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Education and Skills Bill

I offer my warmest support to Amendment No. 194, which was tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp. I have seen some pretty awful careers advice, at least 30 years out of date, given by teachers who have not been given any specialist training. This training needs to be updated as employment opportunities develop so rapidly now. Hundreds of new employment opportunities are created every year as technology develops. Some of the most powerful careers advice is given by subject teachers to young people who are particularly excited by the subject they are being taught and who are looking for a career related to their interest in that subject. Those people have a key role to play. It is important that the advice which they give is up to date, professional and accurate. I offer particular support to Amendment No. 193, tabled by my noble friend. I know that the Sutton Trust has created a very healthy climate. It is generally accepted now that it is not enough just to get more young people from socially deprived areas to aspire to go on to higher education, but that we must incite those who are so qualified to go on to the Russell group universities and perhaps to Oxford or Cambridge if that is appropriate. I support and have worked with the work of the Sutton Trust in that aim. To give a vivid illustration of that, I remember a student who came to my college in Cambridge in 2001. She was a most remarkable young woman who had been living on the street. She had run away from unhappy home circumstances when she was 17. She dropped out of school, of course, and had lived for two and a half years on the street, which many experts say is beyond repair—that if you have lived that long on the streets, you will never be recoverable. Her formidable personality and, as it later proved, formidable intellect, caused her, as she put it, to wake up one morning and say to herself, ““There has got to be more to life than this””. She got herself together, she got a job in a bar serving as a barmaid and registered at her local sixth-form college, where she was immediately identified as an extraordinarily bright young person. Despite having missed two and a half years of schooling, she picked up an A-level course and was working for three A-levels, no less, in what she hoped would be a year and a half. She discovered, of course, that her two and a half years out made it very difficult for her to catch up with the other young people in the group, so she took even more hours working to pay for some private tuition for herself. As it happened, her tutor was a Cambridge PhD. After a few months of working with her, he said to her, ““Do you know that you are bright enough to get into Cambridge if you want to?””. She was terribly excited by that and went back to her sixth-form tutor and said, ““My tutor says that I could try for Cambridge. What do you think about that?””. To my horror, she told us that the reply from her sixth-form college tutor was, ““Cambridge? Give me a match and I’d burn the place down. Nothing but snobs. You’d never fit in there with your background. Don’t even think of it””. At which point, in great distress, she went back to her private tutor and said, ““My tutor at sixth-form college says that I could not possibly try for it””. Fortunately, he encouraged her to go on trying. She came to us with three As at A-level that she got in 18 months after two and a half years on the street and was a star pupil. A story such as that convinces me that there are still teachers out in the system who are prepared actively to discourage people from Russell group applications. It is terribly important that they are encouraged—indeed, directed—to give appropriate advice to young people as to what kind of university they are suited to go to.