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Higher Education

First, I thank the noble Baroness for the work that she put in with Alan Milburn and her other colleagues to produce an excellent piece of work and a first-rate report. The noble Baroness is absolutely right to place emphasis on the Careers Service and the provision of information, advice and guidance on careers in schools. She would, if she had listened carefully, have picked up a sentence or more in my Statement. I invite her to look at the framework statement as a whole, where she will see the emphasis that we have placed on this. It is why we are going to co-operate even more closely and diligently than we have in the past with the Department for Children, Schools and Families, which has responsibility in this area. I hope that teachers in schools will reflect on their own vital role in nurturing, cultivating and encouraging confidence and ambition. I benefited from education at a wonderful college at Oxford. I was the second member of my family to go to university but the first to go to Oxford. I would not have dreamt of applying there had it not been for my economics master, Mr Michael Brown. Despite my headmaster’s opposition to my going anywhere near Oxford or Cambridge—he was not in the mood for encouraging me to go anywhere but down and out of his school, for a variety of reasons which I shall not detain the House with— Mr Brown stood up for young Mandelson and said, "No, he should apply", and I did. We need more teachers in our schools like the Browns, who do not think that going to university is elitist or superior but believe that it is an ambition that young people should rightly have if they have the aptitude, qualifications and potential to do so.