Bill Rammell - Decisions at 18 conference
University of Kent - 10 April 2008

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Thank you and good afternoon. It's a great pleasure for me to be here and to have this chance to talk to you.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, one of Jean-Paul Sartre's students came to him with a problem. The young man wanted the philosopher's advice. Should he join the army and fight the Nazis, or should he stay at home and look after his sick mother? Sartre's advice on that occasion demonstrated why it's probably a good thing that there aren't more Existentialists in the careers service. "You are free", Sartre said to the young man, "So choose".

Anybody who, like me, has teenagers in their family will know already how terribly hard they can sometimes find it to choose. And harder still to make the right choice, even if it's only between tea and coffee, or between whether to get up or stay in bed.

And yet it's in those years that we still ask young people to make choices that will often set the course of their whole adult lives.

Do I want a job? If so, as what?

Do I need - and can I stand - more education? And if so, should it be further or higher education?

And if it's higher education, which universities should I apply to? And for what sort of course?

Obviously, those aren't entirely free choices. They're determined to an extent by other choices that have been made already by young people themselves and by their parents and others on their behalf. About which secondary school they were put in. About which GCSEs or AS or A levels they took about how hard they were prepared to study.
Yet there they are, at 17 or 18, faced with some of the most fateful decisions they will ever have to take.

And they're taken every year in quite massive volumes. The total number of 18 year-olds in England is reckoned to be between 650,000 and 700,000. Of those, about a quarter of a million take A levels and well over 95 per cent of them apply for a full-time higher education course. Of those, about 200,000 actually get a place and start a course.

If young people get the right information, advice and guidance, how can we expect them to make an informed choice about what path to take towards the best and most fulfilling future that their talents can promise? How can they even know what paths are open to them?

In my view, unless we do precisely that, unless we empower young people to make the right choices at 18, we will never achieve our ambition to widen participation in higher education. And if we fail in that, we'll also fail to deliver the much greater range of graduate-level skills in the economy that we'll need in the coming decades.

That's basically what I want to talk to you about today.

The stakes are high. And the task of showing all of our young people, regardless of race, gender, belief or class, that society is setting no arbitrary limit on the extent of their aspiration is an imposing one.

But that's what we're determined to do. And we've already made a start.

There is a growing recognition across Government that we must do far more to improve the quality of the information, advice and guidance on higher education that young people receive. That's something my Department and the Department for Children, Schools and Families are already working together to deliver.

As I've mentioned already, decisions at 18 are the culmination of a series of previous decisions. So if we're to make a real difference, we need to start to intervene much earlier than that.

That's why the Children's Plan announced funding for a series of pathfinder projects in schools. These will assess the value of giving careers advice as early as Key Stage 2, and see whether that will really help to extend children's horizons and raise their aspirations. Each of these pathfinders will include activities designed to excite young people about higher education and the career opportunities that it opens up.

You don't have to tell me that there's a danger inherent in this. Above all else, we have to let children be children. So I'm not talking about some sort of Stalinist career-programming from their earliest years. But if a small child really wants to become an astronaut, we shouldn't tell them it's impossible, because it wasn't for Helen Sharman and others. We should instead help guide them and their parents through the choices that can make that happen.

And if they decide a few years later that they'd rather be an archaeologist, we shouldn't throw our hands up. If the commitment's there, there are ways in which it can be done. But without aspiration, nothing can be achieved.

So good information, advice and guidance in secondary schools is vital, too. For example through taster sessions, workplace tours and work placements targeted at non-traditional groups. We will be working closely with the DCSF to ensure that an appreciation of the benefits of, and opportunities afforded by higher education is built into this work. The Aimhigher programme is increasingly important here, too. And I'll have more to say about that in a minute.

And there are other innovative ideas being taken forward. For example we will work with the DCSF to support the development of materials about universities for use by classroom teachers.

Obviously, there's a part that universities themselves have to play, too.
In March, funding was announced to completes national Lifelong Learning Network coverage. These networks now involve over 90 per cent of all universities in England and over 300 colleges.

Given the need to strengthen progression routes into higher level skills and offer people flexible options, the networks have an important role to play in widening participation. Of course, the networks were originally conceived as a way of improving vocational pathways into higher education. But in practice, their remit has become much broader than that. That's why my Department has now asked HEFCE develop a stronger, more focused remit for the Lifelong Learning Networks.

Specifically we want all Lifelong Learning Networks to develop progression agreements for the new 14-19 Diplomas as they are introduced. They should also provide clear progression routes into higher education for people on vocational programmes funded by the Learning and Skills Council and also for workplace learners.

In doing that, we want the networks to capitalise on this chance build strong structural links between colleges and universities, through dialogue on curriculum and other issues.

Everyone who knows the higher education sector knows too that the least-coveted administrative job for academic, arguably after that of senior tutor, is that of admissions tutor.

But the responsibility for widening participation can't just be placed on universities' shoulders. When I challenge our more prestigious universities about the impact of their fair access policies, many complain to me that there are state schools whose students just don't apply to them.

Following John Denham's speech at HEFCE yesterday, you may have heard David Willetts claiming that it's only this that constrains participation in higher education. Of course, that's nonsense. But nevertheless, it's true that many teachers in the maintained sector just don't see themselves or their schools as producing the sort of material that high-calibre institutions are likely to want, and so counsel their students away from applying.

I think it's very sad that, in words of Robert Browning's from a poem much-quoted by politicians, some schools are "still bidding crouch whom the rest bade aspire". We must convince them that talent can be unlocked wherever it's found and that all children deserve the best chances in life that their abilities can give them.

I think there ought to be scope to recognise schools that do well in getting their students into higher education, and also to identify those who need more help or encouragement. At the moment, it's too early to say much about how that could be done. But it is a question which I've been examining with my colleagues at the Department for Children, Schools and Families.

However, let me give you just one example of the sort of thing that can be achieved with ambition and also with the help that's available from my Department's own Aimhigher programme.

On the face of it, the staff of Xavieran Sixth-Form College in Manchester have a pretty tough beat. Over 80 per cent of students qualify for Education Maintenance Allowances and some come to the college with low points scores. Nevertheless, the college uses a range of strategies, many developed with AImhigher funding, to give its students the best chance they can get. These range from detailed monitoring and profiling to work with parents and help with applications, besides the more usual programmes of visits from guest lecturers and student ambassadors.

The results have been astonishing. Last year, three-quarters of the college's university entrants came from widening participation groups. And a third of its entrants got into Russell Group universities.

That shows just how much can be achieved. And it's one of the reasons why we announced only last Friday an additional £21 million to recruit 5,500 Aimhigher associates. These will be undergraduates who'll work long-term to offer individual support to over 21,000 school and college students as young as 14 all over the country.

I think this is an exciting new development because, as Aimhigher has already amply demonstrated, to young people an example's often worth a thousand words.

Of course, our aim isn't for all 18 year-olds to go to a Russell Group university. Our aim is for everyone to have a fair chance of getting the education that best suits their needs and ambitions.

So I want finally to say a word about the 400,000 young people a year who don't go to university straight after they leave school or college. It would be terribly short-sighted of us to forget about their needs, or that just because they aren't going into higher education now they don't still need advice on their future education and training options. Indeed, there's a vital job to be done making clear that their further education and training options aren't closed off.

There's no shame in a 16 or 18 year-old having had enough of the classroom for the time being. Often that's simply because they already have a clear idea of what they want to do with their lives. Like the schoolgirl in Croydon a few years ago who, to the despair of her careers teacher, could only think of one job that she wanted to do. All she ever said in careers interviews was "I wanna be a model, miss".

How silly of her, you might think.

Her name was Kate Moss.

Admittedly, that's an exceptional case. But there are others. Take, for example, a youngster who knows that he's going to work in his dad's bricklaying business after he leaves school.

So long as young people make choices that are free and well-informed, that's fair enough. The key point I want to make is that their learning doesn't have to stop. There are now more, and more varied, apprenticeships on offer to young people who want to go straight out to work than ever before. These allow them to combine a job with a route to better skills and qualifications. They're not just available in traditional areas like construction, but increasingly in white-collar sectors, too.

Stopping full-time education shouldn't mean stopping learning. And it doesn't have to.

I also think it's highly important that all young people should understand that the fact that they don't go to university at 18, irrespective of whether they follow a vocational training route after that, doesn't mean that they've missed out forever on their only chance of higher education.

These days, school leavers are a minority of the student population. .Part-time study has been growing for many years already. And we will see in the coming years an expansion of work-based higher education courses as we move towards our aim of getting at least 40 per cent of the working-age population qualified to at least level 4 by 2020.

Before I close, I want most of all to do the thing I've signally failed to do so far today, and that's to thank you all for the work you do. There's nothing more important than giving children and young people the best start in life they can possibly get. And there's nothing more uplifting, nothing that fills you more filled with optimism for the future of this country, than to see what young people whose gifts might have gone to waste can achieve once their talent is unlocked.

Thank you.