Education Bill

Baroness Benjamin Excerpts

Wednesday 13th July 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood]

My Lords, I am happy to reassure my noble friend Lord Peston that philosophy occasionally plays a part in schools. I could take him to a couple of primary schools not six miles from here where it is argued by the head teachers that it improves behaviour in the playground. However, that is a separate matter.

On the amendments before us, it is important that we get this matter right one way or the other. I do not accept the connection to 1935, and nor does my noble colleague who proposed the amendment, but if you look at the argument and the tussle going on in Scotland at the moment over the history curriculum then you will pause and have thoughts about where decisions are finally made and on what basis. There is an issue here.

Two things are clear. First, in the end the Secretary of State has the responsibility to make the decision. That is the current decision and I rest content with that. Secondly, though, the Secretary of State, however clever, will need advice. That advice is of great interest to Members here and elsewhere. I would not propose going backwards and effectively reconstituting the QCDA. We have been there and done that, and there were problems; let us think new thoughts. My own inclination as a time-served academic is that when the Secretary of State publishes changes to the curriculum, he or she publishes, as a good academic would, a series of footnotes and references to the advice sought, who gave it, to whom it was given, what the advice was and whether it was well evidenced. That would give me much greater confidence than setting up a board.

There is no final expert opinion on what should be in a curriculum. The risk for the QCDA and any successor would be an assumption that there was a right answer. There is not; there are nuances and leanings in different directions. In the end, that should be a matter for the Secretary of State to take a view on, but we need to know what the advice was so that we can protest if necessary.

[Baroness Benjamin]

My Lords, I agree that philosophy is very helpful to young children. It helps them understand who they are and how they fit into this great big world. I hope the Minister can assure us that when we take advice about what should be in the curriculum, there will be representation of our diverse society in the approach that it takes. I believe that will go a long way to helping people from diverse backgrounds understand who they are and how they fit into our society.

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

My Lords, in abolishing the QCDA we are not seeking to give the Secretary of State greater control over the curriculum, nor do we wish to reduce the external expertise that can be brought to bear on qualifications or curriculum policy. As the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes of Stretford, and others have acknowledged, the formal accountability to Parliament for the curriculum, qualifications and national curriculum assessment will remain as it is now, with Ministers. I note that no one has fought for the QCDA to be maintained in its current form. By removing it, we will bring the delivery of those essential functions, which are continuing, back into the department. This will improve clarity and transparency, simplify the system and save money.

As has been pointed out, under the existing legislation, the Secretary of State already makes decisions in respect of the national curriculum. What will change is that the Secretary of State will become directly responsible for taking forward the statutory consultation process whenever the national curriculum needs to be amended. In future, the Secretary of State will have to have more direct responsibility than has arguably been the case previously, for changes to the curriculum, for justifying how the decisions to make those changes have been arrived at, and their implications.

I hope I can give some reassurance to noble Lords on the issue that I think lies at the heart of this. Consultation on changes to the national curriculum will continue to be a requirement. The Secretary of State will have to conduct a formal consultation with interested parties, including local authorities, schools, teachers and others—the kind of people that my noble friend Lady Benjamin mentions. The precise groups with which he will need to consult are, as now: associations of local authorities, bodies representing the interests of governing bodies, organisations representing school teachers and other persons with an interest in the proposals, which is a fairly broad group. Everyone would have to have a reasonable opportunity to make representations, there would have to be a consultation, and the Cabinet Office advice, as now, is that that should be for at least 12 weeks. After the consultation has ended, the Secretary of State has to consider the responses and must publish a summary of the views expressed—which relates to the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland of Houndwood. The summary published by the Secretary of State will deliver the degree of openness and transparency for which noble Lords have argued. Then, as now, final decisions would remain with the Secretary of State.

The Government are certainly committed to ensuring that everyone with an interest in the national curriculum is given an opportunity to offer their views. The current review of the national curriculum, launched in January, is being conducted in an open manner and we are looking for views from a wide range of interested parties. Once we have published our proposals for a new national curriculum early next year there will be further wide-scale public consultation before final decisions are made.

My noble friend Lady Sharp asked about international evidence. The expert panel to the current curriculum review is looking at the curricula used in the most successful education jurisdictions, including Singapore, Australia and New Zealand, but if I can find more detail I will send that to her. My noble friend Lord Willis asked about academies. As he knows, academies are required to provide a broad and balanced curriculum and we think that that has been successful to date. Although they will not be required to teach the national curriculum, we hope that by slimming it down and making it less prescriptive academies will want to use it as a benchmark. All the material previously available to schools from the QCDA will be accessible to all those schools that want to use it. Finally on the national curriculum, so regards the current review, we intend to publish all the evidence we have considered when we bring forward proposals.

We think that the arrangements are in place to draw on appropriate advice as policies are developed. We do not believe that the abolition of the QCDA will lead to increased government power or control over what I accept are critical elements of our education system. There will be safeguards to ensure transparency and hold the Secretary of State to account.

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[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port]

My Lords, I preface my remarks by asking for some agreement on definitions. It is the word “school” that interests me. In its broadest sense, and I think that we would all concur with this, it is a community of people focused on the well-being and the best interests of children and pupils. It has been used in a different way in this debate, though, and it is in that different way that I would like to use it, while remaining conscious of the base meaning that lies behind it.

We have been using the word “school” to mean those who govern our schools. Schools are expected to take independent advice, and new legislation is placing a duty on schools to achieve two objectives—just two examples from this very debate. I am interested in that definition of “school”, which I think amounts to “governing body and head teacher”, who are expected, in the way that things are developing, to achieve more and more than has been done elsewhere until now.

I do not flinch at that. I am a governor and chair of a foundation that runs two schools in the inner city here in London. We try our hardest as governors and head teachers in the area of career development, particularly because we see increasingly that, if we want to achieve excellence in the provision that we offer, partnership with other schools is increasingly going to be the way forward. I do not know how every school can produce an adequate and rich service in this area. In the Borough of Islington, for example, our school operates with others and we try to pool our best efforts and to make careers advice available in a richer and broader way.

In another initiative that perhaps I might report because it is of some interest, our inner city school co-operates with a school in the independent sector, the Leys School in Cambridge, and we cross-fertilise and attend each other’s careers festivals. I have to say that the independent sector provides a somewhat narrower focus for the range of careers that it seeks to interest people in, but, for all that, it is richly provided for by those who come and help people in conversation and all the rest of it.

We have not quite got reciprocity to the point where I would like to see it, with people from the independent sector coming to us for careers advice. We are situated on the edge of the City of London, and some quite extraordinary people come to us from City institutions to offer that kind of advice, which people from Cambridge could well benefit from. If we are envisaging that schools, in the way that I am defining them, will provide an adequate service across the land, with every school expected to provide excellence all the time in careers advice, we are just baying for the moon. Those are two initiatives that I can report now.

Throughout my contribution to the discussions of the Bill, I am afraid that I will drone on about the extra expectations that are coming the way of schools—that is, governing bodies and head teachers. During this afternoon's debate alone, the responsibility for shaping and focusing the curriculum has fallen to governors and head teachers. I am not saying that they should not do that, but more and more expectations of schools as independent and freestanding bodies are coming our way. There is the curriculum, now there is careers advice. Before we finish our discussion on the Bill, what else will be expected of governors? I am a governor. I attend, as regularly as I can, refresher courses offered by my local authority. I try to be up-to-date with seminars and other things that stretch your mind about new possibilities offered for all of us. I look around the table. I see some absent places where some very busy people are feeling increasingly deskilled and disempowered to do the tasks expected of them—all voluntarily, without a single penny coming our way. As we go down this path and pass more and more responsibility to the school, under the definition I have offered, we must bear in mind that implementation of these grand ideas will be left to people who will be under greater and greater burdens.

[Baroness Benjamin]

My Lords—

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

If my noble friend will forgive me, I invite the noble Lord, Lord Low to speak to his amendment in the group.

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[Baroness Benjamin]

My Lords, I rise to support the amendment and to tell noble Lords a little story. Back in 1965, my mother and sister went to see the careers officer and my sister said that she wanted to work at a leading pharmaceutical company. The careers officer said: “I am sorry, Sandra. They don’t take coloured people there”. My mother said, “I brought my children to England to learn and to be educated, and they have worked hard to do so. Surely that is not possible”. The careers officer said, “I am terribly sorry. I can get her a job as a nursery nurse, but not one in a pharmaceutical company”. My mother proved her wrong. She got my sister to write for an interview. She got the job and she worked there for 30 years. But sadly, the myth still applies today, and there are many young people who do not believe that they will be accepted in certain places.

It is for that reason that I have set up an initiative called Touching Success. I get successful people to visit young people in schools and invite them into their organisations. This helps to help to inspire these young people to believe in themselves and understand that they can work and will be accepted outside their postcode. This is important because many of them do not often see role models they can identify with. That is why I believe we need experts to engage with young people, especially those from diverse, disadvantaged and lower-income backgrounds who do not believe in themselves. They do not see that they can succeed. Careers advice is essential to helping them understand that they will be accepted and can go beyond where they see themselves. We need experts to help them, as my mother did with that careers officer way back in 1965. Believe in yourself and the world is your oyster. Anything is possible. That is why I support this amendment.

[Lord Elton]

I shall speak, if I may, to Amendments 86E and 86F, about the age at which careers advice is made available. When teaching in a secondary school myself, I remember the agonies associated with seeing how early children had to choose which subjects to specialise in. All I would ask is that the Minister should bear in mind the advisability of having careers advice available early in the year when the first choice of specialism is forced on children.

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[Baroness Hughes of Stretford]

I am not going to sum up on what has been a wide-ranging debate; I just want to make a quick comment. First, I want to put on record my support and that of my noble friend for the amendment on PSHE in the name of my noble friend Lady Massey, and those in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley. Secondly, I was disappointed that such provisions disappeared from our legislation in the wash-up before the general election, because we were proceeding with this. Thirdly, these amendments appeared in our legislation following a wide-ranging review that my noble friend Lord Knight conducted over a long period and which involved all the faith schools, other schools and lots of interested parties. It reached a remarkable consensus on the way forward. Provisions similar to these amendments appeared in our legislation. I should like to ask the Minister: given the progress that was made, what else could the review that this Government are now carrying out possibly be looking at? Could they not move a little quicker to get these provisions into legislation, given that that work was already completed?

[Baroness Benjamin]

I totally agree with my noble friend Lady Walmsley and I support her amendment and the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Massey. We need to teach our children to develop social and interpersonal skills and, most of all, to help them to understand what unconditional love is. We have talked about sex, relationships and family life, but lots of children do not know what true unconditional love is. They also need to develop a kind of strategy whereby they can think for themselves. Helping them to develop interpersonal and social skills will go a long way towards achieving that. That is what the amendment is all about.

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

My Lords, I will not be quite as brief as the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, but I shall do my best. As she said, it has in many ways been an extremely interesting and engaging debate. At its heart, apart from a few outliers, it boils down to a judgment that one has to reach as to whether the best way forward on addressing these important issues around PSHE, which we all agree need to be addressed, is through the statutory prescriptive route or through a different approach by trying to slim down the statutory provisions and the national curriculum, and leaving more space and opportunity for more skill—words used by the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth—for teachers to give children and young people the support that they need. Almost my first debates in this House just over a year ago were about PSHE and faith. Whoever said how tenacious my noble friend Lady Walmsley and the noble Baroness, Lady Massey—with whom I have had many discussions—have been on this subject was absolutely right.

We know that in a recent report on the subject, Ofsted found that PSHE education was good or outstanding in three-quarters of the schools visited and that pupils’ personal development was good in most schools visited and was outstanding in about one-third of the schools. However, that same report also found that there were weaknesses, particularly around sex and relationships education, and in some other areas that we need to find ways of addressing. At heart, therefore, is a generally broad agreement on the ends to which we are working but disagreement about the means.

The Government’s aim is to shrink the curriculum and to leave schools and teachers more time to decide for themselves what to teach—a point of view that received a fair amount of support from a number of noble Lords. Teachers have said that they feel that their professionalism is undermined by the overall degree of prescription to which they have been subjected. By stripping the curriculum back we want to give schools the space they need to offer a rounded education, including of course PSHE.

We know that PSHE covers a range of important areas and schools teach it in a variety of ways. It seems to me right that schools should have the discretion to teach it. They know their children. Different schools have different circumstances, and different kinds of children will need different support from their school. Ofsted has said that the most effective curriculum model seen was one in which discrete, regularly taught PSHE lessons were supplemented with cross-curricular activities. That point has also been raised. We are keen to see good practice being shared with the minority of schools that are not teaching the subject as well. Our priority should be to support schools in their efforts to do better by their pupils. That is why we are carrying out the internal review which we have heard about, which has two main objectives: to consider what should be taught; and to look at how schools can be supported to improve the quality of all PSHE teaching. That may be a new element, different from the work previously carried out by the noble Lord, Lord Knight.

I completely understand the impatience of the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, and my noble friend to hear from the Government when this fabled review will heave into view. I have been saying for some time to the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, that it will be soon or shortly; I think it is very soon or very shortly, and as soon as we are there, I will of course circulate that to all Members of the Committee.