S4M-05109 Careers Services

The Presiding Officer (Tricia Marwick): The next item of business is a debate on motion S4M-05109, in the name of Angela Constance, on the modernisation of Scotland’s careers services.

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Stewart Stevenson (Banffshire and Buchan Coast) (SNP):

I might be one of a tiny minority of people who benefited from having no contact with formal careers advice. As a youngster I was not very well and missed a fair bit of my primary education. The most important classes that I missed were those on how to learn from the education system—a skill that I absolutely flunked.

However, I was fortunate to have well-educated parents and to be brought up in a house that was full of a diverse range of books, which I simply devoured in random order. I read J D Mackie’s “A History of Scotland” when I was five and I read a biography of Lloyd George when I was seven—that probably shows that we are what we read. My reading and my enquiring mind enabled me just about to muddle through—

Neil Findlay: Will the member take an intervention?

Stewart Stevenson: I will wait a little, but I will give way later.

I muddled through and eventually graduated with a modest degree in mathematics. Had I had a good degree, I would have been headhunted for a traditional role in the civil service, ICI, BP or whatever. My girlfriend—now my spouse of 43 years—was the person who consulted the university careers advisory service and, right at the end of my academic career, the advice filtered through to me that I should go into computers. That was the best move that I ever made, but throughout my career I got there by chance.

Neil Findlay: Given the member’s exciting career—I know that he has been a pilot and a water bailiff and invented the computer—is the answer that we should not give careers advice but just let people read about Winston Churchill and so on when they are five years old?

Stewart Stevenson: I used my individual example to illustrate that I have been incredibly lucky by not having careers advice, but luck should not play a part in the lives of children across Scotland.

Such a casual attitude to careers advice, which was adequate or good enough for me in the 1950s and 1960s, is absolutely no longer adequate today. There are now more careers and the more prescriptive rules about entry to careers mean that people need qualifications and need to have studied subjects. To do that, people may need to have received, 10 years in advance of acquiring a qualification, the kind of guidance that Iain Gray talked about—from a very informed basis, I thought—in a way that I neither got nor, as luck would have it, required.

Clearly, having only a single skill is also risky—again, Iain Gray made reference to this—so we need to learn how to learn and learn how to adapt. The first law of epigenetics is that the more highly optimised an organism is for one environment, the more adversely it is affected by a change in that environment. The way in which villages where everyone was employed in coal faced problems when the coal industry went away perfectly illustrates that risk. Good careers advice can pinpoint potential in students that those close to them, and even the students themselves, simply will not spot.

Today’s students are very different from the student that I was. They have keyboard skills and they work computers as extensions of themselves. I was typing by the age of eight and nine, but I did not use a telephone for the first time until I was 15. That might seem rather odd, but the telephone was a much rarer beast, to which I had less access than to a keyboard.

The term “moody teenager” applied not just to Neil Findlay but to me, and I will bet that, if we compare photographs, we will find that I was spottier than he was—and that is an unusual claim to make. As a teenager, the last thing that I would have wanted would have been to have someone looking over my shoulder. I was adapted to private study and to doing things for myself. For many children, that is why it is useful to have online systems that are comprehensive in detail, timely in content and—a key point missing from the debate so far—personalised. Such interactive systems are not like the first websites of 20 years ago—that is when I produced my first website—which were simply an electronic library.

Kezia Dugdale: Would the member rather have an algorithm or a one-to-one conversation?

Stewart Stevenson: I would rather that we indulged in heuristic learning, where the computer adds to the available ways in which we can learn of the needs of the person sitting at the computer, in addition to the interactions with human beings.

Computers will continue to be part of people’s lives in years to come. The worldwide web will develop and become even more important and its interactivity is the vital thing. Its ability to guide, to search and to respond to people is vital, so personalisation is important.

I will give members one little insight into how we may be making wrong assumptions about people’s relationships with technology. I worked in technology in the Bank of Scotland for 30 years. When we introduced our first cash dispensers in 1980—my brother had developed them for the Royal Bank of Scotland three years earlier, so I was behind him—we found that people would stand in the rain to queue for a cash dispenser rather than go into a bank branch. We did a survey and found that usage in Scotland was three times higher per head of population than in England, because people would rather deal with a machine than share intimate things in their lives with somebody behind a counter.

That is a narrow, specific example. It need not map to the subject that is before us, but we should not, by any means, discount the electronic world.

I will say a word about the red-amber-green system. I feel very disappointed because, in essence, I hear that we should divert resources from the red group, who need help the most, to the green group, who can be more adaptable, start online and get human interaction when they need it.

I am delighted to participate in this important debate.

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