English Baccalaureate: Creative and Technical Subjects

Earl of Clancarty Excerpts

Thursday 14th September 2017 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Clancarty (CB)]

My Lords, I am glad that the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott has secured this debate. By her laying down an alternative point of view, as the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, has also done, one of the things this debate provokes—perhaps even more than is usual in education debates—is the fundamental question of what is and is not a good education for our children; and, furthermore, is that not the education they are currently receiving?

I want to try to answer these questions myself by using as a starting point a couple of things that School Standards Minister Nick Gibb has said this year. The first, which is in the excellent Library briefing, is from the Written Statement of 19 July of this year repeated in this House. It stated that the EBacc subjects,

“are the core of a rounded and well balanced education that should be the entitlement of the vast majority of pupils”.

The noble Lord, Lord Nash, has repeated on a number of occasions that he thinks that what is being offered is a rounded education.

The other is from comments made by Nick Gibb at Chobham Academy in east London and reported last week in the Times Educational Supplement. He said:

“If you keep the Ebacc small enough … and don’t give in to the temptation to add more and more subjects to that core, you … enable pupils to also take a vocational subject … to take arts to GCSE, and that’s really what lies behind the whole Ebacc policy”.


I too believe passionately in a rounded education—I will say why in a moment—but the first and most obvious thing to say is that by including sciences but not the arts within the core subjects then, by definition, you are not facilitating a rounded or well-balanced education because you are elevating the one thing above the other. This seems to me so obvious that it is difficult to understand why the Government are doing what they are doing.

However, in his other comments, Nick Gibb makes a distinction between core and vocational subjects—which is a distinction that people make. Not everyone who studies the arts goes on to become a professional artist or a professional musician, just as not everyone who studies the sciences or mathematics becomes, in the most specialised sense, a scientist or a mathematician. Indeed, in all these cases they are in the minority. The underlying assumption is of course that, as subjects to study and understand, the so-called “vocational subjects”—a term I would dispute—are not worthy of study to the same extent, the prejudice, as we know, being towards the inherent form of the knowledge imparted.

However, education is not just learning towards a specialisation or even a practice—although the Minister would do well to take on board many of the noble Baroness’s arguments in this respect. It also means that through studying subjects you will become part of the audience for them. This, in my view, is the meaning of education for its own sake, a phrase we do not hear often enough these days. This is the process of literacy which enriches society as a whole—meaning also, in the case of the arts, it should not just be a minority of privileged students who can afford, for example, music lessons through private schooling or private tuition, but all students.

I would say that, without even considering yet evidence that the EBacc is harming creative subjects, the Government’s set of core subjects which represents a very particular vision of education—supposedly the right requirement for entry into a certain group of universities—is simply wrong from the outset. Wrong because it is restricted and restrictive—perhaps any set of core subjects is—and curiously standing in contrast to other courses around the world which prepare students for university and other colleges, such as the International Baccalaureate, which assumes that creative subjects will be studied up to pre-university level.

At some stage students want to specialise. We might argue when that should be but they should not be forced into a box—which is what the EBacc is—but able to make their own choices, and to do so from the more powerful position of an already wide-ranging education.

The EBacc may be a performance measure and entered by less than 40% of pupils in state schools, but it is the culture that the EBacc represents that is being instilled in and felt by schools, with creative subjects being squeezed out of the teaching day. To answer my second question: yes, of course the EBacc is now having a huge effect and schoolchildren are not getting the education that even the Government say they should be getting. For example, a new Norwich University of the Arts study on Norfolk schools finds that since 2010 there has been a decrease of 40% in staffing in art and design and/or design and technology. Design and technology has 25% fewer teachers with 23% fewer teaching hours. A similar story is being revealed by a growing number of studies. The National Society for Education in Art and Design’s survey of teachers last year,

“told us that the implementation of the EBacc has reduced opportunities for young people of all abilities to select art and design at GCSE”.

A study by the University of Sussex of more than 700 schools in England shows a decline in music in the curriculum. Across the country there are significant falls in the number of hours taught, a decline in specialist teachers, in teachers overall, and in resources.

There are also knock-on effects within the system. The City of London Corporation briefing notes, which we probably all received, talk about the Guildhall School of Music and Drama’s concern at the decline in good students from state schools. And of course we are seeing dramatic falls in the take-up of creative subjects at GCSE, the figures for which were quoted by the noble Baroness. Evidence of the decline of creative subjects in our schools is becoming a torrent. How will Ofsted reflect the Government’s EBacc policy in its inspection procedures, as it has promised to do? How will non-EBacc subjects not then start to be neglected?

In the interests of a rounded education, as the Norwich University of the Arts paper recommends, what is urgently required is parity of esteem between creative and STEM subjects. This will be achieved only through radically reforming, or better still scrapping, the EBacc.