Education for 11 to 16 Year-olds (Committee Report)

Lord Addington Excerpts

Friday 26th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, having overcome my disappointment at not being quite quick enough to get on to the committee, this is one of those reports where, when I heard that a debate was taking place on it, I suspected that the answers would be exactly as they have been. Anybody who has been following the education debate will not be surprised by any of the answers we hear.

We started this debate with a description from the noble Baroness, Lady Blower—it is a pity she is not back in her place—of how the tone on education set by the previous Government was like the cock-up school of history writ large: “Got to say something. Got to say the right thing at the right time. Let’s go with that. We’ll go back to good standards and good academic levels. This is what we were taught at grammar school”. That, I am afraid, is the impression I had of the previous Government’s education policy from start to finish.

This has led to other things happening. For instance, if you put an emphasis on academic achievement, anybody who is not academic or does not conform to this will be squeezed. As night follows day, it is there. Also, it is slightly looking back to “the sort of thing we did in my day” and to “We all know that what we did was right, because we did it”. It is only when we get taken out of that space that we realise that the world moves on or that there would have been a better solution even for us. That is one of the things I have come across in listening to this debate and to the experience that has gone through.

One of the main things I would say about this issue is that the damage to it is not just the overloaded system, with the huge amounts of technical detail in the current GCSEs. To digress for a minute, those were roughly the arguments when the old O-level was gotten rid of. People were teaching to memory and rote learning, and there were lots of facts and details. We got rid of them to replace them with a shiny new GCSE that would have more emphasis on learning and concepts. Well, it has changed, has it not?

We must ensure that people are not merely regurgitating something that fits a very narrow band. I regret not having seen the Gibb-Baker confrontation. It is sounds like it would have put “Ali v Frazier 1” to shame. If we are going to step away from that, we must be aware of a couple of things. One is that education must keep everybody interested for longer. Having diverse subjects means that a person can have a degree of success, whether in sport, the arts or technical detail. Everything backs this up: if somebody enjoys their sport they are more likely to do well at other subjects, and the same for somebody who is good at art or the technical detail.

If you keep it narrow and focused, you guarantee failure. If you guarantee failure and it becomes a bad experience, that person will disengage. If you are lucky, that disengagement will be disappearing into the middle of the class and doing nothing. If you are unlucky, that person will be out of the school system completely—physically as well. This has been a contributory factor to the fall-off from our school rolls. There is no two ways about it. I do feel rather sorry for the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, who has to come next. I hope that the Government, when they answer, will tell us how they will ensure that people have a degree of success within the school.

There is an unwritten rule that whenever I speak on education, I must declare my interests in special educational needs and assistive technology. I am very glad that the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, got there first today. However, if we are dealing with technology and using it as the useful tool that it can be, I hope that the Government can give us some hint that they are open to using this correctly. We have just heard that the technical processes of mathematics and English can be done by a computer. Voice-to-text and text-to-voice technology is built into every system from Windows 10 upwards, Apple and all the others. It is there: you press a button, talk to your computer and it word-processes for you. I am still waiting for the people who can tell me why this is less efficient than tapping a keyboard. You can quite easily mark how well somebody does that compared with tapping a keyboard or writing with a pen. The same is true of mathematics and many other concepts. You still have to know what you are telling the machine to do, but then it will come back to you and tell you what you have done.

Doing that will open up these subjects and their basic requirements for large groups of people. If we remain obsessed with written English tests they will continue to be a barrier for many people. I suggest that anybody who wants to fall asleep rapidly looks at the work I did on the apprenticeship system all those years ago. If you put those barriers in place that do not allow people to enter by saying that they have to take these tests in certain ways, you waste time and potential, and build in that failure.

If the new Government are to deal with this, please can they ensure that they embrace it and bring people together? They have the capacity now. You do not have to do anything special; you have to say that the system will do it. You may have to tell teachers that they will have to operate differently and give them some more training. I hate to say that to teachers, who have such an overloaded timetable at the moment, but it is required. Better training in these areas, or at least an awareness, is required in order to do this, but it can be done, and once it has been done the load on the teacher should be lowered.

When the Government respond, can they let us know exactly what they are aiming to do and what the central drive is? If they get that right, everything else will be that little bit easier, but one of the things they must do is ensure that they open up the base of operation. Technical schools and technical education are one way forward, but all the things that they hope to do will allow more people into the system to have a stake in it. At the moment, we exclude those at the edges—cutting them off and making it more difficult. We should not be doing that. We should ensure that the education system says that there is a place for everybody.

The back-up for this, as everybody has said, is that many of the new skills that we have are better acquired through others areas of examination or study. It is not just the key elements. The creative industries, as anybody who pays attention to the DCMS brief will know, have been saying for ages, “No, we don’t need to retrain another English graduate in the creative industries. We need people with level 4 or level 5 technical qualifications”. Allow this key area—one which allows people to go on to their next stage of training or university—to be broader, and allow people into different areas of training. If you do that, you will remove some of the problems which we have at the moment, where people take qualifications that they probably do not want and will not use, and which they take longer to achieve and with more debt. This will be a big cultural shift, so if the Government do not start it now, they will be in real trouble, but how they do it will be very important.

I hope that this report goes down as being a death knell on a wrong turn in education. I hope that the Government will confirm that they are looking forward, to ensure that the general thrust of this report becomes a key part of this bit of education. Also, it would not be beyond my wish list to hear what the Government will do on the other bits to allow that to happen. I understand why the report can cover only a few years in the timescale that we had, but we need to remember that we have stages before and after and think about how this key bit goes in. The analysis from the noble Lord, Lord Baker, of why we have exams at 16, was right on this occasion. When the two of us agree, I always worry that somebody will say that we are wrong, but I think that he is right. However, if can make building up to those exams at 16 more flexible and inclusive, we will take a big step towards ensuring that the rest of the education system works a little bit better.