Education Bill

My Lords, we have had a very good debate on this issue. If anyone was in any doubt before we started about the complexities of children’s lives and the choices that confront them, some of the examples that we have heard from around the Room will certainly have helped to open our eyes to just how difficult it is to be a child in school today, facing, as my noble friend rightly said, 85 years of career choices that they have to make. People say—this is a well known statistic these days—that you can now face three different careers in your lifetime. It used to be that you went into one job and that was your job for life, but now people often change careers two or three times during the course of their life. The choices for young people facing their life ahead are complicated and require specialist knowledge. To give a quick example of that in terms of giving careers advice, wearing one of my other hats, young people who qualify with a degree in film studies think that they are all going to go off to be film directors, but fewer than 1 per cent of people with a degree in film studies ever get a job in that sector. A statistic said that about 34 per cent of those young people end up working in the retail sector. All the factors that have been mentioned today underline how important it is that we get this right. The Minister has said that there will be a professional service. We understand that we may have a professional service, but the people who are providing the actual advice, online or face-to-face, would not have to be qualified under the Government’s scheme. Our point is that young people’s future lives are so important that these people should have some sort of qualification. I underline that again. My noble friend Lord Layard has not commented on this—I am sure that he does not like people constantly making reference to him as being the happiness tsar—but if people at this age get this wrong then it is not just about them making the wrong career choice; it has an effect on their health and their mental health. The consequences of their making wrong choices are real and serious, and that underlines the need for people to be qualified before they are let loose on children in schools. At the heart of our dilemma here is that the Government want to be enabling and we want to lay down duties on schools and rights for pupils. There is not so much of a difference between us, though; the Government have already said that there are some duties on schools regarding what they will provide. The Bill says that there will be duties for the service to be independent, which I think we would all agree with; to be based in schools, which I think is the right place to focus careers guidance; and to have a mix of academic and vocational provision, and a number of voices around the Committee have echoed the importance of both academic and vocational choices. All we are attempting to do is add a few more duties, and the principle that we have already established is a way of going forward. Those duties include specifying the frequency of the careers advice, looking at a wider age range at which children can access careers advice and the whole issue of people being professionally qualified. We have established that there will be some duties, and we want more. I hope that the Minister will see that we are not so far apart in all this. I am pleased that the Minister said that he will take the issue of the age range away and look at it further. We look forward to hearing about the outcome of that in more detail. I think that I understood him to say that he would be bringing forward some more short-notice guidance. Perhaps he could specify whether that will be available to us before Report, at least in draft form, so that we might know where we stand on that. I like to feel that we are moving closer together on these issues, but there remains the issue of what happens in the transition. The noble Lord, Lord Boswell, said that he was not convinced there was a crisis, but I hope that he has heard some of the voices around the table saying that it is perhaps more of a crisis than he might have identified. Our understanding is that hundreds, if not thousands, of people who currently have training qualifications in careers advice are being made redundant around the country, so we are losing those skills and that expertise. It seems pretty strange to set up a new structure that starts from scratch when everyone has been scattered to the four winds, so to speak, with all the knowledge and experience that they retained beforehand. We need to look again at the transition and what else we can do to make it a smooth and well resourced one. We have had a good debate. We would welcome some further discussions on this, but in the mean time I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment 86A withdrawn. Amendment 86AA not moved. Amendments 86B and 86C not moved. Clause 26 agreed. Clause 27 : Careers guidance in schools in England Clause 27 : Careers guidance in schools in England Amendments 86CZA to 86G not moved. Clause 27 agreed. Amendments 87 to 87B not moved. Sitting suspended. Clause 28 : Repeal of diploma entitlement for 16 to 18 year olds Clause 28 : Repeal of diploma entitlement for 16 to 18 year olds Debate on whether Clause 28 should stand part of the Bill.