Education and Skills Bill

My Lords, careers education is essential in helping young people to understand how their choices and learning will contribute to their future lives. It is great to have this brief debate; it gives me the opportunity, as noble Lords have requested, to put some important points on the record. As I set out on Report, we have already put in place a substantial programme of work to improve the quality of information, advice and guidance, but we know that more needs to be done. To set out how the Government plan to improve the quality of careers advice in all settings, my department will publish a new information, advice and guidance strategy document in the spring of 2009. I can confirm that this strategy will look at reviewing our position on the need to extend the careers education duty to 18. In this context, the strategy will need to consider several complex issues. For example, if we extend the statutory duty to 18 year-olds in schools and FE colleges, it would also make sense to place a similar duty on other providers of post-16 education, such as work-based learning providers, training providers and youth offending institutions. However, this would raise a host of practical and legal difficulties, while again not necessarily showing clear benefits. Given the lack of hard, outcome-focused measures on careers education, it might also be difficult and expensive to enforce such a duty. We would want to go down this path only if we were convinced that it was the only way of securing the impact that we seek for all young people. The next Bill will transfer the responsibility for securing education and training provision for 16 to 19 year-olds from the Learning and Skills Council to local authorities, as noble Lords have heard relentlessly in our discussions. This, coupled with our proposals to raise the participation age and the transfer of the Connexions Service, is a significant change. It will place local authorities firmly in the lead in ensuring that all young people can access the support and provision that they need. We would need to position any change within this new landscape. Addressing these important questions through the new strategy will allow us to give it the consideration that it deserves and, I hope, the opportunity to have further discussions with noble Lords concerned about how comprehensive the offer is for young people as they go through transition from 16 to 18 and into adult life. I turn to Amendment No. 7 on schools forums. As we know, the role of a schools forum member is to represent the interests of schools and children in their area and not their own school. Therefore, head teachers and governors should be viewing the discussions from a similar point of view. In addition, the schools forum is essentially a consultative body and does not, in general, make decisions itself; these are made by elected members in the local authority, having first consulted the schools forum. The Government highly value the work of governors—I cannot stress that enough—but we are also conscious that the commitment to being on a schools forum can amount to about 10 working days per year in addition to those given to the individual school as a governor. Therefore, it places an additional time pressure on people, and many governors can find the commitment too much. Consequently, some local authorities can have difficulty filling governor vacancies. The good practice guide will continue to state that parity of governors to head teachers on a schools forum is the aim but that the precise constitution should be left to local discretion. However, we believe that the majority of schools forums, where the constitution is known, satisfy this aim. Furthermore, we will challenge authorities with a small number of governors on the forum and support them in filling vacancies by putting them in touch with authorities that are more successful. We know that this kind of peer-to-peer working can be very productive. Therefore, we would prefer not to accept this amendment, as it could lead to a number of authorities breaching the law without them wishing to do so. We already have the power to change regulation on this subject and will do so if we find that other measures are ineffective. The Government value the work of the National Governors’ Association and would welcome further input from it on this issue. With that reassurance on careers and governors in relation to schools forums, I hope that the noble Baroness will feel able to withdraw her amendment.