Post-16 Financial Education

Baroness Garden of Frognal Excerpts

Thursday 12th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The noble Baroness makes a very important point about the need to support young people leaving care. That, of course, is the reason for making personal advisers available to young people in that position. It is why, as we have been, and will be, debating in the Bill that comes later and more broadly in the Government’s reforms, we must be much clearer about the support available to care leavers and the offer that needs to be made available to them in all parts of the country.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, the Minister spoke about citizenship in schools. We had a brilliant committee last year on 11 to 16 education, which came out with amazing recommendations, all of which the Conservative Government turned down, so it would be very nice to know that the Labour Government will pick those up. Can she say what success we are having in recruiting citizenship teachers? This was one of the big difficulties when all this was put into citizenship.

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I know that since citizenship was established—in fact, I had some responsibility for it the first time I was a Minister in the Department for Education—there has been enormous progress in the ability to deliver those sorts of skills to children in our schools, but also an ongoing challenge to make sure we recruit the specialist teachers in order to be able to do that. That is why the Government are determined to increase the numbers of specialist teachers by 6,500, and why we have put in place the financial and training support in order to encourage them into the profession and keep them in it.