Graham Stuart: We must make it easier for the young people facing hard choices over jobs

Is such good advice typically available? No. It is worth putting on record that the Government inherited a bad situation: a dysfunctional system of careers guidance. In 2009, the Panel on Fair Access to the Professions reported on the low level of satisfaction with the careers guidance work provided by the Connexions service, which is little mourned overall. In 2010, Ofsted criticised inconsistencies in provision.

The Education Act 2011 represented a chance for a fresh start. The Education Committee’s report was prompted by the introduction of the new statutory duty on schools to secure access to independent, impartial careers guidance for pupils in years 9 to 11.

The committee came to the conclusion that the transfer of responsibility to schools was regrettable, as was the way it was done. Our view was prompted not by any nostalgia for the previous arrangements but by concern about how the transfer was implemented.

At the time, Ministers had other priorities. They were under great budgetary pressure, and careers guidance lost out. None of the £196m in funding that the Connexions service received for its careers guidance work was passed to schools.

Following the change, a survey by Careers England found that only one in six schools had the same level of investment in careers activities as the year before. Ministers need to take that seriously. The survey also found that not a single school had increased its level of investment, even after the Connexions service, however patchy its performance, had been removed from the scene.

Evidence from countries that have transferred responsibility for careers guidance to schools, such as the Netherlands and New Zealand, does not support that approach.

In those countries, the schools were at least given funding to supply the service when they were given the duty to do so; nevertheless, the committee was told that even there, the transfer of the duty had resulted in a significant reduction in both the quality and extent of careers guidance provision in schools.

I acknowledge the pressing need to deliver spending efficiencies where possible, but this is not a spending efficiency; it is the promotion of spending inefficiency, as we waste money by placing students on the wrong courses.

When my committee visited Bradford College in October last year, I met a young man whose experience typifies the waste of time, money and potential to which poor careers guidance, or the complete lack of it, can lead.

He was taking a course to join the uniformed services. He had wasted the previous year on a course that was not right for him and would not have led to a job in the fire service, which he wanted to join.

To add insult to injury, this young man, who wanted to be a fireman, found out during the appropriate course that the fire service is now shrinking, and that there was unlikely to be a job for him at the end of his course. The system let that young man down, and it is doing the country no good at all.

How did it happen? He did not receive proper guidance about the courses that he needed to realise his dreams, or even guidance about the dreams that he had a chance of realising.

That is just one anecdotal example. When the experience is scaled up, huge amounts of money are being wasted. With youth unemployment at 21 per cent and the CBI currently characterising the transition from school to work as “chaotic”, the policy smacks of false economy.

Nonetheless, the committee accepts that the new arrangements involving the statutory duty on schools are in place, and being so freshly put on the statute book, are not immediately likely to change.

However careers guidance can provide a crucial signpost for rewarding employment. It can help young people – such as the young man I met in Bradford – to make the right choices first time. With the right advice, that young man could have a clear sense of where his opportunities lie.

If the fire service was not recruiting, he could explore a job with another branch of the services, such as the Army. He would not waste time repeating a year, and could get a job when he left education. High-quality, independent and impartial advice has a key role to play in helping pupils to make good choices. If the system fails young people, a human and economic cost is incurred, by both the young people and the wider society that risks squandering their talents.

In its response to our report, the Government complained that the committee “focuses on the process of planning and providing careers guidance, whereas the Government’s priority is outcomes for young people”.

With respect to Ministers, our so-called process points were about ensuring that young people can access proper careers advice, at a time when five in six schools are cutting back on it. That could help to prevent obvious mistakes. For example, our report highlights the lack of awareness in many schools regarding apprenticeships, despite their being a flagship coalition policy.

Ministers assume that schools will always do the best thing for the children in their care but, in reality, schools will deliver what they are measured on. The system will not deliver when schools are not evaluated on the quality of the careers guidance they provide, and when they are not given funding to supply it. In truth, the committee is perhaps better focused on outcomes than Ministers who made such a hash of the policy in the DfE.

What is the point of all the education reforms the Government have undertaken, if there is no decent signposting between education and the world of employment?