A statutory duty should be placed on schools to arrange for vocational education providers to have access to students to offer them careers advice, former education secretary Lord Baker has said.
Speaking in the House of Lords on Tuesday on the government’s Skills and Post-16 Education Bill, Lord Baker said he would table an amendment to make the Baker Clause, implemented in 2017, a legal requirement for schools.
The clause is seen as key to ensuring that young people get appropriate careers advice and guidance on vocational training and apprenticeships, rather than just being encouraged to pursue a university route by their school teachers. While the clause was set up to ensure access to information on technical and vocational pathways for students, it relies on schools following ministerial advice on the matter. “Ninety-five per cent of schools ignore that advice,” Lord Baker told Tes today. “They just want to hang on to their pupils [into sixth form].”
Background: Ofsted told to ‘do its job’ on school careers advice
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Instead, he said, there should be a statutory duty on schools to provide those opportunities to students between 1 September and 30 April. “Those are key terms because in these terms, most youngsters decide what schools they go to in September,” added Lord Baker.
The Baker Clause: Schools ‘need to give FE colleges access for careers advice’
Speaking in the Lords on Tuesday, he said he broadly welcomed the bill. However, he said it had failed to address the digital skills needs of the UK - the biggest shortage area in the economy. He also said the proposals in the bill risked separating vocational and academic routes of education when they should be going “hand in hand”.
He told Tes: “I really do think there is a danger of really separating out technical and academic subjects in schools. What the bill does in colleges is really sensible.
“But when it comes to schools, the provision of 16-19 is almost devoid of technical education. It is focused on A levels and there is no A level in, for example, engineering.”
Lord Baker, who co-founded the Baker Dearing Education Trust, which runs university technical colleges (UTCs) across England, said UTCs had shown that if you provide high-quality technical education to those from the most deprived backgrounds, it improves their life chances “enormously”, boosting social mobility.
Lord Baker’s comments come only days after the chair of the Commons Education Select Committee, Robert Halfon, said Ofsted was sending the “wrong message” by rating schools as “outstanding” when they were offering poor careers advice. Mr Halfon, who was skills minister when the Baker Clause became law in 2017, told Ofsted chief inspector Amanda Spielman that the inspectorate should “do its job properly” in this area. “My feeling is that careers advice is very much secondary for Ofsted,” he said.
He added: “Your remit is careers guidance. I am not asking you to do anything more, I am asking you to do your job properly and enforce the Baker Clause. It is the law, and it is part of your job - it is just that you see it as a lesser priority because it is about skills and apprenticeships and not academic study.”
Ms Spielman said it was not that Ofsted viewed careers advice as a lesser priority, “but the inspection model we operate is not a list of the statutory requirements and ticking off against that”.
