Education: English Baccalaureate

Debate between Earl of Clancarty and Lord Nash

Monday 3rd July 2017 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Clancarty]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government when they will respond to the public consultation Implementing the English Baccalaureate which closed on 29 January 2016.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Lord Nash) (Con)]

My Lords, the results of the consultation on implementing the English baccalaureate and the Government’s response will be published in due course—I hope soon.

[The Earl of Clancarty (CB)]

My Lords, is this long delay because the overwhelming public response voices the concern that the EBacc excludes art and design subjects? I ask the Minister not to continue to justify the EBacc with the New Schools Network stats on the percentage of pupils taking one arts GCSE, which represented a shift away from other qualifications, but instead to look at the latest Ofqual figures revealing—two years in a row—a hugely alarming 8% decline in the take-up of arts GCSEs. The EBacc must be scrapped.

[Lord Nash]

I can tell the noble Earl that it is not a result of the points he has made. We have been considering carefully a great many responses, and there have been a few political issues in the meantime. I am certainly encouraged to see that we have been improving the quality of these subjects with help from the Royal Academy of Engineering and the James Dyson Foundation. The decline in the subjects to which the noble Earl refers has been more than made up for in the substantial increase in the number of pupils taking IT and the now almost 70,000 pupils taking computing.