My Lords, I support the amendments in this group, particularly Amendment 11, to which I have added my name. I have some concerns about Amendment 61 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, which I will mention. I do not want to go over the arguments again except to add weight of numbers to the strength of the arguments we have heard from other Members today. I do not disagree with anything that has been said, I just want to make two or three points which perhaps have not been made or have not been made frequently enough. I hope I will not speak for long.
First, I hope the Minister will be really clear about when this careers strategy is about to appear. We have been promised it for a very long time and I think I saw something by his colleague who leads in the department for this piece of legislation about it coming later in the year. Given that it is about two years since a careers strategy was promised, I am not sure why a Bill such as this, which will fail unless there is good-quality careers
education, is coming so far in advance of the careers education strategy. They should go hand in hand. We would not be having this debate if we had the careers education strategy. I think a lot of these amendments have been tabled in sheer frustration. We almost panic because we know it is such a weak area of our system and we are about to pass the Bill with no effective careers education system. We need to know when the strategy will arrive and we need to understand why it has been delayed. If there is a problem, we need to know about it. I worry about that.
Secondly, I agree with the information bit but that in itself is not careers education. There are two parts to this. We need the information but then we need to make the decision. As a young person—or even an older person—just having information is not sufficient. The skill of making the right decision is far more complicated. You can let as many people into the school to give information about as wide a range of jobs as you can, but when they leave at the end of the day, it is the teacher who is there with the young person when the decision is made. That is a very important other part of this situation. Information by itself will not necessarily change the young person’s mind—it might but it might not.
There are three big influences on the child in making the decision: their parents, their friends and their teachers. The strategy must encompass and reflect that. We cannot squeeze teachers out of careers education. We can bring people with a wide range of knowledge and experience into the classroom, but teachers will have an important impact on the decisions reached because they are the pastoral carers and they spend an awful lot of time with young people. We have been critical of teachers, and rightly so, but we need a careers strategy that supports them in the job they are being asked to do. We do not want to give them the impression that we want them out of this business. They have an important role to play in supporting young people to make the right, effective and appropriate decision.
Thirdly, we are moaning about schools—I do not disagree with a word my noble friend said; he made this point brilliantly—but the incentives the Government have put into the system are causing the problems. What do we do? We moan at the teachers. We are complaining about the schools responding in an entirely predictable and understandable way to the incentives that we have put into the system—including me in my time. The answer to that is to change the incentives, but we want to leave the incentives in place and change the behaviour. That will not work. Where is the discussion about changing the incentives because that is the surest way of changing behaviour? I agree absolutely with the noble Lord, Lord Baker, that the UTCs are a force for good. They had a difficult birth and baptism but they are still a major player in the field. In a way, they encapsulate the problems of the incentives in the system. Their very existence is threatened because we have the wrong incentives, and I say that collectively of politics and Parliament. The case he has made about having access to young people is strong, but other things need to be done as well.
My only concern about Amendment 61 is that it is too easy to say, “Leave it to Ofsted. It cannot be a good school unless it has good careers education
provision”. We always say that, and then every 10 years we have to prune what we ask Ofsted to inspect. We pile so much on to Ofsted. With every new initiative that is introduced we say, “Let’s get Ofsted to inspect it”. That is how the relationship between schools and Ofsted breaks down; the inspectors are always seen as the bearer of the big stick. I want to turn the amendment the other way around. We are saying that if a school does not have good careers education, it will go into “requires improvement” or “special measures” because those are the only two categories left. There are implications in that for a college that we ought to be aware of if Ofsted is to be used as the lever in this. It is a bit mean, or premature, to put a college into the “requires improvement” or “special measures” category because it has not got right a plank of policy that we have not got right either. It behoves us to get our bit right before we say to any educational provider, “If you don’t get this right”—despite the fact that we have not—“you will go into ‘requires improvement’ or ‘special measures’ and the consequences will be big”.
I say to the Minister that we would not be having this conversation if we had more information about the Government’s plans for the careers strategy. It is a big and dangerous hole at the moment and therefore I strongly support the amendments, with the caveat about Amendment 61.