Schools: Resources

Baroness Wheatcroft Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

We always make strenuous recommendations on that. Perhaps I was sensitive to the noble Lord’s phrase; I think he used the term “fight”. We are trying to work collaboratively to get to the best answer for the country.

[Baroness Wheatcroft (CB)]

My Lords, as we have seen in new figures produced today, the cost of basic foodstuffs has gone up by a massive amount. What are the Government doing to ensure that school meals are not losing some of their nutritional value for the children who need it so much?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

Again, the Government work closely with schools, but ultimately it is within schools’ own responsibilities to organise and fund their school meals from their core funding.

Foreign Languages: Economic Value

Baroness Wheatcroft Excerpts

Tuesday 29th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I absolute agree with the noble Lord and that is why I referred to the Turing scheme, which we hope will be part of creating that richer picture of the world we live in.

[Baroness Wheatcroft (CB)]

My Lords, the Minister cited a statistic for the success with French and Spanish, but they are languages of the EU, with whom our trade has fallen, according to the Dutch Government, by 14% in the three months to January compared with two years previously. I wonder whether the Minister can say something about our success in teaching the languages of those new markets in which we are going to succeed.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, referred to the Mandarin Excellence Programme, but I point out that, as the noble Baroness understands, French and Spanish are very widely spoken outside the EU.

National Tutoring Programme

Baroness Wheatcroft Excerpts

Thursday 24th February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I remind the noble Lord that the bulk of the programme is being directly delivered by schools; that is what they recommended to government, and we listened. Some 230,000 tuition courses started through the school-led pillar, 52,000 through tuition partners and 20,000 through academic mentors. There is a reason for the blend of approaches. It is clearly unacceptable for a tutor not to turn up, and I hope that Mr Ratcliffe has been able to resolve that.

[Baroness Wheatcroft (CB)]

My Lords, the government figures are for courses which have started, but as the noble Lord pointed out, many of these courses cannot be completed because of no shows by tutors. Does the Minister have any figures for how many courses have been fully completed?

Queen’s Speech

Baroness Wheatcroft Excerpts

Thursday 19th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wheatcroft (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome much of what was announced yesterday in the gracious Speech. It is some years since our current Prime Minister declared that he wanted to heal the broken society. I fully supported that aim and still do, but there is much to be done to achieve it. This legislative programme would make a real difference to life chances through the promised changes relating to childcare and those excluded from schools, along with the much-needed radical prison reforms.

Who could fail to be excited by a Queen’s Speech that promised to give the UK the first commercial spaceport? Earlier this year I was lucky enough to meet Chris Hadfield, the Canadian astronaut who commanded the International Space Station. It was not his rendering of “Space Oddity” that stunned his audience, even though it was remarkable, but his conviction that within 20 years earthlings would be colonising the moon. So commercial spaceports to get people back and forth may not be the stuff of science fiction that they currently sound. Innovative business is already investing in developing space technology, and it is on business that I want to concentrate today.

Several measures were announced yesterday that could help business to thrive. In particular, we need to nurture our smaller businesses and help them to become big world-beaters. The digital economy is crucial to that. Fast broadband is not a luxury but an essential. If a business loses its internet connection or is slow in being able to respond, it does not just lose a connection; it loses a customer. So I welcome the commitment to a universal service obligation for fast broadband, a move that could benefit over 1 million households and business premises. However, we have to be sure that fast broadband becomes faster.

The Bill also commits the Government to supporting new digital industries. We have heard much praise already for our remarkable creative industries, which are in a world-beating class, but it should not be forgotten that the inventor of the world wide web was a Brit. Sir Tim Berners-Lee did not make the fortune that the founders of Google, Apple or Facebook made, but he gave the world an extraordinary benefit. Now we must encourage the new pioneers of digital development, and if we can link them, the technological wizards, with the creative minds that we foster, we could generate huge growth.

The local government and jobs Bill could make a big difference to business. Giving local government full control over business rates should encourage creative thinking as to how to attract the businesses that councils need in their areas. It could generate new life on high streets, which in so many towns have suffered a blight of shop closures and desperately need reinvigorating. Differential business rates could be the way to do that.

For regions that have grasped the localism agenda, there is even further scope to engage with business. The new mayors are being given a power to make a levy to fund infrastructure projects. Infrastructure is still woeful in parts of the country, and it is good to see a determination to put this right, both nationally and locally. Incidentally, the modern transport Bill pledges to reduce the congestion that currently costs the UK economy £20 billion a year. I wonder whether that means examining the utilisation of the swathes of the capital’s highways now set aside for the use of that most modern mode of transport, the bicycle.

Before mayors can make the levy, the proposed project will have to have the support of local businesses, which is to be ascertained through the local enterprise partnerships. LEPs can be a force for good, and undoubtedly in some parts of the country they are, but the anecdotal evidence is that the quality differs hugely. It is vital that the Government ensure that the LEPs provide the support that businesses, particularly smaller businesses, need. This is really important when it comes to exporting. For a great trading nation, we are pretty bad at exporting. Four out of five small businesses do not export.

If the Government are to stand a chance of reaching their target of taking exports to £1 trillion of goods and services every year, that proportion has to change. BIS and UKTI can offer much support for exporters, but too often it is very difficult for customers to ascertain exactly what is on offer and how to make the most of it. There has been a lot of talk about simplification, but not a lot of simplification. LEPs could help companies to navigate this maze. They could also be instrumental in one of my hobby horses, encouraging big businesses to help smaller ones in the export effort, providing mentoring and contacts and probably even financial support.

Apart from finance, business needs skills, and I hope that the details of the higher education and research Bill will show that skills will be enhanced by it. It promises a new range of universities, but I hope that we are not reverting to the belief that a university education is right for everyone. Apprenticeships offer many school leavers a wonderful chance to acquire the skills that industry needs without acquiring the heavy burden of student debt. Many universities are still failing to offer their students the acquisition of skills and are offering merely the debt.

The target of 3 million apprenticeships by 2020 is admirable, and I hope that the Minister can reassure me that the target remains in place and that the new universities that the Government wish to encourage will be allied to the skills agenda. Sheffield Hallam, for instance, is partnered with some major companies in delivering a chartered manager degree apprenticeship, and given that the Chartered Management Institute reckons that bad management costs the UK £19 billion a year, that must be welcome.

Business has an important role to play in the new plan for prisons. If people walk out of jail and into a job, their chances of reoffending are hugely reduced. Some companies already do marvellous work to ensure that this happens, National Grid and Pret A Manger among them. It would make a huge difference if every company joined them and concentrated on taking a few ex-offenders into employment.

Finally, I was not going to mention the referendum but my noble friend Lord Trenchard has persuaded me to do so. If the Bank of England, the IMF and the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, among many others, think it would be deeply damaging for the UK to leave the EU, I cannot help but feel that we should listen to them.

Education: English Baccalaureate Certificate

Baroness Wheatcroft Excerpts

Thursday 24th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

We have received this report. We are considering all the responses to the consultation in relation to the EBCs and we certainly will be taking that into account.

[Baroness Wheatcroft]

My Lords—

[Lord Broers]

My Lords—

[The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (Lord Hill of Oareford)]

I think it is the Conservatives’ turn this time.

[Baroness Wheatcroft]

My Lords, does my noble friend the Minister agree that one of the most common complaints from industry has been about the lack of employability of so many school leavers because of their lack of numeracy and literacy? Does he also agree that in the United States a lot of children are taught computer programming, whereas in this country we tend to teach technology as the use of technology, and that programming would be a great advantage?

[Lord Nash]

This is something we have considered and will consider further. The core EBacc subjects are set but we will be announcing our views shortly on the assessment method for what other subjects should be taken into account.

Education: Development of Excellence

Baroness Wheatcroft Excerpts

Thursday 18th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wheatcroft]

My Lords, perhaps I could begin by saying that I am a proud product of the state system. I congratulate my noble friend Lady Perry on initiating this debate and covering so much ground in her opening speech. A lot has been said about the improvements being made to our education system. Increasing choice and raising standards are both crucial, and I applaud the remarkable progress being made.

However, I shall devote my remarks to the need to empower teachers. Children are all different. Nature and nurture ensure that, by the time the education system gets hold of them, they have varied talents and abilities and varied personalities. Some are confident and raring to go—that is in the inner cities as well as elsewhere—and some, and one would be too many, are already cowed into submission or consumed with anger by their circumstances. As their school careers progress, these traits can be exaggerated. Some children are pre-programmed to fail. Caring teachers can rescue them.

The best teachers are those who treat their charges as individuals and have the real desire to nurture them and to bring out what is best in them. That is why, whatever the demands of the curriculum, there has to be time, and place, for attention to be paid to the children as individuals. There are various blueprints for doing this. Secondary schools, where I think they have learnt in part from the public system, operate a house system which seems to work particularly well in assigning a degree of pastoral care to pupils. Thanks to the Lord Speaker’s Peers in Schools programme, I have been lucky enough to visit schools where children from very different backgrounds are thriving thanks to structures which build relationships between teachers and pupils that go far beyond exam marks.

A teacher attending to a child in the round can transform a life. He or she can detect problems that children suffer—we have heard about the difficulties, for instance, with autism and dyslexia. The right teacher can ascertain where a child’s real interests lie and encourage them to make the most of their talents. This is, of course, what parents do, but some parents are unwilling or just unable to do so. Teachers often truly are in loco parentis. We need to ensure that they are trained and encouraged to carry out that role to the full. My noble friend Lady Perry talked of the need for trust. Well, we have to trust our teachers to put a comforting arm around a sobbing child, to administer medicine to a poorly child and to demonstrate humanity. A few may abuse their position, which should never be tolerated—in the current climate, in the wake of the Savile affair and so on, opinions are obviously going to be influenced again—but we must not overreact and impose undue restrictions on our teachers.

When teachers try to impose order on disorderly pupils, they, too, deserve our support. Too often, we hear of teachers who have confronted the most appalling, violent behaviour in the classroom, and it is they who end up being disciplined. Too often, school governors are fearful of what the media and disruptive parents might say, but teachers need our support.

We should recognise the extraordinary contribution made by some teachers who throw themselves into extracurricular activities such as weekend sports matches and school plays and who build a school into a thriving community. Those who give so much of themselves should surely be rewarded, if not financially then when it comes to promotion.