Schools: Foreign Languages
Baroness Perry of Southwark Excerpts(9 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Nash
In April last year, we published a set of key principles for assessment, produced as a result of consultation on accountability. We also announced last May a new package of pupil assessment methods developed by teachers for their fellow teachers. Schools are able to develop whatever methodology of assessment they like. However, I will take note of what the noble Baroness says and look at that further.
Baroness Perry of Southwark (Con)
Will my noble friend tell me what the Government are doing to ensure a supply of well qualified and competent teachers of modern languages, both at primary and secondary level?
Lord Nash
I am delighted to answer my noble friend’s question. We have increased the bursary available to people with a first class degree in, for instance, languages, to £25,000. We are providing £2 million to fund nine projects across the country that will help primary and secondary teachers teach the new modern language curriculum at key stages 2 and 3. The National College for Teaching and Leadership facilitates an expert group for languages and also has a pilot scheme for subject enhancement in primary schools.
Schools: Arts Subjects
Baroness Perry of Southwark Excerpts(9 years, 5 months ago)
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Baroness Perry of Southwark (Con)
Does my noble friend agree that the introduction of the new Progress 8 measure will enable every child to have a broad and balanced curriculum—much more so than in the past?
Lord Nash
I agree entirely. We want every child to engage in a broad and balanced curriculum; Ofsted will inspect against that, and, as I have already said, many more options are now available through Progress 8. Previously we had what the shadow Secretary of State described as the “great crime” of the C/D borderline; we will now value many more subjects widely and will rate Bs to As and Es to Ds much more highly than we have in the past.
Employment: Young People
Baroness Perry of Southwark Excerpts(9 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Nash
The noble Baroness makes a very good point. I am aware of her experience in this area. As the guidance notes, the area where one-to-one careers advice may be particularly appropriate is for pupils with learning disabilities. We will ensure that the careers company makes sure that all pupils get the opportunities for careers advice that they deserve.
Baroness Perry of Southwark (Con)
My Lords, I welcome the Statement addressing an issue which has been an area of such desperate failure in our education system for the past few years. Indeed, on the provision of advice by Connexions, I have not yet met a school which found that Connexions was useful or helpful to it in the work it was trying to do. Is it envisaged that this new company will enable employers to have an input into the syllabus for some of the major subjects of the curriculum? So often we hear from employers that what is taught is not helpful to them in employment. Will it go beyond their involvement in providing placements and advice, into some input into the syllabus for the main subjects?
Schools: Academies
Baroness Perry of Southwark Excerpts(9 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Nash
The noble Baroness picks out some isolated examples. I point out to her, as I have before, that 36 of the 55 pre-warning notices that this Government have issued to academy sponsors have been to sponsors approved under the previous Government. This Government have considerably tightened up financial oversight and improved things such as control of grants. Of course, these figures are but nothing compared with the £10 billion overspend the National Audit Office tells us that the previous Government were heading for under the Building Schools for the Future programme.
Baroness Perry of Southwark (Con)
Will my noble friend tell us whether there is any information about the innovations and improvements that heads have been able to make since so many of them were given the freedom to manage their own budgets?
Lord Nash
My noble friend is quite right that there have been many examples of this, including more efficient purchasing, longer school days, greater freedom over the curriculum, the ability to employ subject-specific teachers in primary schools, the ability to find the money to engage more effectively with the professional communities and business, and the generation of income more effectively from their own facilities.
Schools: Admissions
Baroness Perry of Southwark Excerpts(9 years, 8 months ago)
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Baroness Perry of Southwark (Con)
My Lords, have the Government made any assessment of how many parents are managing to get their children places in the schools of their choice?
Schools: Local Oversight
Baroness Perry of Southwark Excerpts(9 years, 11 months ago)
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Lord Nash
We have not yet gone as far as mandatory training. We have a high expectation that all governors will be trained where necessary and that they should be chosen for their skills. We brought in this big focus on skills rather than representation: governors may come from all walks of life, but they must have the expectation that they will be trained. We have also brought in tightening regulations so that where governing bodies feel that one of their governors needs training and they refuse to take that training, they can be suspended.
Baroness Perry of Southwark (Con)
Can my noble friend confirm for me and for the House that the overwhelming success of the vast majority of free schools and academies is the best evidence that allowing autonomy and freedom to schools and heads is the best way of raising standards?
Lord Nash
I am grateful to my noble friend for her comments. The overwhelming success of the programme is unarguable. Some 24% of free schools are rated outstanding, which makes them by far our highest performing group of schools; converter academies are far more likely to retain or increase their Ofsted rating at the next inspection; and sponsored academies are increasing their performance at a rate approximately twice that of other schools.
Education Institutions: Autonomy and Accountability
Baroness Perry of Southwark Excerpts(10 years ago)
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Baroness Perry of Southwark
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the appropriate balance between the autonomy and the accountability of educational institutions.
Baroness Perry of Southwark (Con)
My Lords, it was the French Prime Minister, François Mitterrand, who, on introducing reforms of education in France in the 1980s, declared that accountability had to be “le contrepart même”—the exact balance—to the autonomy of institutions in the education system. We need no persuasion today that the issue of accountability of schools and teachers, as well as the degree of autonomy that they should be allowed, is central to the future shape of our education system.
Rather than starting with the accountability side of the equation, I begin by asking how much freedom schools and teachers need if they are to accomplish all that they and we hope for our children’s education. There is plenty of evidence to show that granting freedom to professionals to do the job they are trained and motivated to do is the surest way to achieve high quality.
In his excellent book, Education, Education, Education, the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, says rightly that,
“governors—and the headteachers and management teams they appoint and sustain—need to be unambiguously in control of their schools without managerial interference from local and national bureaucracies”.
This, he says, is the magic ingredient of the success of academies. I agree. It is the quality of leadership in a school which determines its success, which means good governors, a good head and a good management team.
Of course, as we have seen all too recently, there can be governors who are not capable of good governance, and heads and teachers who get it wrong, but this does not mean that the model is faulty. As Samuel Johnson said—in what is my favourite quote—it is,
“happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust”.
Through the huge expansion of academies and free schools, this Government have had the courage to trust schools and teachers. I rejoice in that.
We have at present possibly the best generation of teachers that we have ever enjoyed. They are well qualified and well educated, with strong support available from heads and senior staff for those who enter the profession for the first time. I pay tribute to the previous Government for the Teach First initiative, which has brought some outstanding young graduates into our schools. This Government have made teacher quality rightly central to their policies, and new entrants to the profession are of the highest quality, as are many of their older colleagues. It therefore makes absolute sense to trust their professionalism to the maximum extent.
Teachers, like doctors with their patients or other client-centred professionals, are more motivated to do the best for the pupils in their charge than to seek the approval of those above them in the hierarchy. We want them to feel that way, for that way quality of provision lies. However, as Mitterrand said, this freedom needs to be exactly balanced by accountability. The public who pay their taxes for public services, as well as the parents and students who benefit from the public service of education, have a right to know whether the provision offered is of good quality and appropriate for the needs of its recipients.
In achieving the delicate balance of accountability and autonomy, it is important that teachers and heads are not distracted from their prime self-motivation towards their pupils by the imposition of too much bureaucratic regulation. We need them to be looking into the classroom and the children in it, not looking out to the inspectors and regulators. Good schools and good teachers are not driven by their external regulators; they take them in their stride, recognising that if they behave with professional dedication to the task at hand, the results will be what the regulators seek. For this reason, I welcome and applaud the much needed changes which this Government have made in the two key tools of accountability: inspection and examinations.
Ofsted was set up for the best of reasons: to inspect every school often and thoroughly. Such a remit demanded a huge taskforce. By the time the excellent Sir Michael Wilshaw came into office as chief inspector, more than 2,000 people were involved in inspection, employed by private contractors, mainly part-time and often with scant educational know-how or even none at all. Quality control of their activity had therefore to resort to giving them a list of predetermined items in boxes to be ticked, rather than trusting informed, senior professional judgment. As a tool of accountability, Ofsted in this form far too often simply alienated teachers. More seriously, it could, especially for the less secure and inexperienced teachers, reduce their creativity to meeting the tick-box requirements, which might bear little relation to a broad education.
It is therefore with huge pleasure that I welcome the decision to trust future inspection mainly to the 400-plus HMI who are experienced, senior professionals whose judgment can be trusted, and to dispense with the contractors. HMI can judge the key index of a school and the experience of the pupils. This may or may not match the items in the box-ticking exercise, but it will go to the heart of whether the school is providing the pupils in its care with an education fit for the values of our society, and which allows every child and young person to achieve across the widest possible range of elements in and beyond the curriculum.
In my view, it is not possible to overestimate the value of this change. By applying the broad professional judgments that teachers accept and share, Ofsted can become a tool to reward good schools and good teachers for their creative ways of achieving the best possible outcomes for their pupils. It can also become a more developmental and less regulatory tool that will spread good practice and encourage those schools which are struggling to succeed in providing the high-quality education that other comparable schools have achieved.
Examination results are the second measure of accountability by which schools are rightly judged. This has not always been a reliable measure to use. When schools and their pupils were allowed a wide choice of subjects at GCSE, the results were hard to compare. Those schools, and there were many, which avoided basic English and maths, for example, might achieve good GCSE results overall, but when their performance including English and maths was measured, it was not so impressive. In one school, 100% of the students achieved five good GCSE grades, but only 45% included English and maths. The EBacc was therefore a much needed incentive for all schools to include these basic tools, and now the new standard allowing more choice at key stage 4 is an innovation that will raise true performance standards for all young people. The inclusion of high-quality technical and vocational qualifications that was announced last week will at last bring real quality to areas that are attractive to the many young people whose motivation is more practical than academic.
Finally, the long-debated issue of value added has been recognised in a simple and fair way by the planned introduction of progress 8 as a measure for secondary schools. This charts the progress from entry standards to GCSE performance and will be the measure of whether a school is achieving appropriately. At last, a school’s performance will be measured in relation to its own intake rather than against schools with very different pupil populations.
I am proud of our Government and the developments in both autonomy and accountability which are being introduced. Above all, I hope that through these changes the many excellent teachers who serve us so well in schools and colleges every day will find that their dedicated and creative work will flourish, and that they will welcome them.
Education: Free School Funding
Baroness Perry of Southwark Excerpts(10 years, 1 month ago)
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Baroness Perry of Southwark (Con)
Will my noble friend confirm that one of the most heartening aspects of the free schools programme is that every free school is opened only after extensive consultation with the local community? By the time the free school is open, it has huge community support, and the parents who have been involved in the setting up of the school have overwhelming enthusiasm and are greatly involved in the life of the school in a way that, in my experience, has been seen in very few local authority schools.
Lord Nash
I can confirm what my noble friend says. I encourage noble Lords from across the House to visit schools such as Dixons Trinity Bradford, Reach Academy Feltham, Canary Wharf College or ARK Conway Primary Academy, all of which have been rated outstanding within months of opening.
Education: Social Mobility
Baroness Perry of Southwark Excerpts(10 years, 3 months ago)
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Baroness Perry of Southwark (Con)
My Lords, I, too, thank the Minister for initiating this debate with such a powerful speech. His own record in offering truly life-changing opportunities to hundreds of children in the Pimlico Academy stands as an example to all providers, whether local authorities or sponsors of free schools and academies.
Although I am a once-upon-a-time philosopher, I will resist the temptation to deconstruct the phrase “social mobility”, complex as it is. We all know what we mean by it and recognise it when we see it. If an individual rises in social and economic status over their lifetime, and if they rise beyond the social status of their parents, we say that they have achieved social mobility. Much of our proper concern as a civilised and prosperous society has been towards breaking what Keith Joseph—the late Lord Joseph—called the cycle of deprivation, in which children from the poorest parents never rise above the level of their parents’ deprivation, and nor do their children or grandchildren. All Governments have tried to find ways to break that cycle, beginning with the Education Act 1870. Rightly, in my view, they have looked to education as the means of breaking it. A brief look at the history of those efforts, all of them top-down, may help us to understand why the Government are tackling the issue in a new way now.
I will not weary the House with a complete history of education, but I must pause on the effects of the Education Act 1944, which was so earnestly well meant and which was, in my view, so sadly misguided. That Act provided that something between 15% and 25% of young people, depending on the local authority, would be selected at age 11 for grammar schools. These academically excellent schools provided the young people with the skills needed for white-collar jobs at the least, or with access to the professions via university at best. Although the excellent ambition for technical schools was a part of the Bill, we now know, as the noble Lord, Lord Baker, so eloquently said, how little was achieved in providing that demand in technical education. That left up to four-fifths of the population sent—as failures—to secondary modern schools which provided at their best a generalised and undemanding curriculum, which in my less kind moments I describe as soup-kitchen education.
That model was based on an economy which had already begun to die. It assumed a structure in which 80% of workers could be unskilled—an economy which our competitors in Germany, Japan and elsewhere had abandoned. They saw the need for all workers to be skilled in industries where technology was taking the place of the unskilled workers, and they rejected our 1944 model in favour of a model which ensured that 100% of their young people were given a demanding education, both academically and technically. Our error did more over those crucial post-war decades to deny social mobility and economic growth, as we saw in our competitors. So many of our young people simply lacked the skills for the changing economy.
Like many of my generation, I hoped that the move to comprehensive schools would reverse our educational and economic decline. By offering all children access to the same good-quality education, we hoped that all would leave with employable skills and opportunities that had been denied to their parents. I will not enter the argument about why the original comprehensive failed to deliver. The noble Lord, Lord Adonis—the much admired pioneer of the academies movement, as several noble Lords have said today—makes clear the reason that they failed in his excellent book Education, Education, Education. He commented that,
“too many comprehensives were simply a continuation of the secondary moderns”,
and that even the celebrated Holland Park and Pimlico schools,
“soon became educational battlegrounds in the face of low standards, poor teaching and hard-left politicisation”.
So, comprehensives were not the answer, though for my part I remain wholly convinced that selection is not the answer. I do, however, believe that elective differences in the route through education for older pupils—a formula which works for most other successful economies and which has been offered by the UTCs of the noble Lord, Lord Baker—should be the way ahead for this country.
Experience over the years had demonstrated all too clearly that top-down reform and diktat has had little impact on the quality of education. As many began to understand, it was the quality of the leadership and the initiative of the individual school which determined the success of its pupils. Some years ago I was entranced by the words of a Scandinavian educator who declared at an international conference:
“The school is the living cell of the body educational; it is the health of the individual school we must address if the body is to become well”.
I equally rejoiced in the words of the chief inspector of Ofsted at the launch of his annual report this year, when he said that we should end the categorisation of children as either “deprived or well-off”. Their social background, he said, is not the arbiter of their success; there were simply “lucky or unlucky” children: those who went to a good school were lucky; those who went to a poor or inadequate school were unlucky. This puts the emphasis on the quality of education each child receives and not on their social background.
We have spent far too long being emotionally concerned about poverty and too little concerned in shining a light on the crucial contribution of schools. Good schools have been shown time and again to be able to grant success to all their pupils regardless of background. It was this understanding which led to the founding of independent state schools, first started as CTCs in the 1990s, as has been said, and then becoming the academies movement, first under the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and now hugely accelerated under my right honourable friend Michael Gove.
Academies have autonomy over many aspects of their provision. Their quality depends on the leadership and expertise of the head with her or his staff. Control from the centre has been replaced by responsibility at the school level, with freedom for the professional judgment of heads and teachers to meet the needs of their individual children and the community from which they come.
One story of an academy trust illustrates the huge success of this approach. My noble friend Lord Harris of Peckham started one of the first CTCs back in the 1980s. Now there are 27 academies in the Harris Trust, 17 secondary and 10 primary. Those schools were previously classed as failing or near failing: 45% of the pupils qualify for free school meals, and 44% come from black and ethnic minority backgrounds. Under their previous management thousands of children would have been consigned to educational failure and to a lack of any prospect of social mobility. Now, 20,000 “lucky” children are finding success; 72% of the pupils in these schools achieved the magic five good GCSEs—well above the national average—and that improvement has been sustained year on year since the schools became independent.
The Harris Trust story has been matched up and down the country by over 3,500 schools, now with over 2 million pupils. These schools have taken the opportunity to determine their own professional destiny, backed by powerful and supportive governing bodies. These independent state schools are innovative, using all the professional skill and judgment of the teachers and their leaders. Uniformity imposed from the state or local authority too often stifled innovation and the flowering of professionally creative schemes in the academies has been a delightful feature. Examination success has not been their only contribution. Music, art, dance, drama and creative writing have flourished as teachers have felt free to share with their pupils their own enthusiasm and skill. To the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, I would say that good teachers very much recognise the need for emotional development, emotional skills and emotional intelligence.
Not all academies and free schools will succeed; in any system there will be problems and failures. However, there are mechanisms for those to be dealt with quickly and firmly in the way that local authorities manifestly found it difficult to do with the huge number of failing schools under their control.
We are watching a revolution in education. It is a benign revolution. It is contributing hugely to social mobility and has brought life-changing opportunity and the experience of success to thousands and thousands of children. The academies movement is one which all who care about the future of our young people should welcome and celebrate. I am pleased to do so in this debate today.
Children and Families Bill
Baroness Perry of Southwark Excerpts(10 years, 5 months ago)
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Baroness Kidron (CB)
I support both of these amendments, to which I have added my name. I want to associate myself with the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, in order to skip over some of the arguments she made, and move on, because I know that there are other amendments tonight which we must get to with some alacrity.
I declare an interest as a film maker who has made a film about teenagers and the internet. It is specifically the subject of the internet that makes both Amendment 53 and Amendment 53ZAAA necessary and urgent. It is not the case that all things in the virtual world are harmful or dangerous. Indeed, there is an implicit danger that if we in this Chamber demonise the internet, our concerns will not be heard by the young, 99% of whom are online by the age of 16. The internet is in so many ways a liberatory technology; but in its wake, social and sexual norms are changing—social and sexual norms that, for millennia, were contextualised by family and community but are now delivered into the pockets of young children, largely out of the sight of parents, with no transparency, no accountability and no regulation.
Her Majesty’s Government make distinctions between the status of schools; the internet does not. In every sort of school, there are young people struggling to cope with the loneliness of looking at online lives that their contemporaries are leading, and finding their own lives wanting. They are struggling to do their homework on the very same device that holds their entertainment and communication tools, so inevitably they are interrupted and distracted. Young girls are made anxious by not being the right kind of beautiful to get enough “likes” and know that a sexual or revealing stance could get their numbers up. Young people who are curious about sex find themselves in a world of non-consensual sexual violence and are bewildered, excited and disgusted in a confusing introduction to what should be the most intimate expression of self.
What of the feeling of compulsion and addiction as the norm becomes to respond instantly day and night; or the culture of anonymity that is fuelling an epidemic of bullying; and the sense of absolute helplessness with tragic consequences when a young person is trapped and humiliated in full view by something done foolishly or maliciously? Then, of course, there is the immediate and pressing issue highlighted in the 2013 Ofsted report, Not Yet Good Enough, that found that a third of school pupils had gaps in their knowledge about sex and relationships that left them vulnerable to online exploitation and abuse.
Last week, I had a call from the head teacher of an academy who was in great distress. It was a good school with an excellent record. This is a woman trained to bring life into literature, who is now facing a tsunami of problems beyond her experience or training. She was not the first: indeed, she was one of scores of head teachers and teachers who have reached out for help. It is worth noting that, when I asked her which year group she would like me to talk with, she cited the different needs of the year 9s, 10s, 11s, 12s and 13s. She was reluctant to choose whom I should address because she felt that each group had its own very specific and urgent need.
The establishment of an expert working group to update the statutory guidance is excellent, a sign of good governance. Who could be against it? To update it in the context of the advent of internet and associated technologies is fantastic. However, guidance is not enough: we need age-appropriate, structured and expert SRE teaching that ensures that all of the guidance reaches all of the children in one coherent piece.
I was a little distressed at Question Time—I came late into the Chamber—and I believe I heard the noble Lord, Lord Gardiner, suggesting that suicide groups were something that could be dealt with by self-regulation of ISPs. I hope I am mistaken in that. He also suggested that e-safety would be taught in ICT by ICT teachers. This is a reckless approach to something that should unite us. The notion of “duty of care” is embedded into many of our laws and social interactions because we understand that the young can only develop responsibility in proportion to their maturity, and this is one of those situations.
The internet is as yet an unregulated space where sexual acts that remain illegal in the material world are available at the push of a button; where the economic needs of internet billionaires encourage compulsive attachments to devices from which young people are never parted; where young people are encouraged to play, shop and learn without an adequate understanding of their own vulnerabilities or their own responsibilities. This is a new technology that is central to and inseparable from an entire generation, to whom we in this House have a duty of care.
The connection between heavy internet use and depression, the rising incidence of self-harm and anorexia and the playing-out of pornographic scenarios creating new norms of sexual behaviour are increasingly familiar as we see them manifest in our schools and homes. At Stanford and MIT, in important work led by Professor Livingstone at LSE and within the European Union, people are working to quantify the real-life outcomes of internet use by young people. Meanwhile, we need to empower those same young people with knowledge, delivered in a neutral space by appropriately trained adults, in which their safety, privacy and rights are paramount. We know that the internet is not that neutral, safe or private place, and we know that parents alone cannot deal with the entirety of a young person’s life online.
I have said to the Minister before that in the absence of comprehensive SRE delivered to all children, the realpolitik is that you leave some children to be educated in sex by the pornographers and leave bullying and friendship rules to Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare. Guidance, however welcome, is only guidance: its application partial and essentially unequal. The statutory provision of fully rounded SRE that deals with the complexity of the new world in which young people live, written by experts and delivered by trained teachers is quite another thing.
If you can find me a child untouched by the internet, you can show me the child who does not need comprehensive education about its powers and possibilities. I urge noble Lords to put aside any constituency or consideration that might distract them from the urgent need to empower and protect young people and to support both the amendments.
Baroness Perry of Southwark (Con)
My Lords, I support a great deal of what the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, said, in her introduction. As others have said, it would be a terrible world in which children could learn about sex and relationships only through the pornography that they find on the internet. However, I suggest that that is an issue about what is on the internet and young people’s access to it much more than it is about anything which we in education can possibly put right.
I hope that the noble Baroness and my noble friend Lady Walmsley are at least prepared to concede that the Government’s setting up of an expert group on PSHE is something that many of us in this House welcome. I hope that many of my noble friends will also welcome the fact that the chief executive of the PSHE Association is to chair the group; I am sure that we will get much wisdom and common sense from it, which will be enormously helpful to teachers.
It is only in the second of the amendments, Amendment 53ZAAA—gosh, we have alphabet soup in our amendments—that I have reservations about what the noble Baroness is asking for. The vast majority of schools already deal with SRE, and many of them do it very well indeed. Unfortunately, not all do it well, some do it very badly and some do not do it at all. I do not feel that we are ready yet to have it as an established part of a national curriculum. All schools are required in their returns on their curriculum to say what they do about SRE—and, indeed, PSHE; I agree with my noble friend Lady Walmsley that it should be PSHE. That is a much wider topic, and you cannot separate out one part of people’s relationships, health and feelings about their own body in that way.
I really feel that the quality of what is delivered must be left to the professionals. Every teacher and every head knows their pupils, their children, their school, their neighbourhood, and the culture of the parents with whom they are dealing. To try to lay down centrally a fixed syllabus for what should be taught right from the age of six—teaching six-year-olds about homosexuality and so on—could so offend some of the religious sensitivities in this country. I still passionately believe that we must trust the professionals in education; we must trust the teachers. We must not think that we can lay down centrally the rules which will somehow work for them all.
We have a wonderful teaching profession, a very sensitive profession, and this is a very sensitive subject. I believe that PSHE should be age-sensitive, culture-sensitive, community-sensitive and, above all, sensitive to the particular needs of the children that the teacher in charge of PSHE will need to meet. I strongly resist the idea of putting a fixed curriculum within the national curriculum; we should trust teachers.
Baroness Walmsley
My Lords, I have added my name to this amendment but as the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, has explained it so comprehensively and so well, I will not say very much except that I believe that schools have the duty to their children to promote their academic, spiritual, cultural, mental and physical development. Schools will do it in different ways. Amendment 53ZA, crafted by the noble Baroness, accepts that. I have also come across examples where schools teach PSHE in specific lessons about particular topics, but in addition have a whole school ethos that promotes children having respect for each other, having resilience and self-confidence and all those soft skills that so many employers are crying out for as well, of course, as giving them that often life-saving information about sexual matters, drugs, tobacco and so on.
The amendment asks schools to tell the world how they are going to do this. They have this duty—it is right that they should have it—and if they have to make public how they are fulfilling that duty, it will make them focus carefully on the quality of how they deliver these things to the children and fulfil this duty to each and every one of their pupils.
Baroness Perry of Southwark
My Lords, it is good to be able to give a very warm welcome to one of the amendments put down by the noble Baroness, Lady Massey. I agree entirely with what she said in her introduction to this amendment. It is a very good amendment. I particularly like the fact that she is asking all schools to make this explicit to parents, school governors and pupils. We have not talked about the role of school governors enough as we have gone through this Bill. They now have such big responsibilities under previous legislation that to include them in the duty of the school to say what they are doing about the total development of children is very much to be welcomed, as is, of course, the duty to tell parents. We must continue to recognise the role of parents as the primary influences over children—they are primarily responsible for their children’s development.
I am very proud of the fact that it was this House which added the word “spiritual” to the national curriculum responsibilities. Before we had “moral”, “academic” and “physical”, but it was this House which added the word “spiritual” to that list. I am particularly delighted that the noble Baroness has included it in her amendment.
Lord Storey
My Lords, I echo the thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Massey. In the previous debate we, rightly, pointed to the dangers of the internet for young people and talked about the lack of resources that are available for PSHE. I want to use this opportunity to show that the internet can also be a great supporter of PSHE.
There is a new website called Makewaves, which is now live and available to 4,500 schools—more than 70,000 young people. The aim of the project is to get Open Badges, which is a project for young people to earn digital accolades by performing an act in their school or community. The innovative aspect of these e-badges is that an individual may share their achievements with prospective employers or educational institutions, demonstrating their skills, experience and competences. It is hoped that this active platform, which children, young people and students engage with, can develop opportunities for them to get e-badges in citizenship. Here, then, is an opportunity for the internet to support PSHE and engage young people at the same time.
Baroness Perry of Southwark
My Lords, I am very much in sympathy with the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, in her wish to ensure quality in childminding. That is something that we all endorse and I feel a considerable amount of concern that childminders vary very much in the quality of what they offer and in the integrity of their offering to young children. However, I cannot see how Ofsted could conceivably provide this level of inspection. It would be a huge task. The inspectors who work for Ofsted already number in the thousands rather than the hundreds, and this would escalate matters beyond the possibility of quality in Ofsted itself.
The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, and I have shared concerns about quality in Ofsted over the years—and the more its numbers increase, the more evident that concern becomes. I cannot do the sums, but to require inspections of childminders would require another thousand or more inspectors to be taken on by Ofsted. Concern about the quality of what they could offer would escalate. Although I am in sympathy with the spirit behind these amendments, I cannot support them.
The Earl of Listowel
My Lords, I am prompted by the amendment of the noble Lady, Baroness Walmsley, to draw your Lordships’ attention again to the widespread concerns about the adequacy of funding for the two year-old and three year-old entitlement. This is a long-standing concern. If it is so important that we have high-quality early years care, certainly the Government and the taxpayer should fund it properly. I apologise that I did not take the opportunity to raise this with the Childcare Minister, Liz Truss, when I last saw her. If it is possible during the passage of the Bill to discuss children’s centres with her, I will certainly take the opportunity to raise the question.