My Lords, I start with the areas where I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and principally join in his praises for Sir Kevin Satchwell, a truly extraordinary, outstanding head; there are only ever a very few people like him in the system. The more we can listen to and learn by him the better. I certainly agree with the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, that the core to getting careers education right is to have someone strong in each school charged with that responsibility. The focus of parents’ interest in schools is: where am I sending my child in life? What is their future? Where will they end up? What am I equipping them to be able to do? University is just a stepping-stone; it is the quality of insight and advice available in school that is really important, as is the status given to that within the school. Taking an interest in a pupil’s career has to be a high-status activity—up there with sport in some schools and mathematics in others. It is just as important. The people doing it should be painted wearing just as much purple as their academic colleagues.
This is something that ought perhaps to be secured by making it clear that Ofsted will take a real interest in the quality of the advice being provided in schools. None the less, looking at the history of careers advice, something has always been greatly lacking, because, unless they have had an extraordinarily broad career, someone working in a school has access only to a pretty partial view of what is going on in the world; certainly not a broad view of what areas are developing and how things are changing. It would be good to use the opportunity of this Bill. I hope that others will agree on an amendment for Report that puts careers advice and guidance right at the centre of this process.
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We should build on the careers hub structure created by the Careers & Enterprise Company. We need something that has access to a national picture of what is going on, but which is also local enough to be useful as an interface with the expertise in schools. Looking at it from outside, I think that what the Careers & Enterprise Company has done so far forms the basis for that, and we ought to go nap on it. These structures need to be
there for the long term. The CEC has built some pretty good foundations. We ought to say, “Okay, that’s what they will be, this is what we’ll work with. We will use this as the foundation for establishing the kind of strength within schools that the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, wants.”
I would make one other change, perhaps not in this Bill. I would show in a school’s performance tables data the performance of children who have left the school for other destinations. A school ought to be incentivised to do the best for its pupils, not the best for itself; or rather, those two things should be the same. At the moment, if you lose a good pupil to another provider, you lose the benefit of their performance, so you are reluctant to show great kids options that might take them away from a school. That should not be allowed to continue. Merely a technical change is needed to how we display information in the performance tables; it does not take a lot to align schools’ interests with pupils’.
To come back to the subject of these amendments, good careers advice and guidance is—in a way that it has never been in my experience—within our grasp, if we do the right things over the next five years. We should commit ourselves to that and make sure that the foundations for it are in the Bill.