---

Social Mobility and the Professions

I completely agree, and have nothing to add to that excellent comment. It is one reason why we, through parliamentary questions, have been trying to track the record, not least of Departments and quangos, on apprenticeships. It is a very mixed record indeed, with large swathes of Whitehall not having taken on apprenticeships but giving a very poor performance, which we hope will now improve. The final item on my list of five barriers to overcome involves opportunities later in life. Many professions tell us that the broader social mix of their recruitment comes from the older people whom they recruit. Sadly, they are able to reach out more widely at that level than they are through the conventional route of 18-year-olds who go to university and are then recruited. Of course, we have to do better with the 18-year-olds and the university route, but opportunities in later life do matter, and we should not forget universities' continuing unhappiness about the equivalent level qualification—ELQ—policy, which means that if someone already has a university qualification in something completely unrelated, and if they want to go back to university and study something else many years later, it is very hard to change career and direction. We should not forget the disappearance of other adult learning places, either. The Open university, a fantastic institution that does such a good job in spreading access to higher education, has lost £30 million as a result of the ELQ policy. Birkbeck college is an institution with which many on the Labour Benchers have an association: when the ELQ policy was proposed, it lost one third of its students at a cost of £7.8 million. That such institutions, which are particularly devoted to giving people a second chance, were worst hit by the ELQ policy shows that there was a failure to ensure that people have opportunities later in life. I enjoyed the Minister's speech and I look forward to what the right hon. Member for Darlington (Mr. Milburn) will say about his report. If his final proposals match the excellent analysis in the opening two reports, we have much to look forward to.