Social Mobility: Careers Education

Richard Quigley Excerpts

Thursday 19th June 2025 Westminster Hall

[Mr Richard Quigley (Isle of Wight West) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Lewell. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Wrexham (Andrew Ranger) on securing the debate.

Social mobility is the backbone of this country, as the Leader of the Opposition knows from her short stint in a McDonald’s one summer. Although Members on opposite sides of the House might disagree about how to facilitate social mobility, we all agree that every child should have the opportunity to realise their full potential.

Some children grow up knowing precisely what they want from life and precisely how to get it. Most children, however, grow up with some idea of their direction but little clue about what their ultimate destination could be or, more importantly, how to get there. Careers education provides two opportunities: to broaden children’s horizons by providing career guidance and to allow children to experience their desired careers at first hand through work experience placements.

On the first point, a study by the Sutton Trust found that parents, friends and wider social networks are the main source of careers education for more than three quarters of young people, but a child from a working-class family may have never met a barrister, an engineer or a scientist. They may not even know those professions exist, let alone understand the pathways to reach them. On the island, the assumption is that tourism is the only career; it is not. It is for those children that careers education is most crucial, but the unfortunate reality is that they are the least likely to have access to it.

Equipping schools to showcase the full range of possible careers to secondary school students will be pivotal. We should all welcome the 1,000 careers advisers that the Labour Government will recruit, as well as the additional £1.2 billion per year that the Government will invest in skills by 2028-29.

Isle of Wight West is home to many fantastic businesses that provide high-quality jobs for islanders, particularly in engineering, manufacturing and defence. My team and I work closely with a number of local employers, including BAE Systems, GKN Aerospace, Isle of Wight Tomatoes and Vestas. I wholeheartedly welcome the contributions of large companies to the island. However, it is also true that 99.8% of businesses on the Isle of Wight are classed as small and medium-sized enterprises. Research by the Edge Foundation shows that SMEs are typically far more hesitant to offer work experiences, not due to a lack of willingness but due to limited time and resources, which prevents them from tackling the logistics of arranging work experience placements.

The Edge Foundation recognises the crucial role that SME brokerages play. I want to put on record some of the excellent work that Isle of Wight organisations are doing, particularly the Solent Careers Hub, the Isle of Wight Youth Trust and Island Careers Partnership, which are working in concert with careers advisers and businesses across the island. Those organisations are absolutely crucial to opening doors to SMEs. I am pleased to say that a youth partnership event will be taking place in Newport on 1 July. It will be an important chance to get Isle of Wight students and SMEs in the same room.

A working-class child from the Isle of Wight may never have met a scientist, but they could go on to become a great one. It is our responsibility to ensure that every child has that opportunity.