Childcare Bill [HL]
Baroness Andrews Excerpts(9 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Tankerness (LD)
My Lords, further to the comments and concerns expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Basildon, I also thank the Minister for setting out the Government’s position when he moved that the House should go into Committee. It is helpful that he indicated that Report stage will not be until October, but, like the noble Baroness, I was not entirely sure what he was saying in terms of a commitment to amendments. We will therefore reserve our position with regard to anything that may come forward from the Government after they have given consideration to the many concerns expressed not only in your Lordships’ House but also, and particularly, in the committee reports that have been referred to.
This legislation has the hallmark of a party policy announcement during a general election, with the Government now desperately trying to figure out what it means and how to put it together. The comments of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee —which, having recently been in government, I can attest is a committee that Ministers take very seriously indeed—are some of the strongest that I can recall. The noble Baroness said, quite rightly, that it is a cross-party committee chaired by a member of the governing party. When the committee makes comments such as:
“In our view, the Government's stated approach to delegation is flawed. While the Bill may contain a legislative framework, it contains virtually nothing of substance beyond the vague ‘mission statement’ in clause 1(1)”,
it is a strong condemnation which I think shows that the Government have not given the matter adequate thought.
My real concern is that this is not the only Bill where the Government have singularly failed to make a clear case for the policy that they are advancing. People have been watching the proceedings on the Cities and Local Government Devolution Bill. That is a policy that also generally commands support but, nevertheless, we have seen in that case, too, the Government seeking to make policy on the hoof and pass through the revising Chamber legislation that fails to stand up to the most basic test of scrutiny.
I suggest to the Minister that—while it may be past praying for these Bills as they were introduced—tools such as pre-legislative scrutiny might be used more regularly when the Government want to do something that is, at the outset, somewhat unclear regarding the detail of how they wish to proceed. They might reflect on the failure to use the mechanisms available to them for this Bill and ensure that such measures will be taken, where appropriate, in the future.
The Minister said that there had been agreement to make progress. My noble friend Lady Pinnock will indicate today in Committee that we do not want to see this Bill delayed; we want the Government to get their act together and make reasonable progress with a measure that commands, I think, a fair degree of support. Primarily, our position is that we want reassurance that, in the future, this House will not be frustrated in its fundamental role of effective scrutiny because the Bills presented to it have not been properly thought through.
Baroness Andrews (Lab)
I want to reinforce the points that have been made by my noble friend the Leader of the Opposition and by the previous speaker. I was critical of the Government on Second Reading because I felt that the Bill that they introduced was, essentially, an abuse of process. Having read the report of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, I think that I rather understated the case. Now that I have seen the Constitution Committee report, which points to an increasing trend of legislation that is vacant and in fact leaves most of the delivery to regulations, I think that I have been even more restrained. I am grateful for what the Minister has said today because he has responded to many of the concerns that were raised, but I want to press him on a few things.
To pick up on the previous speaker’s statement about the mission statement, the nature of the Bill, what the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee said is excruciating stuff, advising the Government and officials that Bills are not there to “send a message”; they are there to implement legislation. I think back on great reforming legislation, such as the National Health Service Act 1946. If it had just sent a message that it would be rather good to have a national health service and left everything to regulations, we would be in a fine mess now, but that is precisely the nature of the trend of legislation that we see in this House, which is a point that has also been picked up by the Constitution Committee. Without knowing the likely impacts of this Bill, it is very difficult for this House to do its job. As my noble friend the Leader of the Opposition said, it is not so much a question of when Report stage is introduced, it is whether we will have the fundamental information that we need to actually test this Bill in this House as we are required to do.
We are in favour of the Bill. Who could possibly be against the expansion of affordable childcare when so much more is needed, when so many parents are not able to access it and when so many children are in need of the sort of quality childcare that lifts their learning and gives them a good start? In this Bill we will be looking for evidence of not merely an increase in capacity but a genuine increase in quality. However, at the moment we do not know whether the Bill will meet its objectives. We do not know whether it will make the situation better or worse, because there is currently a real issue of capacity in the childcare system. Many childcare providers think that at the moment the Bill could reduce capacity. That is why by Report we need a full account of the evidence that has been provided to the Government so that we can make a judgment about how to improve the Bill, how to deliver the objectives and how to get the best possible outcomes for children and parents.
Lord Northbourne (CB)
I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Listowel for mentioning that we were going to speak together and I apologise to the Minister for being a minute or two late—I did not realise that there had been a slight rehash of the timings. My Amendments 4 and 7 dare to ask, in this company, whether childcare is always the right answer for all children and all parents. I shall, of course, come back with those questions when this matter returns. I understand that we are not discussing these things in any detail today, so I shall not press my amendments.
Baroness Andrews
My Lords, I have a few comments. First, Amendment 1 raises a lot of the issues that we began to talk about in our previous discussion on the way the Bill is managed. Again I tell the Minister that we are very grateful for the flexibility he has shown under the circumstances.
Amendment 1, in the name of my noble friend Lady Jones of Whitchurch, creates an opportunity for the Minister to give us a bit more information on the timetable in general. He has said clearly that we will have the results of the funding review before Report. It would be really useful if he would spell out, as far as he is able at this point, some sort of road map for the process as it will run over the next three to six months. There are so many reviews and all manner of different things happening. There are the pilots—I, for one, do not know much at all about those. Is it possible to set out the department’s working timetable, and perhaps put a copy in the Library, so that we can reflect upon it as we come back at various stages of the Bill? That would be very helpful.
Secondly, there is a contrast between the amendments in this group. Some are probing into the workability of the process itself and then there are two, in the names of the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, and the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, which raise much more fundamental questions about impact and longitudinal issues. We need a proper debate on what we actually know about the impact of childcare, in terms both of learning and social skills. At the moment we have a rather random collection of evidence about impact, much of which is from the agencies themselves. It would be extremely useful, given the investment that is going into this and given the expectations raised by doubling childcare, if we could have some thorough, systematic research on impact, as the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, suggests in his amendment.
I do not want to labour the point, but I am reminded that there is a contrast between the way the Bill has been introduced and the way previous childcare legislation was introduced. If we go back to 1999 and look at “Meeting the Childcare Challenge”, that was a very detailed road map for increasing the supply of childcare, which went along with tax credits, with start-up capital, with revenue funds and with the extension of after-school care. There was a very clear prospectus as to what was going to happen and how it was going to be funded. We should bear in mind that past massive changes in provision have been planned carefully. Some studies on not just the value for money of what we are getting but the impact on educational achievement in particular are long overdue. For example, a recent report from the National Literacy Trust on reading shows an increasing, not decreasing, gap between the achievement of boys and of girls from disadvantaged backgrounds, after all the effort that has gone into investing in boys’ education. We really need to know what we do not know, as well as what we do know.
Baroness Andrews
Can I ask the noble Lord something that is slightly puzzling me? I understand that, under Section 6 of the 2006 Act, local authorities are required to provide sufficient childcare as far as is reasonably practical, but I also understand from research that has been done that many local authorities are not undertaking childcare sufficiency audits, which obviously means that they will not provide sufficient childcare. Given the new responsibility given to the Secretary of State, is that the sort of thing that he will be able to require local authorities to do?
Childcare
Baroness Andrews Excerpts(9 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Nash
We will be looking at this closely in the coming review. We have of course been extremely focused on providing for those most in need through the early years pupil premium, the pupil premium, universal free school meals, free childcare for 15 hours for two year-olds, and of course expanding the three and four year-old offer from 12 hours to 15 hours.
Baroness Andrews (Lab)
My Lords, has the Minister seen the devastating report that came out earlier this week from the Delegated Powers Select Committee? If he has, what is his response to its conclusions that the absence of any detail in the Bill and the inappropriate delegations of considerable significant powers make it practically impossible for this House to have a meaningful debate on it? Does he not think that he owes it to the House to enable us to do our job in terms of the proper scrutiny of a very important Bill that we would all like to support?
Lord Nash
The noble Baroness is quite right; I have seen that report, and I am very grateful for it. We will have the opportunity to debate it in great detail tomorrow in Committee, when I will be saying more about that. We will be considering the report extremely carefully and making any necessary appropriate amendments.
Childcare Bill [HL]
Baroness Andrews Excerpts(9 years, 5 months ago)
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Baroness Andrews (Lab)
My Lords, I join other noble Lords in welcoming the Bill and the promise of extended childcare that it offers, as indeed I welcome the extension of long-overdue childcare over the most recent years.
The Bill has also been welcomed in principle by the people in the field who know most—the expert organisations and the providers. However, like them, the House has already identified some of the key issues that we have to address during the passage of the legislation, and the crucial one is: how workable is the Bill? Can free, quality childcare be expanded from 15 to 30 hours without putting the existing system at risk? To help solve the problem, it is welcome that the Government have set up a funding review and a consultation programme for parents, and we look forward to the findings. Yesterday the Minister was good enough to hold a briefing session to explain the Bill to noble Lords, and we learned that the review and the consultation will report in the autumn. However, that presents this House—and I suggest that it presents the Government—with a genuine problem. I am afraid that I have many questions and I hope that the noble Lord will be patient with me.
Can the Minister tell me whether he expects the Bill and the regulations to reflect the findings of the funding review and the consultation, and, if so, how does he expect the present timetable for the Bill to work? Would it not have been eminently sensible to hold back on the Bill until the Government knew what the recommendations of the funding review would bring forward and design the regulations around those recommendations so that we could indeed debate them, as he says, as thoroughly as we should? Better still, why not put some of the design and detail in the Bill so that we would have a proper opportunity to challenge and change what we thought could be improved? We cannot amend regulations, as the Minister knows.
If the Government do not intend to reflect the changes that must be under consideration in the funding regime in the regulations, how does the Minister actually intend to implement them? If he does not intend to reflect these changes, what is the point of this Bill in this form now? This matters profoundly to this House. The Bill has been introduced here and it is our duty to test and scrutinise policy against what the Government claim are their policy objectives and in terms of its sheer workability. That is what we are for.
The Prime Minister, as we know, is not a man for detail, but even he has to concede that getting this massive expansion of childcare provision right is going to take time. As he said, for,
“the best way of making sure that”,
childcare providers are being,
“properly paid for the level of childcare that they provide”,
the time must be provided to get it right. Given the challenge of finding the right balance so that providers and parents are not, as now, cross-subsidising the system, and providing sustainable as well as better- quality childcare, I have to ask the Minister why we are discussing this Bill before we have the answer to some of these questions. I think that it is almost an abuse of process, because we are not able to discuss this Bill in the way that we need to in order to have an impact on the process itself. I know that the Minister will want to explain the logic of his position in his summing up.
My second point is the nature and scope of the regulations in the Bill. I do not think I have ever seen a Bill that is, frankly, so vacuous but on which hang so many regulations, some of them novel and contentious, such as that to create a new criminal offence. The Bill and the regulations raise the question, as has already been alluded to by the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, of who will be held accountable for its delivery. The Bill creates a new duty on the Secretary of State to provide for childcare. This is, in many ways, very welcome. However, the question surely is, how does this new duty sit alongside the existing duties on local authorities to provide for childcare? Is it intended that the Secretary of State will police the local authorities to establish more consistency in terms of access and funding? Whatever happened to localism? I would be very grateful for a specific answer on that point.
On a related point, what will be the function of the new and mysterious “body corporate” set out in the regulations mentioned in Clause 1(5)(g)? Why is this not in the Bill? This is nothing less than a new quango. I wonder whether the Minister has brought this new quango to the attention of the Cabinet Office on the grounds that none of the existing agencies can actually manage the complexity of the existing or new system.
This underlines the point that I want to make: these regulations are not technical—some of them may be technical—but they provide for substantial new delegated powers. Which of them will carry the affirmative orders? We await the report of the Delegated Powers Committee with unusual interest.
My third set of questions is around how this will actually work and what difference it is going to make. I welcome the consultation in principle because it is always good to see government wanting to take evidence. However, there is no need to look very far for solutions as to what needs to change. It is all set out in the report of the Select Committee on Affordable Childcare and in the response to the Bill by the childcare agencies and providers.
There is consensus around the failings of the present system. There is a lack of capacity, with 40% of providers saying that they have no spare capacity. There is a lack of flexibility in the hours provided, which means, as we learned from the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, that many parents who work irregular hours have not been able to access the provision that is already there. There is a lack of trained and qualified teachers, particularly in the private and voluntary sector, which means that the poorest children in particular are not getting the enriched childcare to lift their learning and life skills. In short, the Minister will hear from all the organisations involved that the childcare system is hugely stretched, unfair and locally erratic in terms of funding and delivery, inchoate in relation to the benefits system, and missing some of its key objectives. The Minister and Ms Patel will hear, loudly and clearly, that unless the extension to 30 hours’ funding provides for the right degree of uplift for providers, which means that they no longer have to subsidise the system themselves, there will be a meltdown. These are not my words but those of the Pre-school Learning Alliance. Does not the Minister agree that this is an obvious opportunity to put these failings right and to create a more robust and fair system of provision?
Will the Minister do as the Select Committee asked—the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, alluded to this in his speech—and clarify the objects of the policy in the Bill? What is the prime aim of this policy? Is it about boosting child development, through childcare, for the poorest children, or is it about working parents? Of course they are both important and fit together but the policy objectives need to be integrated and articulated in such a way that we can see where the funding is going and what impact it will have. Cheap low-quality childcare gives to parents an opportunity to park their children, but it does very little to lift child development.
In the letter the Minister sent to noble Lords he referred to working families and reducing the cost of childcare, but there is no mention of providing quality childcare as an objective. I am sure that was an oversight rather than a deliberate omission.
However, if the prime objective is to close the attainment gap for children, which disables so many from accessing the curriculum, will he provide in his new plans for more early years specialist teachers in the voluntary sector? Will he follow the leading example of Wales and provide for cultural enrichment to aid language, social and reading skills for the most disadvantaged? Will he correct the situation whereby the poorest children are in settings which are neither good nor outstanding in many cases? Will he now provide for additional provision for disabled children? In short, will he commit to developing a proper strategy for the early years workforce to improve training and qualifications and to increase capacity?
If the prime aim of the policy is to get as many parents back into work as possible, the Minister will know that the evidence suggests, as already quoted, that it is reaching far fewer working parents than anticipated at a formidable cost. Does he accept the findings of the IFS? Can he tell the House how the Bill intends to enable providers to move to full daycare and greater flexibility? How much will it cost to do this? How much of that will be capital investment?
Finally and fundamentally there is the question of funding. What does the Minister think the Prime Minister meant when he spoke of the providers being properly paid for the level of childcare they provide? Does it mean, for example, that the Prime Minister and the Minister agree with the Pre-school Learning Alliance that the existing commitment to £350 million is around a quarter of what is needed? That evidence was provided to the Select Committee by the Minister in the other place. We need an answer on that. Does he agree that unless this is provided there are real fears of more and more providers withdrawing from the system, which will undermine and railroad the entire policy? Again I quote the Pre-school Learning Alliance.
Yesterday we heard the Minister, Mr Gyimah, suggest that the funding issue was less challenging than everyone seems to think because a high proportion of the extra 15 hours to be provided will be accounted for by parents who now pay for childcare but who will, under the 30 hours extension, be able to access it free for the first time. This raises some profound questions to which we need answers. What proportion of parents do the Government think will simply transfer from paid care to free care? If this is intended to bring more parents into work, what proportion will be likely and able to access free childcare for the first time? In short, if the test is to expand the provision for working parents and economic benefit, who will the policy provide for and what will be the outcomes for parents and the system? At the moment, as we have heard, parents who pay are, in effect, subsidising the shortfall in the cost of free places, which varies hugely from place to place. What will be the impact on those precariously funded providers, as we heard from the right reverend Prelate?
Will the Minister guarantee that the uplift in funding will cover the cost not only of extending hours but of enhancing the skills and the capacity of the workforce to provide the high-quality, rich learning experience which will make a real difference to poorer children when they start school?
The Select Committee produced a devastating forecast of what will happen if underfunding in the system is not addressed. We understand the call for additional free hours of early education to help working parents. However, in light of the evidence of underfunding of free early education in the PVI sector, we believe that an extension of the entitlement to free early education would be unsustainable for the private sector at current funding levels. It would not be possible for providers to recoup the losses made on the delivery of free early education places if this were extended to 25 hours a week. We are talking here about 30 hours, not 25.
This report was the obvious place to start building a new and improved model of childcare. Quite simply, I fear that, by proceeding as they are, the Government are at risk of not taking advantage of thinking this through and creating a better start for the most disadvantaged children and poorest parents, and that this extended model could build on—and actually compound—some of the failings of the existing system. It is almost certain to do that unless the funding review finds the money with which to build, rather than undermine, capacity. I very much hope that the Minister will think again about the scope, as well as the process, of the Bill.
Children and Families Bill
Baroness Andrews Excerpts(11 years ago)
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Earl Attlee
My Lords, I think that this may be a convenient moment for the Committee to adjourn.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Andrews) (Lab)
The Committee stands adjourned.
Schools: History
Baroness Andrews Excerpts(13 years, 1 month ago)
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Baroness Andrews
My Lords, we are all in debt to the noble Lord, Lord Luke, for the debate. It is a pleasure to take part and to follow the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, who has done so much in his career to promote history and heritage. I declare an interest as chair of English Heritage and also, in another life, as a makeshift historian. Sadly, I was never taught either by my charismatic noble friend Lord Morgan or by any of the other historians in the Chamber—sadly, not even by the noble Lord, Lord Cormack.
The debate is extremely timely because it is timeless. At its heart are questions that surround the whole purpose of teaching history and how we find the right way to teach it. Dictatorships have never had a problem with the importance and purpose of teaching history, and they have come up with similar solutions. Democracies, too, wrestle with this, and many questions raised in the House are fundamental to a democratic appreciation of the importance of history. Even in a country such as ours, with a very placid trajectory, we have wrestled with these questions for decades if not centuries.
The teaching of a subject that raises the issue of what constitutes the national past and what should be taught in schools is a study in history itself. It is a brave debate to embark on, and it is a brave Minister who, in summing up, will have to try to reconcile all the different views. I have been helped to find my own way through this thicket by the work of David Cannadine. I was very happy that he gave me access to a book he is about to publish called The Teaching of History. I am very grateful to him for the brief glimpse he gave me of a very powerful thesis in which he charts the disagreements over the teaching and learning of history in this country over the past century. There is no doubt that, in a very decentralised curriculum that serves an astonishing variety of schools and a diverse system generally, the teaching of history has been fraught with disagreements, at least since 1870 if not earlier—I am sure my noble friend could correct me.
Until the 1980s and the coming of the national curriculum, the power to influence through the Secretary of State was very limited. Now, with the national curriculum and its relationships with examinations, almost as many issues are being raised. Many of them were raised in this debate, with controversies around them. The fundamental question is whether history matters. If it does not, it is hard to explain the fascination demonstrated already across the Chamber, for example with “The Tudors” on television or with the great blockbusting historical novels or, indeed, the great popularity of anniversaries. If one wants an example of how government interferes with the presentation of history, the account of Prince Albert chairing the Fine Arts Commission, and the commissioning of the Maclise portraits in the new German technology, on which he insisted, is fascinating. I commend Malcolm Hay, our curator, for that knowledge.
If history does not matter, why is there so much evident concern with the fact that fewer than one-third of students take history beyond 14? Why is there anxiety among teachers themselves about the lack of specialist knowledge in primary schools? Why is there an agonised debate about narrative versus bore-hole theories of history? I hope that the Minister will be able to confirm that many of these issues will be raised in the curriculum review. History does matter, and must be seen to matter. That is crucial. In a complex, liberal and individualistic society such as ours, consciousness of the past is even more important. The more sophisticated that our society becomes and the more that we move away from linear, simplistic interpretations, the more we need history. Of course it is about identity and it is central to our sense of place, significance, perspective and proportion. I was fascinated by the account of the dramatic interpretations of British relations with Iraq. For the past 10 years I have yearned for our Governments to know more about the history of British relations with the Middle East in general.
History offers at least two particular, related motivations for learning. One is that it is full of ripping yarns and feeds our appetite for more stories. One of my GCSE heroes was Jethro Tull and the seed drill, although I cannot imagine that he is a very popular figure these days. The Elizabethan spymasters, too, captured my imagination. Having talked to a few leading historians this week, including some from the better history forum, which involves both academics and teachers, it seems that a key issue is time itself—time in the school day. Evidence suggests that since 2007 the curriculum has been eaten away in terms of time and focus. Head teachers are under pressure to get results. One result is that in many schools the time available for history is heavily restricted. In some, the discipline survives as a discrete subject; in others, it is treated principally as serving other disciplines. The picture is very patchy, especially in primary schools.
In secondary schools there is a growing tendency to cram key stage 3 into two years. This can mean that, in effect, many pupils get only two years of specialist history teaching before they give the subject up. The rest of Europe might be shocked to know that we have students giving up history completely at 13. I have to ask the Minister why he thinks so many schools are losing the battle. How can we incentivise head teachers? What impact is the EBacc going to have in this respect? Crucially, does he agree with the case made by many historians these days that history should be compulsory to 16? Does he agree that this would drive a more coherent and integrated syllabus across key stages 3 and 4?
This is a salient question because, no matter how we read history, whether we are on the side of the great sweeping narrative or we see the virtues of the in-detail study of Henry VIII or Hitler, there is a tension here. We do not go in for the great historical panorama set pieces any more. I do not want to use another food analogy, but it has been described as the YO! Sushi approach to history, where one just tastes little bits of history and studies short blocks of time intensively. Whether or not this approach allows a better understanding of historical debates and engagement with original materials—and I think possibly it does—it certainly leaves students, as Ofsted put it, with,
“an episodic knowledge of history”,
and a sense of time that is unclear. At GCSE level there is a sort of swerve back into narrative history but the complaint here is the isolated use of texts without the connecting tissue of context.
The question of what is taught, and how, raises questions around the need for transparency of the assessment and examination system. Again, I hope the curriculum review might address this. I do not want to put the Minister on the spot but there is a big question about whether the Government should have a greater role in determining detailed content of the curriculum to avoid, for example, eccentric programmes of study. Another subset of this tension between narrative and episodic teaching is between what could be parodied as the Gradgrind approach to history—“Facts, my boy!”—and the approach that determines that history is a splendid way of developing other analytical skills and competences. Again, this is an active debate in our schools today.
I too have read the Historical Association reports about the absence of specialist teaching and the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, was quite right to point to that as absolutely central to how we read and develop this debate into better learning and teaching. By the sound of it, it is possible that some students can go through their entire school career without ever being taught by specialist teachers. Ofsted talks about teachers failing to establish,
“a clear mental map of the past”,
because they lack expertise and because of the disconnected way the national curriculum treats topics.
Finally, one point of particular relevance to bodies such as English Heritage is the proposition from the better history forum that the Government should work from the outset with professional bodies and resource providers to ensure that the curriculum is fully resourced. I say amen to that, because surely history is above all an adventure—an active and participative adventure. When children are engaged with learning they are motivated to learn more, and when they visit our great monuments and sites, whether in school or sometimes more successfully out of school, they do not engage with bricks and mortar but they engage with their imaginations.
There is a problem with time and resources in schools—it is a crowded curriculum. I hope the Minister agrees that time and resources are well spent when schools commit to out-of-school learning. English Heritage is fully engaged with this, as noble Lords will understand. We have wonderful resources that we download into classrooms and then we upload students into our sites and monuments. Anyone who has seen the legions of 10 year-old Roman soldiers at Birdoswald on Hadrian’s Wall—making Roman lamps no less—or encountered a group of tiny children acting out the life of the Victorian servant class in Apsley House, will know that these children will always want more history and that heritage for them is not actually the past, it is something that enriches and explains their future.
One of my ambitions is to make those occasional encounters a substantial and systematic part of the relationship between local schools and local history and the national story. We have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, that he would like to see his five themes; I would actually like to see more attention in the curriculum to the local history of our country and, of course, the four countries in our nation. I would also make a plea for more study of the impact of science and technology.
For noble Lords who have not been there, I should say that Dover Castle is a brilliant example of how history reinvents itself. Dover Castle was not only an Iron Age hill fort at the beginning of our story; it concludes with the wartime tunnels—opening this summer—from which Admiral Ramsay, a rather neglected figure, saved the soldiers from Dunkirk, when 300,000 men were taken off the beaches. We have the whole story of England in one site. How much better can it get?
Finally, I do not entirely agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley. I actually share Simon Schama’s concerns that if less history is taught in some schools—those schools might be the academy schools, and I would like the Minister to comment on whether that is possibly the case—there can be a schizophrenia, which is to say a sense of shared memory and shared appreciation of history among one group of people and a lack of interest and appreciation among another. That has huge implications, not just for culture but for a diverse nation which has to come to terms with a number of different stories and histories. I believe that this is an issue. As Simon Schama said,
“a truly capacious British history …will not be the feeder of identity politics but its dissolvent”.
That is one of the many very serious questions raised by this debate.