Queen’s Speech

Baroness Perry of Southwark Excerpts

Monday 9th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Perry of Southwark (Con)]

My Lords, I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak about education in this debate. Although there are no education Bills in this gracious Speech, that does not mean that education will not be a part of much that we will debate in the year ahead. Education affects every aspect of our individual and national life. For example, lack of literacy skills is strongly related to poverty, crime—the rate of functional illiteracy in our jails is a scandal in itself—and social unrest. Equally, our failure to give marketable skills to sufficient numbers of our young people is a direct cause of much youth unemployment and a huge drag on the national economy.

I am therefore proud of the Government’s work in raising the national standards of education in very direct ways. I am now delighted to welcome a new initiative to ensure that every child learns to read at the level appropriate for their age. This builds on many schemes of the past 10 years, from the “every child reading” strategy, launched in the 1990s, to the national strategy, Literacy and Numeracy for Learning and Life, which was launched in 2011. All those have begun to have an impact on this most basic of educational outcomes, but it has still not been enough.

We cannot afford to get this wrong. Literacy is the gateway to all other learning in both the humanities and sciences, it opens the spirit to great literature, and it is a source of infinite pleasure throughout life. It has always seemed to me to be the first element of the implicit contract between the state and a parent: “Trust me with your child, and I will teach her or him to read”. One national expert said to me, so wisely, that we know when a child is reading, not by tests and grading but when we see them go into the book corner, choose a book, and curl up to read for pleasure. At that point they are reading.

I also celebrate the initiative of charities to deal with educational failure. I particularly commend the charity to which my noble friend Lady Stedman-Scott gives so much of her energy and commitment. The charity works on a one-to-one basis with young people who have been identified by their school as in real danger of slipping permanently through the net. They are truanting, failing and losing any opportunity to make a success of their lives. It was a great privilege recently to meet, along with my noble friend Lady Shephard, some of the young people in Tower Hamlets who have been lucky enough to have their lives turned around by this programme. The key to its success is that each young person is encouraged to articulate their own chosen goal. Once this has been established, their mentor—working with many excellent and far-sighted employers in the neighbourhood—arranges a work placement in the field to which they aspire. That is the turning point in their motivation.

One young 16 year-old boy told us that he simply loved cars. He wanted to work with cars and was tired of wasting his time hanging around street corners or shopping malls with other disenfranchised young mates. His mentor got him a placement with a BMW service centre, and that changed his life. He realised while he was there that if he was to work with cars, he needed to win an apprenticeship, and to do that he needed some good GCSEs. Back to school he came, and worked hard for the first time in many years. He has now won the place he so longed for, and from failure his life has been turned to the fulfilment of what had been a distant dream.

For many young people like these, academic subjects do not in themselves attract their interest. Once they see the vocational relevance of academic work, their motivation is focused. There is a real lesson here for policy, and I commend the UTC initiative of my noble friend Lord Baker for recognising and building on this. By combining high-level academic work and real motivation in the vocational subjects, success is being achieved. So many good things are happening, and so many more are to come.