A former Conservative education minister has said that schools struggling to fund careers advisers should ask local businesses to pay for them.

Lord Nash, who was academies minister from 2013 to 2017, made his comments in a House of Lords debate about careers education yesterday.

The peer, who earlier in the debate described himself as being “a philistine businessman all my life”, chairs the Future Academies trust, which he founded.

Lord Nash stressed the need for coherence in the way employers and schools engage with each other, and referenced a previous peer’s comments about the “old fashioned, part-time unqualified careers adviser or careers teacher”.

He continued: “I have long believed that in order for this coherence, this connection, to work well, there needs to be one person in each school who focuses on this and nothing else.

“Individual schools may find it hard to find money for this but the payback would be substantial, and it may be that some of them could find this money from local businesses to pay for such a person to help the coordination.

“Certainly in my experience I have never found businesses slow in coming forward once you ask them, but often they don’t know how to engage, and this is something they could definitely do.”

The debate, on the case for high-quality careers education and advice being available to all students, was called by crossbench peer Lord Aberdare.