Education for 11 to 16 Year-olds (Committee Report)

Baroness Barran Excerpts

Friday 26th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in thanking my noble friend Lord Johnson of Marylebone and all members of the committee for their comprehensive and wide-ranging report and recommendations. I also send my warmest congratulations to the noble Baroness opposite on her appointment to DCMS, which is very much deserved.

I sense that I have a slightly lonely job in my remarks, but I felt as I listened to your Lordships’ speeches that perhaps it was a job that needed to be done. As your Lordships pointed out, the previous Government’s response to the report, which was published in February, set out some significant reservations about its recommendations. I will summarise in different words what lies beneath those reservations. It is fair to challenge the committee to answer why England’s children are moving up the international rankings if there are so many problems in our education system and, most importantly, how the proposed changes would impact on our international performance.

However, in an effort for conciliation, I will start by touching on some of the areas where the previous Government agreed with the committee. The first relates to the emphasis that the report placed on opportunities for disadvantaged pupils and those with special educational needs and disabilities. The previous Government have a proud record in this area, with the introduction of the pupil premium, the national tutoring programme and, at the heart of it all, a commitment to offer all pupils a broad and balanced curriculum. I stress that because I have an uneasy feeling from listening to the speeches in your Lordships’ House today that we are at risk of having preconceptions about which children follow an academic path and which do not, and of losing as our north star an emphasis on social mobility. I worry that, by assuming some children will follow an academic path, those who do not will be those on free school meals and those with special educational needs. I know that is not where your Lordships want to end up.

The previous Government also agreed absolutely with the importance of creative subjects and sport in the curriculum and made a major commitment to deliver those through the sports premium and, more recently, the music education plan. We absolutely share the committee’s concerns about access to modern foreign languages in the curriculum, but, as the House knows, this has been a particularly challenging area for teacher recruitment.

In relation to the current curriculum, of course, where the new curriculum has not worked quite as intended, it makes sense to review it. We hear anecdotal evidence about the breadth of the curriculum in the sciences and the House will be aware that, in the case of computer science, the previous Government drafted a new curriculum, which was being consulted on and was published in May of this year.

I will focus on a couple of areas where the previous Government did not agree. We disagree that the EBacc has resulted in a narrowing of the curriculum. The noble Baroness, Lady Blower, who is no longer in her place, described the EBacc as having a big impact—perhaps not in an altogether complimentary way—but I will stress some incredibly important positive shifts. In 2010-11, only about 61.5% of pupils were entered for the EBacc science pillar, so they were doing double or triple science. Today, that figure is almost 95%. That is an economy-changing shift and something we should be very proud of; it opens doors for every single child, not just the children who we have decided are academic. I make it a rule never to disagree with the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, but I just pose the question: who could argue that a default curriculum should not include maths, English, sciences, geography, history and a modern foreign language? Every child should have access to that. So we talk about this narrow curriculum at our peril.

In relation to the amount of assessment at the end of key stage 4, the previous Government’s response to the committee’s report acknowledged that there was a case to review the burden of assessment and a case for streamlining. Of course, if one can get the same level of reliability from a smaller set of questions, nobody would disagree with that as a good evolution. But I think it is worth reporting the finding from the Ofqual report that there is little evidence that coursework has any differential impact on outcomes for either disadvantaged students or those with special educational needs.

In this shift to focus more on skills, I remind your Lordships to look at what has happened in Scotland. To quote a different Keir, Keir Bloomer, one of the architects of the Curriculum for Excellence reform, which has seen such a sharp drop in the international rankings of Scottish pupils in the recent PISA results:

“The problem is we did not make sufficiently clear that skills are the accumulation of knowledge. Without knowledge there can be no skills”.


Knowledge—or “facts”, in the words of my noble friend Lord Holmes—is what you think with, and you cannot outsource your thinking successfully.

Many of your Lordships will be familiar with Daisy Christodoulou’s book, Seven Myths about Education. In it, she very clearly makes the point, also made by my noble friend Lady Evans of Bowes Park and other noble Lords, that no one can argue that the skills of critical thinking, problem solving, communication, collaboration, creativity or innovation are not vital for all pupils to thrive. This is not a new thing: they have always been needed. It is how we give children those skills that matters, and it has to be done with a strong knowledge base. The risk is that, by reducing the amount of knowledge in the curriculum, pupils are less able to develop these skills. What Archimedes knew about bath-water and Euclid knew about maths have stood the test of time. As my noble friend Lord Baker said in different words, nothing dulls as quickly as the cutting edge; think how programming and coding skills are being made redundant in a world of AI.

We also need to be rigorous—I look now at the Minister—in understanding whether there are other reasons why children are struggling. The issues that the report raises are not universal across all children from disadvantaged backgrounds or with special educational needs and disabilities. Many are thriving and many are achieving exceptional results, so I really urge the new Government to look at areas where those children are thriving and succeeding and to see what can be learned from that.

Finally, I turn to the new Government’s curriculum review, which talks about addressing

“the ceilings to achievement … built into Key Stages 4 and 5”.

I would be grateful if the Minister could elaborate on what is meant by this. If she cannot today, perhaps she would be very kind and write to me afterwards. The committee’s report was clear that norm-referenced assessment does not limit the number of pupils who can be awarded each grade, so I just wonder what ceilings the Government are referring to. In relation to the focus on breadth—particularly the arts, sports and vocational subjects, which we welcome—we know that the strongest schools and trusts are already offering this. They are using their funding in the most efficient way to offer maximum opportunities to their pupils. I wonder how the Government plan to build on this. Could the Minister summarise what she sees as the barriers to expanding the curriculum in this way?

The committee’s report will certainly give the new Government some really useful insights, perspectives and ideas, which I know will be invaluable for the new curriculum review. That review will be important for the life chances of future pupils and the strength of our economy. I urge the new Government to focus not just on calls for change where the system is working less well but also on where pupils are really thriving most, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds and with SEND, and to work out how to scale that great practice. I genuinely fear that there is a real risk that we return to a world where it is precisely those children whose futures are limited by well-intentioned changes that do not deliver, falling prey to what one Secretary of State and, indeed, US President, described as

“the soft bigotry of low expectations”.

Any changes need to avoid this. They need to avoid the mistakes that have damaged education systems from Scotland to Finland and beyond and protect the achievements of the last 14 years.

My final question to the Minister and my noble friend Lord Johnson of Marylebone is: please can they show me a country whose international educational rankings have improved by introducing a greater emphasis on skills and a reduced focus on assessment at the expense of knowledge? Then, perhaps, I will change my mind.