Secondary Schools: Arts Subjects

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Monday 7th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, since the introduction of the EBacc, the take-up of GCSEs in the arts has remained broadly stable. As I believe the noble Baroness is aware, we also developed a pilot project, funded by DCMS, for apprenticeships, which are important in this sector. We are developing this with ScreenSkills as a partner, because people do not tend to have one employer in this sector and move from project to project. We had to pause because of Covid, but we hope to extend the pilot and look again to make sure that there are apprenticeships in this area for young people to take advantage of.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, the Minister referred to the well-being benefits of the arts. She is probably aware of the “HEarts survey” published in the PLOS ONE journal in March, which showed that arts involvement is

“associated with higher levels of well-being and social connectedness”

and lower levels of loneliness. Surely, education in secondary schools is essential to set that up. Given the Government’s avowed attention to build back better, should the £90 million arts pupil premium referred to by the noble Earl not be certain and guaranteed, rather than up in the air? Schools are planning staffing now and staff are planning their future careers—they need to know what is happening.

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, all I can say to the noble Baroness is that, unfortunately, we have had to make some difficult decisions in relation to current priorities. An arts premium will be considered in the spending review but, as I have outlined, about £84 million this year has gone into the music hub and various programmes to ensure that provision. I wish we had the ideal world that the noble Baroness outlines.

Queen’s Speech

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Wednesday 12th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, it is delightful to be back in your Lordships’ House after our brief break and to hear so many excellent speeches today. It is also delightful that so few of them were as partisan and inaccurate as the one that I now follow. It is particularly delightful since that break contained elections at national, regional and local levels, in which voters showed great support for the Green Party, with our candidates finishing a clear third in most mayoral races, and second in Bristol, and with 90 council seat gains, as well as eight MSPs in Holyrood. Unfortunately, however, our representation here today does not reflect those results. Respecting the topic divisions for each day’s debate, we will be putting out in the media the speeches Green Peers might have made on the days that my noble friend and I are not getting the chance to represent all those voters.

It is great to welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Blake of Leeds, who has joined our also underrepresented northern numbers today, and to echo her thoughts on the great damage done by the overconcentration of power and resources in Westminster. Changing that does not mean the Government deciding which voters will be rewarded with the occasional airdrop of pork barrels.

In my five minutes today, rather than skidding across the economy, business, health and education, asking whether Dilyn ate the oven-ready social care Bill, pointing out the fallacies of the freeport idea, welcoming the embrace of lifelong learning while echoing the concerns of the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, about the Government deciding what people will study and adding my concerns about loading people with even more debt, I will focus on one missing Bill, under the heading of economy and business, and one grossly flawed Bill, under health.

Yesterday I joined the APPG for Future Generations hearing at which Nobel economics laureate Professor Angus Deaton demonstrated that, in the US, a four-year degree is as protective of death from Covid as vaccination. That is not because of knowledge but because of the jobs that the degree opens up. To put it another way, the poor quality, low-pay, insecurity and lack of respect that are attached to too many jobs in the UK, as in the US, are demonstrably deadly.

In the previous Queen’s Speech the country was promised an employment Bill. In 2019, the Government consulted on plans for workers to have a right to reasonable notice of their schedules and to compensation if shifts were cancelled without due notice. Plenty of Tory MPs have expressed support for the campaign group Pregnant Then Screwed, reflecting huge problems of gender discrimination in the workforce that urgently need legal redress. Rather than talking about creating good jobs, or just doing that, we need a law to ensure that every worker is in a good job, with a real living wage providing a secure income and certainty of working hours that allows planning for childcare, community commitments and life, ideally one that has a four-day working week as standard with no loss of pay. That requires legislation—the employment Bill missing in yesterday’s Speech. Many US jurisdictions have brought in fair work week laws. Just this week, Spain agreed to a law protecting delivery workers. On employment rights, as in so many other areas, we are not world-leading but are trailing the pack, even behind the United States.

I turn to one Bill that was in the Speech: the health and social care Bill. Its elevated pitch is that it is about integrating care. Who could argue with that? Well, beware buzz phrases. The direction of travel of the NHS—a direction already imposed without parliamentary scrutiny or decision—is Americanisation; the implementation of the world’s most expensive, least effective approach to health. NHS England’s chief executive told the Select Committee that the Bill will be

“a welcome recognition of where the health service will have moved to”.

I put a question to Members of your Lordships’ House particularly concerned with process: is that really how our national jewel, our NHS, is supposed to be run? Should not the law and democratic oversight come first?

What is meant by “integrated” is agonisingly clear. It is a cover for a level of funding that is less than is needed, and the centralisation of services under the cover of the need for increasing specialisation. Caroline Molloy, the editor of openDemocracy, expressed the feeling of many communities when she said:

“I get fed up with politicians telling me that I will have better care if they close my local hospital.”


I am sure the Government will not be saying it, but that is what this vision of the NHS means.

Noble Lords might notice that I have not talked about climate and nature, this not being the allocated day for it. But in the other place, and in the media, Green MP Caroline Lucas is showing more of what could and should have been in the Queen’s Speech: five Bills to allow our country and planet to thrive. As Greens, we work as a team, and I look forward to that team being much larger soon.

Education and Training (Welfare of Children) Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 19th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to take part in this debate following the clear and informative introduction from the noble Baroness, Lady Blower, and the noble Lord, Lord Young of Norwood Green, who made important points about resource needs, which I shall seek to build on.

I shall, however, be fairly brief, because some of what I might have said has already been covered. It has been noticeable in the past few months that the number of invitations landing in my inbox referring to apprenticeships and other post-school training has leapt significantly, some of which I have been pleased to be able to take up. The term “lifelong learning”, long central to Green educational philosophy, has come to increasing prominence.

As the mover of the Bill in the other place said, it corrects an anomaly in the law by ending an unintentional oversight that meant that young people attending 16 to 19 academies, special post-16 institutions and independent learning providers were not protected in the same way as they would be at a school or further education college. I can only wholeheartedly endorse that intention but, following on from the previous speaker, I note that funding for this sector of education, which offers young people and adults who may not have had the same positive experiences in schools an additional and potentially life-changing opportunity, is clearly inadequate. To deliver on what is contained in this Bill, and for many other reasons, further education should be funded on an equal basis with other sectors.

As a former school governor, I am very aware of how many resources safeguarding issues can demand of educational institutions. That experience was in a primary school but, of course, the challenges faced by all young people can present similar issues and resource demands. The funding model should reflect and support the enormous social and economic benefits that accrue from lifelong learning and should not be focused purely on vocational skills—those that can be narrowly commercialised. Lifelong learning is also about being a good citizen, a member of a healthy family; it is about enriching lives and not just turning out servants of “the economy”. Of course, that requires proper safeguarding, and I welcome the steps in this Bill to ensure that. I wish it fast passage.

International Women’s Day

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 11th March 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, I gave the Minister advance notice that I will speak about the need for a feminist UK foreign policy. She may be expecting me to major on the cutting of foreign aid below the 0.7% of GDP that is set in our law, but I assume that the Government will eventually have to stop breaking the law and bring a Bill to the House. While I am often thinking of the desperate women, men, and children of Yemen, pounded by our weapons and denied our aid, for the moment I will put that issue to one side.

Since this is the International Women’s Day debate, I want to think and speak more conceptually, particularly in the light of the announcement from the Biden Administration that their intention is to:

“Protect and empower women around the world”.


Across the channel, the French Government declare explicitly that they have a feminist foreign policy. I am not hearing the same terminology from the UK. But it is not really terminology that I am interested in, but policy and action.

Around the world, women and girls are increasingly using human rights law to try to force climate justice, from the Union of Swiss Senior Women for Climate Protection going to the European Court of Human Rights to the case that 16 children are taking to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child.

However, a feminist foreign policy goes well beyond protective action and positive action. It goes beyond steps such as those outlined to me earlier today by the noble Lord, Lord Goldsmith, in supporting access to modern methods of contraception. It is about a transformation of our economic and political systems. It is not just a case of doing some positive things but of reversing centuries of damaging choices and policies; millennia of assuming that humans and the natural world exist to serve that creation of a few—mostly male—humans: the market. It means not operating for the military-industrial complex, or the fossil fuel-finance complex, but making a world that creates a decent life for every individual, from every newborn baby to every centenarian, and that allows ecosystems to flourish and wildlife, for a start, to survive. A feminist foreign policy must be guided by Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics. It means ending what the academic Karen Warren has called the “logic of domination”.

Some global progress is being made, notably in the increasing operationalisation of the rights to universal healthcare which have long been contained in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights—not, however, in the UK, where access to healthcare has been taken backwards for many non-citizens. But there is a growing understanding that we need to go beyond medicine and talk about the need for care societies—a concept with enormous potential, as demonstrated by the Women’s Budget Group’s plan for a care-led recovery from coronavirus.

I have talked largely in big abstract terms. What does all this mean in practice? It means caring for and welcoming refugees as survivors of our disastrous policies, large parts of their wealth having been robbed from them, rather than treating them as threats. It means stopping pumping vast quantities of arms into a world choked with them. Last year the UK was the world’s second-largest arms exporter: £11 billion of exported destruction. Many women, children and men will die as a result. It means acknowledging the historic and continuing massive damage of colonialism, and paying reparations for it; the frame of “loss and damage” at the COP 26 talks provides an important potential way forward.

What has been called the malestream—millennia of thinking of the planet as a mine and a dumping ground and people as an exploitable asset—has produced a maelstrom of destruction and a world on the edge of disaster. A feminist world can be one that lives within the physical limits of this one fragile planet while caring for all. Caring is key.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill) (Lab)]

I call the next speaker, the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw. Please can you unmute, Lord Bradshaw? We still cannot hear you. I will move on to the next speaker while we try to sort you out. I call the noble Lord, Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth.

Covid-19: Women

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Wednesday 10th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, the effects of the pandemic are indeed differential across a number of factors. We have invested half a billion pounds in mental health services and recognise that women have taken on more responsibility in the home in terms of childcare and home-schooling, but, thankfully, schools are back as of Monday. We are looking closely at the data, to then analyse it. That will inform our policy development, as will, as I have outlined, meeting with women’s groups.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, in one of the reports to which the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, referred, the Women and Equalities Committee in the other place recommends

“a Gender Beneficiary Assessment of investments from the industrial strategy”,

which are currently going into areas that are well known to be male-dominated, and

“an economic growth assessment of the Women’s Budget Group’s care-led recovery proposals.”

Surely the Government must take these steps to understand the impacts of their policies.

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, the Government are looking at the data and have now got an equality data assessment based in the Cabinet Office. We have brought together the GEO with the disability and race units so that we have all the data to look at. The massive economic package and support that has been in place has benefited millions of women, and women are slightly less likely to be made redundant and slightly more likely to be furloughed.

Covid-19: Ethnic Minority Disparities

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness will be aware that the NHS has an obesity strategy and the pandemic has shone a light, helpfully, on how important that strategy is. I can comment only in relation to the role of education in this—we were on track and had seen an overall closing of the attainment gap over the last 10 years. We recognise that there has been a narrowing in the last couple of years, but we are focusing our catch-up recovery to ensure that children from disadvantaged backgrounds catch up as quickly as possible.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, the report suggests that overrepresentation in certain generally low-paid occupations is a significant factor in the horrific death rate for people from Pakistani backgrounds. There is a lot that might be said about that with regard to structural racism, as the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, referred to, but in the pandemic context, does it not demonstrate that employers are not doing enough to protect workers, particularly essential workers? What more will the Government do to force employers to behave better to save lives?

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, since 1974, I believe, the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act has been in force in this country and, overwhelmingly, employers take their responsibilities in this regard very seriously. The NHS, as a key employer, had by the end of last year done a risk assessment of the overwhelming majority of its ethnic minority workforce. As I said, we are also including certain groups in the mass testing asymptomatic pilots to ensure that we reduce rates of transmission.

Free School Meals: Food Parcels

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 14th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge (Con) [V]]

My Lords, of course the Government trust parents. That is why we have given schools these options of how to deliver this. If there is any complaint about their treatment, parents should raise that with the school. There are also further avenues for them to make representations. However, as I have outlined, schools do not want to deal with distributing cash to parents, particularly during the pandemic. That is why a local or national voucher system is by far the best option for monetary support, rather than cash.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, can the Minister confirm that the national voucher scheme will be operating through the same private company as last time? Can she also reassure me that its computer system will be adequate, and that school staff or parents will not find themselves having to log on at 3 am or 4 am as the only time it is possible to get into the system? Given that it is a for-profit company, what does the Minister consider a reasonable profit for it to be making on the scheme: 5%, 10% or more?

[Baroness Berridge (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I can assure noble Lords that, as I have outlined, from Monday e-codes will be issued that can be redeemed against supermarket vouchers. The department is closely monitoring the logistics of the scheme being set up. We anticipate thousands of schools wanting to access that portal as soon as they can, but we are monitoring this properly. In the emergency of the pandemic, we stood up a system that delivered vouchers worth £380 million last time.

Covid-19: Educational Settings

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 7th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, the staff in the early years sector have done a sterling job as well, and over 80% of early years were in their settings before Christmas. These are not unsafe environments. We base our decisions on the public health evidence. These settings were given a very small amount of PPE just in case there was a pupil who was symptomatic on the premises, which was the same for schools. Those staff have access to community testing, of which we have ramped up the capacity. The data on which I rely, in relation to the rates of disease among the workforce, are the ONS data that we have. There was no higher prevalence among education staff than in relation to the general population. The sector is being funded on a per-attendee basis now, but I know that the Secretary of State was meeting the sector today or yesterday and we are in close contact with it regarding its sustainability.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, my question is about vaccination. I noted the answer from the Minister earlier regarding the Government currently prioritising the most clinically vulnerable in line with the scientific evidence. But do the Government accept that education staff—both teachers and other staff—should be a very high priority, with other crucial essential workers, very soon in the future? If the Government accept that, are plans being made? We heard earlier from the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, about the complex logistics of arranging vaccinations. Are the Government planning to make arrangements to ensure that, should some extra vaccine become available, it would be possible to have plans in place to vaccinate school and other education staff very quickly?

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, I have outlined that the priority in relation to vaccination is based on that evidence because of the clinical risk of hospitalisation and mortality for the age of the population. I have outlined that, once we have done that cohort of the population, there will obviously be consultation and discussion with the JCVI, the Department of Health and other sectors in relation to who is then prioritised for the next round of the vaccine. However, I will take the comments and views of Members of your Lordships’ House back to the department and make sure that they are fed through.

Higher Education (Fee Limits and Student Support) (England) (Coronavirus) (Revocation) Regulations 2020

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 29th October 2020 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

I thank the Deputy Chairman for the advance notice of the schedule change.

Yesterday, in the internal market Bill debate, the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, found it objectionable that my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb used the term hypercapitalism. I refer to this now because this statutory instrument is a second attempt to manage extreme competition between universities. What were once communities of scholars working for the advancement of knowledge are now pushed to operate like cut-throat businesses. The “aggressive recruitment practices” to which the Minister referred are a perfect illustration that the Government might like to study to further their understanding of the term. I draw on the Wiley Online Library discussion of hypercapitalism, which states that

“critical scholars believe that once separate spheres of culture and commerce now overlap … culture and the way of life in a hypercapitalist society becomes subsumed by the commercial sphere”.

Our universities are a case study for that subsuming. They have been pushed to become businesses by the policies of successive Governments over decades.

The original statutory instrument was a small concession from the Government, who were forced by the reality of our current circumstances to move away from their ideology of allowing market forces to run wild. They now acknowledge that there is a deep state of chaos. I am pleased to follow the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth of Drumlean, and others in asking for cuts to student fees—a cut , or perhaps the dropping of all fees this year, given the kind of suffering to which the noble Lord referred. On another occasion, I shall talk about why they should be dropped altogether.

While competition between factories to produce the best tools, or between market gardens for the tastiest produce, might not be a bad thing, competition in the educational sphere, as I noted in our earlier debate on Ofsted inspections, is innately damaging, particularly in the state of confusion we now find ourselves. I can only hope that such confusion helps the Government to see the problems that we are in now and understand the swingeing damage being done by hypercapitalism, which I note the Wiley reference says is also called “zombie capitalism”. I would be interested in the Minister’s thoughts.

Education (Exemption from School and Further Education Institutions Inspections) (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2020

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 29th October 2020 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, with whom I strongly agree on some things and strongly disagree on others. I strongly disagree with his suggestion of further grading of schools, but strongly agree with his suggestion about the sharing of best practice.

It might seem strange that a Peer from a party that wants to abolish Ofsted should welcome a statutory instrument ending exemption from Ofsted inspection for some schools. I speak today to do just that, for the assumptions behind the exemption were an illustration of the deep faults and failure of the philosophy that has underpinned the operation of Ofsted, and, indeed, our entire education system, for decades. At the base was the assumption that schools were competing against each other in league tables, chiefly for exam results, but also for the Ofsted ratings that were closely related to them. Schools that managed to get those results, aided by their ability to perform and show themselves to the best advantage for a day or two, could clear the bar of outstanding and then be assumed to be in a special category, able to run off into the sunlit uplands away from Ofsted.

Meanwhile, their peers that did not do so faced the regular descent of the terrifying ordeal of the inspection. I speak as a former school governor, so I have some experience of this. The price of so-called failure was often the forced loss of local control, or at least the need to fight hard to fight it off. Moulsecoomb Primary School in Brighton, which I follow closely through my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, whose interest in the matter is obvious, conducted a poll in which 96% of respondents were opposed to forced academisation, yet still the push continued.

This ranking and testing has been and continues to be profoundly damaging, while also—as the statutory instrument implicitly acknowledges—failing to recognise that things can go wrong in a school very quickly. Parents have been encouraged to compete, to use their knees and elbows to get their child into a school based on this magic talisman of “outstanding”, which has very little meaning and often reflects the socioeconomic circumstance of the pupils.

Of course, as several other noble Lords have noted, Ofsted is an institution with its own problems. As the Accountability Commission noted, inspectors were being spread too thinly, judgments were often dubious and reporting unreliable. It is built on competition and is widely judged to be unfit for purpose.

What is needed instead is a co-operative, supportive, continuous process of local and regional sharing of best practice. Every school has great aspects that it can share with others. One might be strong in maths, another strong in sport, another great at supporting pupils in difficult circumstances. If we think about the current situation with Covid-19, each school will have its own particular problems, but many will also have identified solutions that could be—[Inaudible]—will recognise these widely varying and often quickly changing strengths and weaknesses.

Rather than anxiously scanning league tables and thinking about whether they can afford to move house, parents should be able to look as a matter of course to their local school, at the centre and part of their community, and see the children attend it. Those schools should be working together for the best results for every pupil in the area, not being pushed to expel or force out difficult pupils. This would be of great benefit, particularly to the most vulnerable.

The Minister said that schools would benefit from an updated picture of their performance. I respectfully suggest that every school knows its own strengths and weaknesses far better than any outside inspector—so, indeed, do teachers for individual pupils. They do not need an outside test to do that, which is why I take this opportunity to ask the Minister to consider cancelling the 2021 SATs in the light of Covid-19, as the More Than a Score campaign is asking, as well as introducing alternative assessment systems for GCSEs and A-levels next year in the difficult circumstances that we will clearly face.