---

Social Mobility and the Professions

I do not think that children's opportunities can or should be determined by their experience in the early years. Early years matter, but I expect my hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr. Hayes) will speak later in the debate about what has happened to adult learning opportunities. The absolute decline of more than 1 million adult learning places suggests that there has been such an exclusive focus on early years that the opportunities for people later on in life to reshape their careers and get new skills have indeed been reduced. I want to return to working through my list. The first item about which I think that the Minister and I agree is the importance of careers advice. I want to refer to the Nuffield-Rathbone study—another version of that research was published this week—but my interpretation is slightly different from the Minister's. It is easy to say that there is a problem of aspiration, and the report does contain some evidence in that regard, but the Nuffield-Rathbone researchers present a somewhat different argument. Interviews were conducted with young people who were NEETs or otherwise disengaged from education and so unlikely to go to university. The study said:""At the workshops with young people, all of the participants expressed some form of aspiration, many of which were highly specific...they were able to express clear and precise aspirations."" Those young people aspired to conventional jobs, such as chef, solicitor, holiday rep, bar worker, plumber and so on but, as the study went on to say,""it was also clear that they did not have a planned trajectory for achieving those aspirations"." The study added that they were pessimistic about where they would be in 10 years' time. If anything, the problem has to do with the routes to achieving aspirations. Young people have to find their way through a maze if they want to get the A-levels that they need to get on the course that is best for fulfilling their aspirations. Some very ingenious traps have been laid to send them down the wrong route. It would be perfectly reasonable for a person to think that a law A-level would be a good route to becoming a lawyer, but we know that it is not a particularly good path to studying law at university or beyond. It is therefore not a good way to achieve aspirations in the law. I remember a fascinating interview on "Woman's Hour" a few weeks ago. A young woman engineer had come up with an ingenious device to serve as a low-energy fridge for the third world. It comprised two containers, one inside the other: the external one held soil or grass that absorbed water, whose evaporation cooled the contents of the internal container. The interviewer said to the inventor, "But you didn't do engineering at university." The young woman replied, "No one told me I needed to do maths for that, so I couldn't do it." It is clear that there are people with great aptitudes and aspirations who are being let down because they are not being given a route through the maze. That is why careers advice is so important.