Education: Development of Excellence

Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts

Thursday 18th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Baker of Dorking]

My Lords, I declare an interest as the chairman of two educational charities and I draw no remuneration from them. I wish to speak only about technical education, an area in which all parties have failed over the past 150 years. The reason for that is that the classic curriculum written by Thomas Arnold in 1840 has dominated English education and has been reinforced by the EBacc. As a result, technical, hands-on and practical learning has been eliminated from English schools.

We had technical colleges in 1945, alongside grammar schools. They were in shabby buildings and were closed by snobbery because everyone wanted to be the school on the hill and not the school involved with dirty jobs and greasy rags. It was a huge mistake. Germany did not make that mistake. It still has a tripartite system, which is one of the reasons why Angela’s ruling the roost. It is not the only one, but one of them.

Four years ago, Ron Dearing and I said that we must recreate these technical colleges and make them better. The university technical colleges are for 14 to 18 year-olds. We believe strongly that 14 is the right age to transfer, not 11—11 is too soon, 16 is too late. We have already discovered that if you treat 14 year-olds as adults, they come to college in business dress. They are given a laptop or an iPad. They start working with their hands for 40% of the working week. They turn up, truancy disappears, bloody-mindedness disappears—referral pupils come to these colleges and they attend.

Each college is supported by a university, so university lecturers, undergraduates and postgraduates go in and talk to the youngsters as part of the university outreach programme, thus introducing them to the richness of university life. We get local employers to create the lessons. Rolls-Royce created eight weeks of lessons on making piston pumps and trained the school staff who had to deliver those lessons. Network Rail created eight weeks of lessons on engineering and level crossing gates. The colleges are filming them, they liked them so much. The National Grid has produced eight weeks of lessons on electrical transmission. More than 400 companies are supporting the 33 schools that have been approved. Thirty-three have been approved, five are open.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hill, and Michael Gove for their support for these university technical colleges. They are the most successful free schools that have been started so far. I invite my noble friend to up the game a bit and get more established as soon as possible. There are 3,200 secondary schools in this country. There is no reason why one in 10 should not be a university technical college, giving a total of 320. It may be thought that that is ambitious but that was the number of colleges we had in 1945, and our country needs them.

This week the Royal Academy of Engineering produced a report saying that we are short of 100,000 engineers and 1 million technicians. The university technical colleges are the only schools and colleges in our country that are producing these young men and women below the age of 18. Therefore, I strongly recommend them. I am glad that this initiative has all-party support. In fact, it started under the previous Labour Government with the noble Lord, Lord Adonis. Stephen Twigg supports it and I know that the Liberals support it as well.

As regards the EBacc, I have set up a committee to establish a TechBacc and we will publish our proposals before Christmas. Therefore, this initiative is no longer an experiment; it is a movement. It is encouraging to find youngsters with a very broad band of abilities coming to these colleges. We are agents of social mobility. In the college at Hackney that I visited which has been open for seven weeks, 54% of the students get free school meals—that is a very high proportion indeed—and 80% are black and Asian. I met two pupils who had been expelled from their previous schools and their records were three inches thick. One of the girls was already on the school council and has decided that she wants to go on to college. These bodies are engaging the disengaged but also responding to the needs of our economy.

I repeat that my noble friend Lord Hill is very supportive of these colleges. I say to him that I have some help for him from on high. The right reverend Prelate will remember that the psalm that was read last Sunday was Psalm 90, which ends:

“Prosper thou the work of our hands upon us, O prosper thou our handywork”.

Therefore, I say to Ministers, “Prosper thou our handiwork”.