(10 years, 1 month ago)
Lords Chamber
To ask the Leader of the House what plans he has to improve the conduct of question time in the House of Lords.
My Lords, as a self-regulating House, we all have a responsibility to uphold our rules of conduct at question time. The rules on supplementary questions set out in the Companion could not be clearer: no reading and no statements of opinion. Supplementaries,
“should be short and confined to not more than two points”.
I thank my noble friend for that reply. Does he agree that Standing Orders should be compulsory reading for anybody who enters the House? If questions were briefer, would it not allow more people to enter the fray?
I agree very much with my noble friend that brief questions are to be encouraged: brief questions tend to elicit brief answers. I think that it is incumbent on everyone in the House to make sure that they understand the rules set out in the Companion. I think that over time behaviour sometimes slips. This is a good opportunity to remind ourselves of those principles to which we all say, “Hear, hear,” but which we need to put into action.
(11 years, 5 months ago)
Lords ChamberI have a number of points, my Lords. First, on the question of having a Lord Speaker, I know that the House looked at it in the previous Session and concluded by a considerable margin that it would prefer to keep things as they were. As for regulating the House, it is the responsibility of all those on the Front Benches not to speak too long and not to hog questions and take them away from the Back Benches, but it is also the responsibility of the whole House to make its views known if it thinks that Members are going on for too long or are asking too many questions.
Does my noble friend agree that a single supplementary question is much better than a double-barrelled question, because the Minister does not have time to think?
As is often the case, my Lords, I do think that less is more. The Companion is extremely clear. It says that supplementary questions should be,
“short and confined to not more than two points … they should not incorporate statements of opinion. They should not be read”.
I think all of us will want to remember that.
(11 years, 8 months ago)
Lords ChamberI agree with the noble Lord’s point. It is an area where more work needs to be done. I accept that the provision is patchy. As regards the variation between different kinds of provision, the more we can publish data which illustrate what the facts are, so that people can then draw their own conclusions on the action needed, it is a good and healthy development.
Can my noble friend tell me what proportion of children going to school now have English as their second language?
I am afraid that I do not have those figures in my head but I will write to my noble friend and make sure that she has them.
(12 years, 10 months ago)
Lords ChamberCan my noble friend explain why children here go to school at the age of five when in virtually every other country they go to school at the age of six or seven?
I am not sure that I can provide an easy answer to that, other than to say that practices vary from country to country in all sorts of different ways.
(13 years, 2 months ago)
Lords ChamberI accept the noble Lord’s point that there are a range of challenges across the piece. Communication difficulty is another one, and in that case we are putting in place more specialist help through therapists. Working with the Department of Health and others, we need to find ways of early identification and giving as much support as we can to children with those challenges.
Will my noble friend say whether literacy is worse among children for whom English is a second language?
Looking at the literacy figures, we know overall that roughly one in five children leaving primary school are not achieving the basic standard expected of them, and those figures are worse for boys and for children on free school meals. With regard to children who do not have English as a first language, there are more challenges, and some schools that have large numbers of those will have to be realistic about the challenges that they face. It is also the case, however, that outstanding schools, which I am lucky enough to visit, are able to put teaching methods in place so that children who do not have English as a first language are able to learn to read fluently and well. The whole thrust of what we are doing is to try to increase the emphasis on moving to systematic synthetic phonics and early identification, and I hope that we will put in place in all schools systems to ensure that all children, including dyslexics from all backgrounds, have the chance to master the skills of reading and writing early, because without those they cannot go on to learn.
(14 years, 2 months ago)
Lords ChamberI start by paying tribute to the work of the noble Baroness as chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Modern Languages. I know that she has kept the flame for modern languages burning and I agree with her wholeheartedly about that. I am a great fan of modern languages and, if it is not too rash a thing to say on my first outing at Oral Questions, of ancient ones as well. As the noble Baroness knows, over 90 per cent of primary schools are offering a language to some of their pupils at key stage 2—70 per cent to all pupils. I welcome also the progress made by the previous Government in attracting and training more language teachers for primary schools. I reassure the noble Baroness that the spending cuts announced for the current financial year should not affect funding for primary languages or for the training of teachers.
My Lords, does my noble friend agree that a problem here is that English is the second language for 27 per cent of pupils coming into schools?
I agree with the noble Baroness. Obviously that increases the challenges that primary school teachers have in teaching languages. However, I have already had the privilege of seeing many good examples where schools are coping with that challenge and managing to teach modern foreign languages as well.