should be specialist careers teachers, but they need the support of the specialists outside. These are issues that we shall be coming to later, because I have tabled some amendments on them. The Government need to have another look at careers services. They are putting a tremendous amount of emphasis on this area. There is need for it to be substantially reinforced, for a lot of retraining to be done and more people to be brought into it, but we have five years before the Bill is implemented—or before the raised learning participation age comes into effect, in 2013. There is five years, too, before the full range of diplomas comes on stream. Therefore, there is time to do as the amendment suggests and have a review of careers services and for the Government to effect some of the reforms that it is necessary to make.