My Lords, the noble Baroness’s remark that she wanted to become a landscape gardener but ended us as a civil servant could make the brilliant first sentence of an autobiography, with us all intrigued as to how the intent to become the one ended up in the more humdrum reality of the other. I only hope that, maybe by utilising all the opportunities of lifelong or lifetime learning, she is able to indulge her passion. She has great artistic genius and this may be the moment when she could set up a new enterprise.
There are two issues here. The first is the careers guidance to students in schools and colleges about what should happen after they leave that institution. The second is the more specific issue raised by the noble Lord, Lord Baker, of advertising options to students in secondary schools for moving to alternative providers, including between the ages of 11 and 16—when they might be better served by, for example, one of the noble Lord’s university technical colleges—and seeing that that advice is made available to them.
We need to accept that, as is the experience of all of us in the House, careers advice and guidance has never been done well. The truth is that schools with a more academic bent—which I am glad to say is now most schools, but even until quite recently, they were in the minority—have always been pretty good at giving advice and guidance on universities. That is because teachers are graduates and know about universities, and schools are judged on the university destinations of their more able students. However, those schools have traditionally been poor or worse at providing options for technical and further education. That is partly because they are not incentivised to do so, since public authorities and the inspectorate mostly do not notice whether they do or not, but also because teachers by definition have very little experience of these areas. There are almost no teachers who themselves have done apprenticeships or gone on to further education.
So we need to accept that this has never been well done. I suppose that in all areas of policy there is golden-ageism—“30 years ago it was done brilliantly and it has all degenerated since”—but we must accept that the old-style careers service was not great. It did not turn up in most schools, and when it did it was pretty haphazard. It was not regarded as a high priority by local authorities, and schools’ engagement with it was generally a low priority too.
The various incarnations of the careers service—up to and including the Careers & Enterprise Company, which came partly from the wholesale privatisation of the old careers service and the requirement that it be disbanded, which was a draconian step that I would never have taken—have not led to great careers guidance in schools. All those who do good work in this area should be applauded, and the Gatsby benchmarks are great. The noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, and the Careers & Enterprise Company, which I hear some
good accounts of and some accounts that it barely infringes on the work of schools at all, are to be encouraged. However, there is a systemic problem that we have never properly addressed, which is how we ensure that within each institution there is a facility—which in my experience always means a person—responsible for delivering careers guidance, including technical education guidance.
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In this respect, it is important to understand that colleges and schools are very large institutions. A college is an institution of £10 million-plus a year with many hundreds of staff. Secondary schools are by and large now institutions with turnovers of £5 million, £6 million or £7 million and usually 100 to 150 teachers. It is perfectly reasonable to expect that each school as well as college should provide directly—not by having a haphazard relationship with some external provider—good-quality careers advice and guidance which is about both university destinations and technical options, apprenticeships, employment and enterprise education opportunities for students. This goes with the grain of all the reforms to the education system since the noble Lord, Lord Baker, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke, and the move towards much more independently managed schools with their own budgets, which is a reform I took forward further in the academies programme. It is very important because it means that the managers of these schools are directly responsible for the staff and the outcomes.
The conclusion I have reached from engagement in this over many years is that it is probably conceptually wrong to think that the answer is having an external service that engages with these very large institutions of schools and colleges. The right way of thinking about it is that part of the core function of the school and the college should be to provide good-quality advice on apprenticeships, university destinations and employment thereafter. I see many former Ministers and educationalists here, and those of us who have engaged with this know that the breakthrough moment is what you see on the ground. When I was Education Minister, I visited Thomas Telford city technology college, one of the original technology colleges set up by the noble Lord, Lord Baker, with Sir Kevin Satchwell, its phenomenal principal. I believe he is still at the school and has been its head since it was founded by the noble Lord, Lord Baker, in 1988 or 1989. I think he must have been there for well over 20 years. It is a phenomenal achievement.
I took the whole of the CTC model forward in the academies programme, learning from the best of what the previous Government had done. The sponsors of Thomas Telford CTC included Tarmac, which was then a big employer—and a very big local employer, which is part of the reason why it sponsored the city technology college. From memory, I think it was the former chief operating officer of Tarmac, who had taken early retirement and had been part of the original project team which set up Thomas Telford CTC, who worked four days a week as what was called the enterprise and employment director at the school. He had a big, open-plan stall—it was not one of those cubby-holes that you often get for the careers service
which has dust and kids may visit once or twice a year—right by the cafeteria where the students were passing all the time. He set up for three hours a day and accosted all the kids as they were coming by and asked them what they were doing. He knew them all. He had a great catalogue of apprenticeships that were available. He organised placements for the students in local employers—proper enterprise education which, of course, gave ambition to the students afterwards—and he handled all the universities. As he had been in business and understood that area really well, he was providing first-hand professional knowledge.
The conclusion I drew from that is that you need every secondary school to have its own enterprise and employment director who has significant business experience, particularly local business experience, who knows the local employers and can organise the work placements and the enterprise education as well as doing the more systemic things, such as the catalogues of apprenticeships and university destinations. That person’s experience base should be with local employers, and they should not be a conventional teacher. My only regret is that, having seen this idea working in the Thomas Telford CTC and having told all my officials it was brilliant and we should be doing more of it, it never really took root. It is the usual situation: the very well-run schools provide this and often have people filling this role while the less well-run schools, particularly in more deprived areas, tend not to, so they are much more dependent on the shadowy successor bodies of the careers service which may or may not be providing decent advice and guidance.
My strong advice is: go to Thomas Telford CTC, look at what it does and copy it. That is what should happen. Some people read Hansard and I hope that they pick that up. We do not need the whole paraphernalia of legal changes and duties on people to do this and that, involving them liaising with bodies outside schools and colleges. Every head teacher—I meet head teachers at the moment—should be appointing as an equivalent of a deputy head a director of enterprise and employment to fulfil these functions.
I come to the specific issue of the noble Lord, Lord Baker, and university technical colleges. I should declare an interest, in that I am on the Baker Dearing Educational Trust. I pay tribute to him, as he has done outstanding work in this area for 30 years. There were technical schools promised by the 1944 Butler Act but never established, which is one of the great tragedies of post-war education. The university technical colleges will start filling that need.
There is a particular systemic malfunction in the system at the moment which can be described very simply. It is that university technical colleges rightly start at the age of 14 because that is when, by and large, students start forming technical interests and deciding where they want to go. For many of the areas on which the UTCs focus—engineering, performing arts, media, technical media skills and the rest of the list, all of which are enormously worth while—specialist education is not provided by mainstream comprehensive schools. The issue is whether it is sensible for students to transfer at the age of 14. For many it is very sensible, but the problem is that schools have a massive
disincentive to allow UTCs or other providers to come in to market their wares because they lose the students and the money.
As we discovered with UTCs, schools have some slight incentive to allow difficult and disruptive children to transfer. The noble Lord was reading from his prepared text—he is much better when he is full and frank without his prepared text—and said that there are certain categories of students that head teachers are often prepared to push in the direction of UTCs. What he was perhaps not sufficiently frank about is that, as he and I know, it is often students that the schools want to offload that they push in this direction, but many of the students who could benefit most from it are not getting those opportunities. We have been around the block a few times on this and we thought that the Baker clause would deliver this belt and braces three years ago. It has failed to do so because it is not a statutory obligation. Although we always have to be very careful about imposing statutory duties on schools, it is reasonable that there should be an opportunity for all students at the ages of 13, 14, 16 and 17, which is what this amendment provides, to meet the heads of local colleges, including UTCs, and hear a presentation of what they are offering, to work out whether it is better for them. Their parents should have the opportunity to see that too. I strongly commend the amendment to the Committee.
However, there is a big underlying problem at the heart of the English education system at the moment. It is the reason why there is such a problem of incentivising pupils to understand the routes to technical and further education and the weakness of providers in making students aware of what they have to offer: there is not a sufficiently strong and well-established apprenticeship route in this country.
Universities do not, by and large, have a problem getting through to schools. To be absolutely blunt, middle-class students and their parents know that they want university for themselves and their children, they know the university world, the teachers know it and the arrangements are made. In the case of apprenticeships, however, the route is weak and there is very little awareness of the apprenticeship opportunities in each area. Changes are being made at the moment—maybe the Minister can tell us more about that—but, until recently, UCAS did not make any apprenticeship opportunities available through its service. Whereas you can go through a national brokerage system for university places, you cannot do so for apprenticeships. I understand that this is changing, and it would be good to have more information about that, but until we sort out this problem and have a strong apprenticeship route, which is prestigious and understood locally by employers, students and schools, any amount of tinkering with the law will not make a great difference.
The noble Lord, Lord Baker, tells me that the House of Lords Youth Unemployment Select Committee is looking in particular at this big crisis issue of apprenticeships and the apprenticeship levy. While these remedial changes are very welcome and I hope they will be agreed by the House—in particular, the new clause proposed by the noble Lord—we must sort out the fundamental, underlying problem of the
inadequate supply of high-quality apprenticeships, particularly to young people. This is not being sorted out at the moment. Nothing the Minister said in response to the earlier debate was adequate. She gave figures for how a high proportion of the apprenticeships being provided is for young people, but the figures I gave the House earlier speak for themselves. There has been a massive fall in the total number of apprenticeships on offer and, as King Lear put it many years ago:
“Nothing will come of nothing.”
We must sort out this big issue. I hope that the Select Committee looking at these issues will be extremely robust on this massive supply-side failure. It is a failure of the state because it is ultimately the job of the state to see that young people have proper opportunities for their own training and formation. The Bill itself is pretty weak and ineffectual, but out of the consideration of it I hope will come a full-scale reform of the apprenticeship system; that is what we need to put right the fundamental problem of technical education in this country.