Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

In the previous group of amendments we dwelt at length on the need to provide a requirement to include advice about apprenticeships in careers advice, and the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, spoke to her Amendments 66 and 71. Our Amendment 72 would require the Secretary of State to commission a report on the quality of current careers advice, with further consideration of the appropriateness of establishing an all-age careers service in England similar to those in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. We currently seem to be struggling to provide our young people with the sort of careers advice that they deserve. While the Government may legislate for a statutory right to an apprenticeship or improvements to examination standards, as we discussed before dinner, this can be undermined by a lack of effective careers advice which would direct our young people to where they would be most suited, to where their potential can be best harnessed. In schools in England currently around two-thirds of careers advice is delivered by teachers with no formal qualifications in this field. The noble Baroness, Lady Wall, referred to that when she spoke to the previous group of amendments. Outside schools, much of careers advice is provided by Connexions, the external agency which was set up in 2001. While we recognise the valuable service that Connexions offers in giving advice about all manner of problems, ranging from housing to careers to sexual health, we feel that that holistic range of advice may detract from a focus on careers and that the service may therefore be poorer for it. A study by the Skills Commission found that, ""there has been a decline in the quality of careers guidance since Connexions replaced the Careers Service"." Given that the Government declare that their intentions are to help young people achieve their potential, does the Minister not agree that this would be a good time to institute a review of the careers advice that is on offer? As Keiran Gordon of Merseyside Connexions said before the committee in another place, the Bill does not go far enough to ensure that, ""high quality independent advice can be offered to young people"." With that in mind, I hope the Minister will see fit to give due consideration to the second half of our amendment, which asks for an assessment of the appropriateness of adopting an all-age service as indeed already operates in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Does the Minister agree that particularly in this time of economic crisis, it seems appropriate to have a career service that would allow truly effective and professional advice to be given to people of any age, be they starting work, unemployed, already in work or even while moving towards retirement age? This service would allow people to make truly informed choices. A universally recognised and community-based source of advice would provide reassurance both to those looking for work and those needing employees that they were getting the best service. We would argue that this professionalised, all-age career service should also link up to the way that advice is given within schools. While we agree with the premise of this part of the Bill which advocates that advice should be given within schools, there is a strong argument that this should not be left up to the discretion of teachers. We spoke about that before the break. Careers advice can have an enormous impact on the path that a student may take from school and indeed much further into life. We on these Benches would therefore argue that these students should receive the benefit of advice from an independent, dedicated, professional resource of a free-standing careers service. My noble friend Lord Elton spoke about the quality of the adviser as well as the advice when he spoke to the previous group of amendments. We do not want to put the onus of the choices that these young people make on to their teachers who, without training in this specific and important field, may push people towards an apprenticeship or towards further academic study based on criteria that are in the best interests not of the pupil but of the school. So I hope very much that the Minister will give serious consideration to these proposals. I beg to move.