Active Citizenship

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Maclennan of Rogart for introducing this important debate. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Bannside, on his maiden speech, and I look forward to that of the noble Lord, Lord Blair of Boughton.

I would like to concentrate my remarks on active citizenship as it relates to young people. In our schools, we should be preparing children for their future lives, not just stuffing them with facts which they might need for any particular job. We should also be giving them a love of learning, stimulating their curiosity and teaching them how to learn. None of us can look in our crystal balls and see what our career pattern will bring us. I had three careers before I had the surprise of coming to your Lordships’ House. That is why I believe it is crucial that we continue, nay improve, the courses in schools which prepare children to lead a happy, fulfilling and active life both within their families and in their communities. Both national curriculum citizenship and personal, social, health and economic education—PSHE—courses fall into this category.

As my noble friend Lord Maclennan said, citizenship was first introduced as a cross-curricular theme by a Conservative Government and became a statutory subject under the previous Government, giving all children an entitlement to the only curricular subject that encompasses politics, economics and the law and that teaches children about their rights and responsibilities as citizens. We may not know how a child will earn his living when he leaves school but we do know that he will eventually get the right to vote—unless he is sectioned or becomes a Member of Your Lordships’ House. We want him to make a positive contribution to society.

In these days when politics is in disrepute, we need to do everything we can to encourage young people to learn enough about politics to be able to make up their own minds and use their vote when the time comes. I often ask young people when I go into schools as part of the Lord Speaker's outreach programme whether they agree, as I do, with votes at 16. Not all of them do. I usually ask those who do not why that is. They tend to say, “I don't know enough about it”, to which I retort that I know a lot of 40 year-olds who don't know much about it either but they still have a vote. Many citizenship teachers do a great job and our own Parliamentary Education Department offers excellent materials and events to help them. But there is always room for further improvement and support from the Government.

Citizenship is important because it provides young people with the knowledge and skills they need to become employable and to make an effective contribution to public life. Surely that is part of what the Prime Minister means by the big society. Citizenship is intellectually rigorous and children see it as relevant to their lives, which is more than can be said for quadratic equations in most cases. That is why young people find it interesting and engaging.

PSHE also develops the skills that children need in life and in employment, and many schools also introduce an element of volunteering in the community. This often lays down an attitude of being willing to help others, which follows people into adult life. In my own school, long before citizenship or PSHE were invented, we went to visit elderly housebound people and did jobs for them. I think that my disabled old lady enjoyed my visits and I certainly learnt more about betting on horses than I would ever have learnt at school, because she was brought up near Aintree racecourse. Seriously, it did me a lot of good. Can my noble friend the Minister assure me that there are no plans to downgrade either of these important subjects from the school curriculum?

Of course, schools do other things to develop young citizens, such as in the school councils. From the very early years in primary school, they teach children about decision-making, how to make their voice heard and how to negotiate for what they want. When my step-granddaughter was elected to her school council, we mused at home that it was the first time that any of the family had been elected to anything, however hard her grandfather and I had tried. Many schools testify to the benefits of these school councils in developing responsible young people.

Community activities need somewhere to take place, and not every town or village has a lovely community hall such as ours in Gresford. Section 4 of the Children, Schools and Families Act 2010 takes effect from next April. It enables schools to use their delegated budgets for community facilities. Schools have had powers to provide community facilities or services since the Education Act 2002, but there were restrictions whereby they could fund services only when they directly supported the curriculum or were of direct educational benefit to pupils. Services such as adult learning or sports activities for the local community could be funded only by certain grants, charges or other external income. Schools will soon be able to use this power to allow their facilities to be used for those things. Can my noble friend the Minister confirm that the Government have no intention of restricting the scope of this funding, since it has the potential to provide great opportunities for community action in many places that do not have other facilities and to make better use of the buildings and equipment for which our taxes have already paid?

Finally, I join my noble friend Lord Maclennan of Rogart in welcoming the national citizen service. When I first heard about this idea, I was slightly sceptical that it might be just for the middle-class children for whom there are already many opportunities. However, following a meeting with my right honourable friend Tim Loughton, the Minister for Children, my mind has been set at rest. He told me that the pilot schemes were measured on their effectiveness in ensuring that there was inclusiveness and that young people who were hard to reach were actually reached by those schemes. The first organisations that have won contracts for the first year have been told that their success will be measured on that basis. It is very important that we involve young people who do not have other opportunities. I was very interested to hear that a group that is very well represented in applications to take part in the national citizen service is young Muslim teenage women. That is an excellent thing. I wish the scheme a fair wind, but I hope that my noble friend can set my mind at rest on one or two other matters.