It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friends the Members for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Aaron Bell) and for Waveney (Peter Aldous). There have been a number of good speeches, but I was struck in particular by a couple of things said by my hon. Friend the Member for Waveney, who is no longer in his place. First, he spoke of FE having been a Cinderella service for a long time, and secondly, he addressed the risk of affluent people using the Bill’s provisions to get a qualification additional to those they already have. I will talk about the issue of access, which I think chimes well with my hon. Friend’s comments.
Before I entered this place in 2019, I ran charities for disadvantaged young people. Those charities pretty much worked with young people aged 16 to 25—a couple of them went all the way down to age 10, but the bulk of young people I worked with in the 16 years before becoming an MP were aged 16 to 25. I am therefore quite familiar with how the system pushes people to do three-year university courses at the age of 18. Indeed, they are set on that path before they even get to that point, because at 16 they have to choose the courses that will set them up for their desired university course. For example, if someone is not studying chemistry at A-level, they will not be admitted to a medical course. We put people on a narrow track at a very early age.
There are all sorts of debates about the international baccalaureate and whether we should study a broader range of subjects. If students are to follow the university track at 18, however, they have to pick subjects at 16, and school visits will often be to universities rather than to colleges and employers. The UCAS system—I am really glad that we are changing this—makes it incredibly easy for people in year 12 and moving into year 13 to apply to university. There is one form, on which they list five universities. The process could not be much simpler, although there are difficult things to do to put the form together. Everything says to young people, and to adults, “There is a slip road at this point, but if you miss your junction”—to mix metaphors slightly—“that is it. You will be set on an incredibly long road without the opportunity to come off at the next junction or go back and find that junction again.” That is what our whole system has done for a long time, and it has been quite instructive.
I do not say this as a criticism, but the two big influencers of young people—parents and teachers—reinforce that message. That is not a criticism, as I say, because we all have to do better in that regard. Parents often want their children to go to university, even if they did not go themselves. My parents wanted me to go to university, but I was the first generation in my family to do so. For many people, going to university is held up as the aspirational thing to do, and the alternatives are not seen in the same aspirational way, which they should be.
Most teachers did exactly what we are talking about: they got to 18, went to university, did a teacher training qualification, and joined the profession. So it is the thing that they are most familiar with, too.