Lifelong Learning

Baroness Shephard of Northwold Excerpts

Thursday 6th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Shephard of Northwold (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Knight, on securing this debate, his insightful remarks and reminding us that all sectors of education need to evolve as our society changes. Lifelong learning has social, economic and personal value. It is long established but it has many of the qualities that the noble Lord demands: it is diverse, flexible, collaborative and constantly evolving to meet the needs of its customers. But it is frequently overlooked—although not today.

I am glad to note that, within the Government’s ambitious plans for reform of apprenticeships and for further and technical education, there is also mention of lifelong learning, responsibility for which I think is going to lie with mayoralties. The Government have equally ambitious plans for the wholesale reform of local government at the same time. I am looking at the Minister, who is smiling—it is not a gloomy day—and I am hoping that she is going to be able to reassure noble Lords that lifelong learning will not fall through any cracks.

Lifelong learning providers include local government, as we all know, colleges, schools, universities, extramural boards and, indeed, the voluntary sector. Courses can be part-time and short- or long-term, and they increasingly lead to qualifications. Grants are available for learning essential skills. There is a free courses for jobs scheme for low earners and the unemployed. Lifelong learning can be delivered, as we all know, remotely as lectures, courses and classes, and held in schools and colleges after hours, in village halls and—sometimes, in my own experience—in pubs.

The Open University was founded in 1969, and it has been one of the most revolutionary developments in lifelong learning. It enabled people—from their homes, with help from televised lectures and in-person courses—to graduate. The WEA, founded in 1903, has a distinguished record of providing pathways to qualifications and purely academic courses. The University of the Third Age has, since 1982, made an extremely valuable contribution to lifelong learning. It is run by volunteers, and its membership is now at nearly half a million.

The benefits of lifelong learning are wide-ranging. It can play a huge role in the future world of education the noble Lord described. It can certainly improve employment prospects, and research has also shown that it can benefit social skills and confidence and even improve mental health. One of the things that appeals most to me about it is that it is widely available and usually accessible, even in rural areas.

Our lifelong learning sector is unique, creative and endlessly adaptable. It has been a precious source of social mobility and more for generations. I ask the Minister to reassure the House that its unique nature and provision will not be threatened by all the activity going on in the education sectors that could affect its freedom and its effectiveness. I believe that she will be able to reassure me on that point. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Knight, for his widening of all our horizons on the contribution that education makes to our lives and to our nation.

Free Schools and Academies

Baroness Shephard of Northwold Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Shephard of Northwold (Con)]

My Lords, how inspiring it is to follow my noble friend Lord Harris. His enthusiasm for the work of his life shines out and encourages us all. I also congratulate my noble friend Lady Evans on her sparkling and enthusiastic opening to this debate.

Surrounded as I am by noble Lords on this side, I wonder whether I dare confess—but I am going to—that, when academies were first introduced by the Blair Government, I had some misgivings. However, it is true that the spirit of the academy movement—a loosening of local authority control—was already present in the creation of grant-maintained schools, specialist grant-maintained schools and city technology colleges under previous Conservative Governments.

In my professional life before politics, I had been the chief inspector of schools in a local authority. I strongly believed that the most important public service there is, namely education—also known as the future of our children——should be democratically accountable through elected bodies. But, from being in a job that meant I was in schools and colleges a lot of the time, I also knew that the excellence or otherwise of any institution, including schools, depended on the quality of the head. It was also obvious that the best heads ran the best schools because they were innovative, creative and determined to make their schools serve pupils, parents and their neighbourhoods.

However, I began to note that those heads were frequently frustrated by their inability to pursue change inside the local authority system. They needed more flexibility in recruitment and to be able to vary teachers’ pay to attract the best. They needed the opportunity to vary the curriculum to reflect the needs of their pupils and generally unleash creativity within their institutions.

When the academies movement got under way, it did indeed attract those creative and innovative heads and teachers, whose achievements have created a system in which nearly 50% of all our schools are now academies. The results—particularly when compared with those in Scotland and Wales, which pursued a different path—are more than encouraging. Since 2000 the UK has moved from 21st to seventh in the international league tables in maths, and from 11th to ninth in science. One of the most impressive achievements is the result of the requirement for failing local authority schools to become academies, thus giving those schools more support and fresh hope for children, often in disadvantaged neighbourhoods, for the future. As Tony Blair said at the 2005 Labour Party conference,

“the beneficiaries are not fat cats. They are some of the poorest families in the poorest parts of Britain”.

My noble friend Lord Harris has given graphic illustrations of that.

While I obviously understand the wish of a new Government to innovate, I do not know and cannot understand why they would want to limit the current powers of academies to vary the curriculum to meet the needs of the pupils in their schools. Academies, like local authority schools, are inspected by Ofsted, and any irregularities that affect pupils, disadvantaged or otherwise, would surely be picked up and dealt with. Regular Ofsted inspections should also meet the Government’s concerns about qualified teacher status and the relaxing of requirements for that status in academies.

I greatly respect the Minister. I have in my mind that last week she apologised for sometimes being grumpy. I hope I am not going to bring out a display of grumpiness from her, but I hope she will allow me to ask the obvious question: exactly what problem with academies does the new Bill seek to solve? I had always believed that academies were an area of cross-party agreement, so my hope is that this debate and the passage of the new education Bill will continue in a good spirit. Good educational standards can only benefit our children, who will bear the burden of the future.

Education (Values of British Citizenship) Bill [HL]

Baroness Shephard of Northwold Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 18th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Shephard of Northwold (Con)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble and right reverend Lord and the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett. I congratulate the noble and right reverend Lord on his Bill, which seeks to update and clarify the principles underlying the teaching of fundamental British values in our schools, within the national curriculum’s citizenship programme.

We all understand that sensitive issues are involved. One is the use of the term “fundamental British values”, which, when it was introduced as part of the Prevent strategy in 2011, met with opposition from some communities where people felt that the term was directed at them. Others felt the term suggested that British values were somehow superior to other nations’ values. The Bill meets these criticisms head-on by referring instead to the “values of British citizenship”. There are other textual but very important changes in the Bill, and the extremely interesting addition of “respect for the environment”—but there are questions about the current teaching of citizenship in our schools.

I turn to the Minister, whom I warmly welcome to her post. She will know that, in 2013, Ofsted reported positively on the teaching in schools of citizenship education. It said that

“headteachers had recognised the rich contribution the subject makes to pupils’ learning … and to the ethos of a school”.

But by 2018, a Lords Select Committee report entitled The Ties that Bind found that

“citizenship education is being subsumed”

into PHSE and was focusing on the personal development of young people rather than teaching them about their role in society, ignoring the political element of being a citizen. Rather alarmingly, the Lords Liaison Committee heard in 2022 from the Association for Citizenship Teaching that

“there was a general lack of … understanding of the subject by inspectors of what Citizenship is”.

I am shocked. I spent some time in my professional career as a schools inspector and this seems a rare accusation.

What has caused this change? We all value citizenship teaching, but do teachers now find the concept vague and difficult? Or do they, conscious of the sensitivities involved, need the confidence of new definitions and more clarity? I hope that the Government will see the proposals in the Bill as thoughtful and sensitive and a positive way forward.