Education Bill

Baroness Paisley of St George's Excerpts

Monday 24th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Paisley of St George's]

My Lords, there are thousands of parents in our country today who do not have a Bible in their homes and who do not read it to their children. School is the only place where these children are given any light at all into the word of God. This is the 400th anniversary of the printing of the King James version of the Holy Bible in the English language. We are a Christian country and it is our duty and responsibility to see that the word of God is placed in schools for the benefit of the children. The Psalmist David said:

“Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path”.

If people want proper guidelines for life, they are to be found in the word of God. I leave that with your Lordships tonight.

[The Lord Bishop of Chester]

My Lords, I will clarify one point if I may. I have not spoken before. We on the Bishops’ Benches sometimes look alike; I promise that it goes no further. There is a very clear distinction between collective and corporate worship. The noble Lord, Lord Elton, referred to corporate worship. That is not what is provided in schools. The act of collective worship is appropriate to the collection of people who are there. It needs to be wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character. In practice, schools with significant numbers of members of other faith communities have managed to work within the degree of flexibility that the law allows, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds suggested. It is very important to realise that this is not ramming worship down people’s throats. That is not what school worship is like. It is part of an educational experience and preparation for life. You never know when you will go to a Remembrance Day service, a wedding or to many other places. When the regiment based in Chester came back from Afghanistan for the presentation of medals, the soldiers wanted an act of worship. It was collective worship in the context of the Armed Forces. There are many contexts in life where some experience of collective worship earlier in life is an important preparation.

My second point is that the amendments are too tarred with secularist intent. Probably there is a case at some point for a cool, considered look at the provisions of collective worship. However, it must be done in a way that enhances the spiritual experience of education. This goes much further than religious experience, but religious experience is part of it. The amendments push too quickly in a particular direction. There is a case for a proper review and full consultation in due course. However, let us not be misled. Collective worship is exactly that: worship appropriate to the collection of people who are present.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am enormously supportive of everything that has been said so far. I am greatly encouraged by what the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, said about the TES. Government after Government have tried to find ways of spreading good practice in education. I was looking at an example the other day—the Harkness table, which is a way of teaching. It started in America in 1930. It is still trickling into schools over here, because information and experience do not move until teachers move between schools, and it is a very slow process. ICT has made it possible to do this better and at a greater speed, but I have not seen it happening yet. I did not know it was happening in the TES and I am very pleased to hear it. It ought to be the sort of thing that the Government are grabbing at ways of supporting.

I entirely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, about personal devices. An element of this Bill is about enabling schools to ban them more effectively. Actually, as the noble Lord, Lord Knight, said, they ought to be finding ways of using them more effectively, of incorporating them and of enabling those children who do not have access to a good enough device to participate. That takes the kind of transformation that the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, has seen in only a few schools, but they have done it, they have done it successfully, and it shows what is possible. Clearly this is going to challenge the whole way of teaching. Everybody can now have the best teacher in the world, or at least for a substantial part of the time. The transformation of teachers from people who are supposed to know everything, however inadequate they are, to people who are going to be good guides and really do know everything, is one to which I look forward with great excitement. It is going to take some getting right. I am looking forward to a very supportive speech from my noble friend on the Front Bench because I am a great supporter of what this Government are doing.

In the bits of the speech from the noble Lord, Lord Knight, with which I did not agree, he was celebrating his role as a great frog sitting in the middle of the department, croaking while everybody else listened to his croaks. Now we have ponds all over England full of tadpoles and no great frog. The noble Lord, Lord Knight, may claim to be the father of the tadpoles, but this Government have liberated education and have made things possible that, under the Stalinist bureaucracy of the QCA and its successors, was never possible. All the changes that the noble Lord, Lord Knight, is looking for would not have been possible under his way of doing things because the centre insisted on having things done its way and reaching its own decisions before it allowed other people to take action. That has been done away with. I meet people who used to work for Becta who are out there now doing wonderful things. They no longer have to wait for Becta to take decisions. They are out there spreading the word individually and making businesses and lives out of it. I think it is part of the transformation that the noble Lord, Lord Knight, celebrates that we have been through a period when there has been a dispersal of ideas. Now, instead of one great oak, we have a lot of acorns sprouting, and I think that is the right place to be when it comes to technology.

I celebrate the particular acorn that this Government have allowed me to sprout, something called Behind the Screen, which, to my great surprise, was adopted as government policy with the help of David Willetts, who must have briefly reincarnated himself as the Minister for Education. The idea is to take computing—in particular, coding—back into school in a serious way, to work with industry in doing that and to work on real-world projects with real-world software. The aim is to have no limits as to how wide it goes, to be able to invade other bits of the curriculum, to have no limits as to how far it goes, indeed to be able to involve oneself in university-distance learning, if that is where a particular idea takes you, to work collaboratively within and between schools, to research, to problem-solve, and for teachers and their partners in industry to be pupils’ guides rather than their instructors. Furthermore, it should get going immediately; the first projects start in November. We are going to write the whole curriculum—to the extent that you can write a curriculum for something that changes every six months—around the schools and industries involved. The whole thing is being generated from the grass roots and not from the middle. The way to tackle technology in education is to let all that expertise and interest and involvement, which is out there around the country, be the source of enlightenment for those of us who sit in the middle.

The noble Lord, Lord Knight, celebrates Apple. I curse my iPad every day for its limitations and for the rules that have been imposed on it from the centre. It will not get Flash. I try and do things with the iPad and it kills me half way through because the website has chosen to do something in Flash and Mr Jobs has said no. I do not want that to happen. I do not want monopolies to spring up and one voice to be the controlling voice when it comes to getting technology into schools. I want diversity. I want lots of different people to try to do it, and I want to see who does it best. That is the way that I think we will come through to a successful technology education system.

So I celebrate what this Government are doing for me and for many others. I celebrate, too, Nick Gibb in the middle of that. This may not be his natural style but he knows that, at the end of the day, anything I do has to come up to his standards. That is an Olympic-level challenge and I welcome it. Where you are allowing a lot of different systems to compete to see which is best, the important role for the Government is to be in the middle making sure that what you have is rigour and quality and is not subservient to fashion and ideas of the moment. I know that I can rely on my honourable friend for that.

[Baroness Paisley of St George's]

My Lords, I, too, support this amendment. I had two wonderful experiences recently. One was on board a ship that was visiting Belfast. On a tour of that ship we were shown an operating theatre. The captain said to us, “There is the theatre”. It was a beautiful operating theatre, and the captain explained, “There is a computer in the wall, and in mid-ocean we can perform life-saving operations on board this ship directed from shore hundreds of miles away”. I thought it was wonderful to see how technology had advanced to this degree. In other times this could not have happened.

The other experience I had was in my own family. My great-grandson, who is two and a half, went to the computer, put in a DVD and waited until it came up on the screen. He knew which buttons to push to fast-forward it to pass the adverts to the part that he wanted to see, and of course he knew how to reverse it back if he missed something. If a two and a half year-old is able to do that, I think there is great hope for the future for technology and I support this amendment.

[Baroness Sharp of Guildford]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord Willis and those who have spoken in favour of this amendment. There are two issues that are important. One is that this is not just about access to hardware. Yes, we are going to move to a situation where you no longer have a suite of computers within a classroom but instead young people have iPads and technology that is mobile around the classroom and around the whole school, and that will make for a much more flexible atmosphere within the school. Access to the technology is important. I think it was my noble friend Lord Willis, or it may have been the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, who made the point that many of the disadvantaged do not currently have access to broadband or to mobile technologies, both of which are quite expensive. For those existing on a weekly jobseeker’s allowance of £90, it is one of the items that they have to forgo. It is vital, therefore, that our public libraries are open and available to such people so that they can have access through the public library system.

My second point is that, as the noble Lord, Lord Knight, mentioned, the pedagogy is changing rapidly. The technology is interactive and when you use this interaction, because the learner can respond, you get a different and much more motivational form of learning. It is vital that our teachers are trained to use this pedagogy, recognise its development and move forward with it.