Life Skills and Citizenship

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Thursday 7th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, I was lucky enough to be a member of the committee that looked at this issue, so ably chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts. In our report, The Ties That Bind, we found that citizenship education, which should be the first great opportunity for instilling our values and encouraging social cohesion, was often being subsumed into individual development. This is undoubtedly important, but it is not the same as learning about the political and social structure of the country, how it is governed, how laws are made and how they are enforced by an independent judiciary. It also does not offer an opportunity for practising civic engagement in schools, local communities and beyond. We said then that the Government should reprioritise the subject by enabling a target for every secondary school in the country to have a dedicated, qualified teacher.

The Government’s main instrument for delivering citizenship programmes is the National Citizen Service. I am a long-standing critic of this organisation. It was born with a huge endowment of political will from the Conservative Party, and it was given the status of a royal charter body, which it neither needed nor merited. It receives £63 million—the lion’s share of government funding for youth services. Its website lists eight things that it does: everything from health and well-being to working together for success and employability. Deep down, in the middle of that list, is citizenship and British values. There is no detail about any of the work it does with schools, other than statistics about the number of people and places that have been engaged on short programmes that last for six weeks in the summer. It has a new chair and a new strategy for the next five years. Will the Minister agree that now is the time to have a proper comparative analysis of the effectiveness and cost effectiveness of the National Citizen Service, as opposed to that of other organisations that have a long history of working in this field?