Education Bill

Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts

Tuesday 14th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Baker of Dorking]

My Lords, back to education, as I was saying before we were so rudely interrupted. I declare two interests in that I am the chairman of the Edge foundation and the Baker Dearing Educational Trust, two educational charities which promote technical, practical and vocational hands-on learning. I draw no remuneration from either charity and I have no interest in any educational company.

I support this Bill because it builds upon the Bill that was introduced in the last Session and really encapsulates Michael Gove’s major, radical reform. He is doing many other things but his really radical reform is to increase substantially the number of academies in the educational system. That goes back to the city technology colleges which I started back in the 1980s and which were the first colleges independent of local education authorities. When I announced them, they were totally opposed by the Labour Party, by the Liberal Party and by many Conservatives but the first 16 proved so successful that, when Labour came into power in 1997, it decided to expand and develop them. Indeed, when you listen to Tony Blair speak about his educational record it is all about academies and special schools.

The change that Michael Gove has made is that in effect—and this Bill says it—the assumption will be that all new schools will be academies. That is a very radical change which really turns the whole education system upside down, because in future the expansion of that system will be by demand pull and not by supply push. That means that huge responsibility is thrown to the local areas, to local communities and to the groups of people gathering together to create new schools. The Minister spoke of autonomy, which is a very important change.

I think that the Government will come to realise that, when academies expand, there will be a need for immediate bodies between them and the department. There will probably be several thousand academies, made up of some of the existing academy trusts and charities such as the Baker Dearing Educational Trust, which provides advice, guidance and help and ensures that standards are high in the colleges that it supports.

One of the reasons for my being particularly keen on this policy is that the technical colleges which I have promoted for the past four years and with Ron Dearing before he died count as academies. They are proving very successful. Together with the department, the Baker Dearing trust is examining more than 40 applications from all over the country, many from very deprived areas in the inner cities, to establish such colleges. I think that Members of the House who have heard me speak on these colleges previously will realise what they are: they are distinct from ordinary schools; they are 14 to 18, not 11 to 18; each is sponsored by a university, not just for prestige but to involve universities in pupil mentoring and pupil teaching at the ages of 14, 15, 16 and 17; and local industry gets involved, not just for day release, not even for apprentices, but in shaping the curriculum. That is because they will be the bodies that want to employ those youngsters when they leave the UTCs.

The colleges’ importance is recognised in lots of ways. First, the working day is 8.30 to 5.30, which is two hours more than for a normal school. They do 40 weeks instead of 38 weeks, which means that, over a five-year period, they gain a whole teaching year. Below 16, the teaching is 40 per cent technical and 60 per cent academic. Apart from engineering or the building trades, they offer English, maths and science and the bridging subjects of employability skills, entrepreneurial skills and financial skills. By way of foreign languages, they teach German for engineering, not Goethe, and French for business, not Molière. When it comes to humanities, we have commissioned courses in the histories and lives of great engineers, scientists and inventors.

The really distinguishing feature of the colleges is that the transfer age is 14. I have become quite convinced that the right age of transfer in our education system is 14 and not 11. By 14, many youngsters know what their interests are; they can make a decision as to which course they want to follow, as long as they have a chance of changing if it does not work out for them. This is very clear from the applications that we are examining. Many of the colleges have done popularity surveys in their areas which show very strong support from parents and students—50, 60 and 70 per cent—for more practical, vocational and technical education at the age of 14. That is what the colleges provide. Indeed, it is how Europe organises secondary education, having upper secondary and lower secondary at the age of 14. Fourteen is the dividing of the ways.

We could have had 14 in 1945, because the Board of Education meeting in 1941 chose the pattern of education after the war: selective grammar schools, selective technical schools and secondary modern. It also reckoned, which is often forgotten, that the transfer age should be 14. That was never changed by a Minister; it was changed simply by the Permanent Secretary of the day saying that transfer could not be at 14 because grammar schools started at 11. It was a missed opportunity. I hope that by establishing colleges that start at 14 we will provide game-changing ability in the education system. That is the way forward. I think that they will be very popular—the first one is already heavily oversubscribed for the second year—and spread across the country like wildfire.