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

Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts

Friday 26th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

It is always a pleasure to follow my friend, the noble Baroness, Lady Morris. She is one of the three former Education Secretaries—the other being the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett—who still talk about education, and brings to the House her wisdom and experience.

This is a fascinating debate. When my noble friend Lord Johnson presented his report in December 2023, it was dismissed out of hand by the previous Government. We were told that our recommendations to change the curriculum were absurd because the curriculum, which was EBacc and progress 8, was the best that had been invented by mankind, and as for the assessment system of GCSEs, it was the best examination system in the world, and the person who invented it was brilliant. I invented it, and I now want to scrap it.

The GCSE exam dominates the whole educational world. I spoke to a young student last week who has just done her GCSEs. I asked, “How many exams did you take?” She said, “I took 27 exams—nine in five days”. That is absolutely absurd. The GCSE dominates the whole education system, and I hope that it will be a victim of the review that the Government set up. It was needed in 1980 because 80% of children left school at 16. Now only 5% leave at 16, and the qualification that is important is what you get at 18.

I welcome what the Government said in their manifesto and the action that they have already taken. The Secretary of State got off the mark very quickly. She said in the Commons only two days ago that she was going to stop the defunding of BTECs. It is a very technical matter, but it is important that BTECs and T-levels run together. I thank her for that. She also said that she would set up a skills fund. I very much welcome that; it will replace a body that we—the Conservatives—abolished in 2017: the Commission for Employment and Skills, which identified the skills that the country needed and identified where there were gaps. Since that time, there has been a sort of mist, miasma and fog over skills; then suddenly, out of the blue, we discovered that we were short of abattoir workers, heavy duty drivers, construction workers and data analysts. The Government have already appointed an interim head of the skills fund, Mr Pennycook, whom I hope to meet.

The other fundamental thing that the Government have done is to set up a review of the curriculum and assessment from 14 to 18 under Professor Becky Francis, who is a very distinguished person and well-known figure in education. That review will be very important. Its object is to re-establish the broad curriculum, which I tried to introduce in the 1980s. It has been whittled away. As a result of the EBacc, design technology—the only practical study—has been reduced by 80%; that is incredible. The cultural subjects—I think the Minister is responsible for culture, or has some interest in culture—have dropped by 50%, including drama, dance, music, art and the performing arts. That industry is burgeoning: the entertainment industry in Britain this year is likely to earn as much as banking. There is huge demand. Eight of the colleges that I promote produce students for the entertainment industry.

One thing that we made a great fuss of in this report was the importance of data skills. In this day and age, students at 18 must all have data skills, not just to be able to use a computer for Instagram and social media but to use all the riches of a computer. In the schools I have been promoting for the past 15 years—university technical colleges—all the students have a computer and are, obviously, well versed in how to use them. What I have found, however, is that everything is happening so rapidly in this area that you have to realise that data skills change almost every other year. Cybersecurity is one example. Several of the colleges that I promote teach cybersecurity with GCHQ. GCHQ has come out of its closet to say that it will support these schools. That is not done in normal state schools.

These schools also teach virtual reality—helmets on heads—and gaming and all that sort of thing. We are the centre of the gaming industry. Again, this is not in normal schools today. The only exam is a GCSE in computer science. My grandson has recently taken it—he did very well—but all they do is learn coding. You no longer need to learn coding, because artificial intelligence codes quicker and is more accurate. The only GSCE that we have in computing, which is taken by only 13% of the children, teaches something that they will no longer need. This shows how important this review will be.

To stay on skills for a moment, it is really very important to change the whole mentality and approach. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chichester said that the approach of the Church of England was “Wisdom, knowledge and skills”. I benefited from that, as I went to a Church of England primary school when we were evacuated to Southport. It really was the basis of my education. It is important to have that mixture. In the university technical colleges that I have been promoting for the past 15 years, we try to have that. First, they are for 14 to 18 year-olds. Fourteen is very important as a transfer age in education; the rest of the world tends to transfer at 14. Europe is moving from lower secondary to upper secondary at 14 and America changes at 14. We are the only country that is stuck with 11 and 16. We have 11 because it was once the school leaving age and 16 because that was also once the school leaving age. The school leaving age should no longer be the determination. The private sector in Britian, as noble Lords know, changes at nine and 13 or 14, as the rest of the world does. This is something that I hope the review committee will look at very carefully indeed.

You cannot just turn on technical and cultural education with one switch. It is much more complicated than that. The real success of our schools is that we get local companies—whether the school is in Newcastle, Plymouth, Birmingham or Norfolk—to determine what should be taught in the curriculum, because that is what affects the local community. In Birmingham it is cars, but we have also now discovered that jewellery is a very important industry in Birmingham. This September, we will have jewellery courses, on manufacture and training, in the Aston UTC. One has to develop these sorts of local things. Technical education does not work without the active support of local companies. By “active”, I mean that they sit on the board, help to determine the curriculum, bring in projects for students to work on in teams, and get involved in the schools, just as the local university does. That is the sort of education that we should have in this century.

I am very hopeful that we have now got to the stage where change will happen. It really must. If the Government are to get a 1% improvement in the country’s economic performance, we will have to produce more skilled people in our country. Otherwise, the alternative is to import more from overseas. The Government are quite right to promote wind farms, both offshore and onshore, but the Minister will discover that at least 25% or 30% of the people managing the large offshore one at Grimsby come from overseas. There is a huge task to be done in training people in all these skills.

I very much hope that we are at the dawn of a very different and new age. I hope that it will be done with cross-party support. I hope to persuade my party to support what the Government are doing. It might be quite a difficult task from time to time, but I will do my best.