Education Bill

I support most of the amendments in the group and I want to focus in particular on careers advice, on which many other noble Lords have already led. I agree totally with everyone who has spoken that unless careers advice is independent, it is very worrying. I hope that the Minister will consider whether Ofsted should include as part of its assessment of the effectiveness of a school how well it provides careers advice. It would not be an unusual process for Ofsted to get involved in. Although I agree with my noble friend Lord Peston that at the age of five you do not know what you are going to do, in this day and age people start taking an interest at a much younger age. An area of concern has been raised by a number of employers who I have been talking to, along with a number of colleges. Recently I visited Newcastle College and North Lindsey College in Scunthorpe for Training 2000. What those colleges said was music to my ears. Although some careers advice is okay, a lot is obviously inadequate. But the principal at Newcastle College said that when she was a young girl—it was probably a while ago—no one had ever talked to her at school what it would mean if she went down a certain career path: how much would she earn and what would be her prospects going forward? Perhaps we have stayed away from those questions as well. For me, she made a telling point because, whether we like it or not, they are keen to know if they will have money to spend. Through Semta I have been working with a careers adviser at BAE Systems, which has a programme in place in which representatives talk to young people about what it means to be an engineer and explain that it is not the dirty job that everyone thinks it is. There is a slide presentation to describe the earning potential at each stage of someone’s career progression. Some people might flinch at that, but in the real world of 2011-12, it is absolutely where young people are. It is the kind of information that is not always readily available. You can follow a pathway through looking at sector skills councils, but what is not often linked to it is the thought that, ““If I work really hard and progress from this level to that level, what will that mean for me going forward in the sense of my future career?””. I emphasise, as others have, the funding of this careers advice. A number of people who have supported me in these contributions have given me information. The previous Government put money into careers advice—now, obviously, two departments are dealing with this, with BIS and the Department for Education—but the DfE’s financial involvement is down to £7 million. Before, when we were working with Connexions, £200 million was put into this. The current figure will get us some computer-aided stuff and some advice. We can complain like crazy about young people not understanding where they are going and what the advice to them might be, but that does not come cheap. We need to ensure that we have a sound resource underneath all that. For me, having an Ofsted appraisal of this included in how well a school was doing would mean that we had something substantial to measure. I agree with the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, that says, ““Let’s look at this every three years””. When the previous Government introduced the Apprenticeship Act, we had a lot of this advice in there but maybe it was just not robust enough in terms of coming back and checking how this was doing, because it is still a major problem.