School Inspections: Funding
Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts(2 days, 16 hours ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
As I said in my initial response, Ofsted, like any well-run organisation, has looked at where it is spending its budget and has refocused that. The Government have given it additional funding for the uplift, particularly in school inspections, that has been expected. Obviously we work very closely with Ofsted, and I cannot comment on any future spending review.
Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)
My Lords, as I am responsible for 44 university technical colleges, I have received lots of Ofsted inspections, and I am glad to say that 85% resulted in good or outstanding ratings but 15% were rated as failing. I do not resent it; I do not object. Ofsted has told us what we have to do better. Any education system in the world requires an independent inspectorate. That is what Ofsted is, and it should be supported.
Baroness Barran (Con)
I thank my noble friend for his remarks. I agree that we have a system in this country with high autonomy in our schools. We trust our school and trust leaders to deliver for our children, but with that autonomy goes high accountability.
Ofsted: Pupil Absence Rates
Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts(2 months ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
The Government remain committed to legislating to set up a register of children not in school. The noble Lord may be aware that the honourable Member for Meon Valley has introduced a Private Member’s Bill, and we will be working hard with her as she progresses that.
Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)
My Lords, when children of 14 decide to leave their school and go to a university technical college, their absence rate falls dramatically compared to that at their previous school. They like going to a UTC because they can work in workshops as well as classrooms, they can learn by their hands as well as their brains, and they visit companies looking for jobs. I assure your Lordships that, unless that sort of education is deeply embedded, the absence rates of disadvantaged students will not fall, because they are told all the time by the Department for Education that they must study eight academic subjects. We need a curriculum fitted to this century.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My noble friend needs to consider also the patterns of attendance before the pandemic. The curriculum was the same before the pandemic as post-pandemic, but attendance rates are very different. Linking absence entirely to the curriculum may require further consideration.
Education: 11 to 16 Year-olds
Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts(2 months, 1 week ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
The Government are very proud of their track record on apprenticeships. I hear the noble Lord’s reflections in terms of technical apprenticeships, but actually 70% of our economy is now reflected in the apprenticeship options, including our service sector as well as more traditional areas of apprenticeships. Thanks to amendments put down in your Lordships’ House, we are expanding the amount of careers education in schools to six days across a child’s secondary career.
Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)
My Lords, is the Minister aware that the Select Committee of this House on 11 to 16 education has come up with very radical proposals, basically replacing the curriculum that she is defending with much more practical training and skills? This is welcomed by British industry; it wants school leavers at 18 to have practical skills, employability skills and data skills, and these are not effectively covered by the present curriculum. Does the Minister not realise that we need curriculum change, otherwise there will be no economic growth?
Baroness Barran (Con)
I respect my noble friend enormously, but I think that the evidence overall does not support that. We need to make sure that children have a really strong grounding in mathematics, sciences, English language and English literature, particularly if we want them to follow vocational courses. We have seen in other countries—for example, in Scotland—what has happened with a very well-intentioned policy. I have no doubt about the motivation of those who introduced the Curriculum for Excellence, which looks very like some of the elements that your Lordships are raising—but look at what has happened to our schools in Scotland.
Schools: Persistent Absenteeism
Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts(2 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
The Government look at both the impact of mental health support on students and the financial impacts. As the noble Baroness knows, we are working with the Department of Health and Social Care to have mental health support teams, which are now covering 35% of pupils in schools and further education. This will increase to around 50% by March 2025.
Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)
My Lords, is the Minister aware that, in disadvantaged areas of the country, absenteeism could be as high as 20%, where you cannot expect parents to get their children to go to school every day of the week? The reason why they are not going is that, when they go to school, they have to study just eight academic subjects, which is the curriculum that the Government have imposed upon schools. They do not believe that they are learning anything that will get them a job. Will the Minister accept the recommendations of the Education for 11–16 Year Olds Committee of this House, which recommended that technical, practical and useful subjects, and also computer studies, should be introduced immediately into the curriculum?
Baroness Barran (Con)
I cannot accept entirely my noble friend’s assertion, because persistent absence, which the noble Baroness’s Question points to, has more than doubled since the start of the pandemic and the curriculum has not significantly changed.
T-levels
Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts(8 months, 4 weeks ago)
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Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)
My Lords, is the Minister aware that so many students are dropping T-levels because they have been misled? They thought they were going to study a technical curriculum, but the curriculums are 75% academic and 25% technical—that is absurd. In the review she is undertaking, will she ensure that the curriculums for engineering, construction and digital skills are at least 40% technical, otherwise students will not study them? That means you will have fewer technicians for the economy, which desperately needs more.
Baroness Barran (Con)
As my noble friend knows, the qualifications were designed very closely with employers. The content of the curriculum reflects what employers, working with the department and colleges, told us that they needed. I remind the House that, historically, we have had over 200 qualifications in engineering and over 200 in building and construction. There has been a complicated, unclear landscape. We will now have a clear and high quality one.
Schools: Admissions
Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts(9 months, 1 week ago)
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Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)
My Lords, as there is no Anglican bishop in the House to put forward the view of the Anglican Church, I remind the House that I went to a Church of England primary school back in the 1940s, when we had been evacuated to Southport. Neither of my parents was asked whether they were members of the Church of England—neither was. I know of no secondary Anglican school that has ever debarred a child on grounds of religion. They are open to all.
Baroness Barran (Con)
It is not quite clear to me what my noble friend’s question was, but he is absolutely right that, on oversubscription, certainly at primary, there is no difference between faith and non-faith schools.
Schools: Data, Digital and Financial Literacy
Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts(1 year, 1 month ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
I have the advantage of having the citizenship curriculum in front of me. I should like to reassure the noble Baroness and the House that it absolutely covers the issues that she raises. It looks at saving, spending and use of money through key stages 1 and 2 but, in particular, budgeting and managing risk at key stage 3 and beyond.
Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)
My Lords, I strongly support the far-seeing proposal of my noble friend Lord Holmes of Richmond. Every country in Europe is teaching its students up to the age of 16 in digital, computing and technical skills. Some 90% of our students in school today are taught nothing about artificial intelligence, computer-assisted design, cybersecurity, virtual reality or networking online and coding. Is it not time for torpor and indifference to disappear? The Department for Education and its Ministers should now recognise that they should bring in a curriculum based upon our digital age.
Baroness Barran (Con)
That is exactly what the department is doing with its T-levels.
Education System
Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts(1 year, 4 months ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
Obviously, the Government appointed Katharine Birbalsingh as the social mobility tsar, so I think that perhaps answers the noble Lord’s question. More broadly, the principles she espouses of aspiration for every child are upheld by the Government and delivered in many of our schools and trusts.
Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)
Does the Minister recall that in the two debates we had recently on education and the curriculum in schools, every Peer who spoke said there should be more technical and cultural subjects in the curriculum next year? The Minister did not accept that at the time but now that she has had time to reflect on it and to discuss it with her colleagues, is she prepared to say that at the beginning of the school year next September all children in all schools will be taught lessons in computing, data skills, coding, cybersecurity and artificial intelligence? That is where all the jobs are and this is a programme that would help to fill job vacancies, which the Government are not doing anything about.
Baroness Barran (Con)
I really cannot accept what my noble friend has said about the Government not doing anything about it. As I pointed out in the recent debate, computing is part of the national curriculum. I have already alluded to the rapid growth in the adoption at A-level of computer science. My noble friend is aware of the pioneering work that we are doing in relation to T-levels, which are equipping children for the future.
Young People: Skills (Youth Unemployment Committee Report)
Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts(1 year, 4 months ago)
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Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)
My Lords, first, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, on being the brilliant chair of this committee. We heard a huge volume of evidence, and for him to marshal it and for us to hear and discuss it was quite remarkable.
This is a radical report, and I do not expect the Government to welcome it at all. I cannot anticipate what the Minister is going to say, but the attitude of the Department for Education to all change is now totally negative. In the last year, there have been six major reports, of which this is one. The first was from the High Mistress of St Paul’s School a year ago. It was a huge survey of 800 people, including from the public sector. She came to the conclusion that the curriculum was not fit for purpose, and nor were GCSEs. She was told—not by a Minister but by the Permanent Secretary at the department—“Forget it, we’re not going to change anything”.
A fortnight ago, we had a debate on the report from the Times Education Commission. The Minister made it quite clear that the Government were going to bin that as well. Again, the report recommended substantial changes in our curriculum. So I do not expect that the Minister tonight will accept any of the 88 recommendations that we have made—and certainly not the most important ones.
Some of the most important ones centre on the curriculum. The evidence we heard from industrialists, big and small, was that it is not suited for purpose because too many youngsters at 18 leave with no employability skills at all—none whatever. By “employability skills” they mean an experience of working on teams. That does not happen in the present curriculum. Experience of collaborative problem-solving does not happen in the present curriculum. Having really good communication skills—“oratory”, as it is called—is not taught in our present system, either. This was the absolutely overwhelming weight of evidence and, quite frankly, the Department for Education does not listen at all.
Nissan, one of the largest car manufacturers in our country, said that design technology should be a compulsory subject—but no chance at all. The Government over the last 12 years have presided over a decline in design technology of 80%—it is absolutely unbelievable. What is more, over the past 12 years they have cut technical education by 20%. They are not interested in it at all. The Department for Education is preoccupied solely with academic subjects.
We took a lot of evidence on data skills. The actual curriculum the Government are following is word for word what was published in 1904 in the Edwardian age: exactly the same subjects as 150 years ago. Well, the Minister might recall that 150 years ago, a man with a red flag would have to walk in front of a car. We have moved on from that now and, quite frankly, the Government should recognise that artificial intelligence is the gold rush of this century—and artificial intelligence is embedded in data skills. So will the Minister accept our recommendation that all primary schools should have coding clubs—all, not some? Every student should have the right to a computer—not just some but every single one.
When it comes to secondary education, does the Minister realise that, compared with 2016, 40% less computing is being taught in our schools? It really is extraordinary. We recommended that computing, which means not just coding but virtual reality, cybersecurity and artificial intelligence, should be taught from 11, as soon as possible. I do not expect she is going to accept that tonight, but it is in fact what we ought to do. This is the age in which we are living, and the department is digging in again and again.
The actual problem we have had is that, since 2010, we have been subjected to the theory of an American educator called Hirsch, who says that if you just give to those disadvantaged children academic subjects, they will flourish and expand and all the rest of it. Well, that has failed: we have been the test bed. There is no other country that has followed Hirsch and no state in America that has followed Hirsch, but we have been the test bed and the programme has failed. Today, there are as many disadvantaged students—300,000—as there were in 2010. There has been no real improvement whatever. So what is the result? We have job vacancies. Which department is responsible for job vacancies? It is the Department for Education, because it has not provided what industry and commerce need in the youngsters they are going to employ.
Therefore, we are on the edge of a major change, because the volume of opinion is now building up. The membership of our committee was not a group of eccentric amateurs; it included two ex-Secretaries of State, a former Director-General of the BBC, and the noble Lord, Lord Woolley, who is the greatest advocate in this country of improving the education of black, Asian and minority interest students.
Again, we had recommendations on this—we had recommendations on work experience, but the Government want to phase out work experience. They passed legislation in 2016 to try to restrict the number of people going on work experience from ages 14 to 16. This is so much against what is needed in our country.
This report is radical, and I was proud to be a member of the committee that produced it, but this is not just a single matter. A volume of opinion is now growing. I am very glad to see that the Labour Party is seriously going to consider fundamental educational reform. I can see noble Lords nodding. I hope that my party will also embrace that, and I will do everything I can to support it. We have to bring skills back into education, where they have not been for a very long time.
Are there grounds for hope? Yes, I think there are. The new Secretary of State for Education is the first since 1870 to have been an apprentice. I therefore think that she will be sympathetic to many of the proposals in this report. The Prime Minister, in a briefing from No. 10 to the Times newspaper, said that education was a silver bullet. I hope we might have some indication of the silver bullet tonight. I doubt that we will, but there we are.
Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)
I ask the noble Lord please not to worry about the time I am taking. He should just listen to what I am saying—he will learn something.
I hope that in addition, we will tonight have some evidence of what the silver bullet is—or will it just be a defence of the status quo? The status quo has failed on an absolutely massive scale. Youth unemployment is at 9%. By the way, when we, a committee looking into youth unemployment, asked the Minister and the senior civil servant who appeared before us what was the level of youth unemployment, neither of them knew. It is at 9% but in the depressed areas of our country, such as in Walsall, Stoke-on-Trent and Blyth, it is as high as 20%. I therefore hope that we will see a considerable change.
I conclude by saying that I was very interested to see that the Chancellor of the Exchequer in his speech last week has appointed an assistant, who I know very well, to be his adviser on education. That is clearly an indication that he will not expect very original ideas to emerge from the Department for Education. I wanted to end on a note of optimism, and that is as optimistic as I can be.
Times Education Commission Report
Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts(1 year, 6 months ago)
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Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)
My Lords, first I would like to thank my noble friend Lord Lexden and congratulate him on creating the opportunity to debate the curriculum and assessment in our schools. In his work for the Tory party over many years, he has always taken a great interest in what we say about education in our manifestos—and there is a great job to be done on that in our next manifesto.
We do not often speak about education here in the Lords. This happens to be the first three-hour debate to discuss the curriculum and assessment since 2010, and yet we have in our House a great number of people who know a great deal about education at all stages—primary, secondary and universities. We really ought to find more opportunities to debate education.
The Boris Johnson Government was not a listening Government—they just went ahead. We do not know yet whether the new Government under Liz Truss are listening or not. The one thing we do know about her Government is that they have one overwhelming object, which is economic growth. She hopes that this can be achieved simply by cutting taxes and changing supply matters. She will soon find out that they might be helpful but they are not of themselves assurances of economic growth. In the week that she said this, she also announced that the number of job vacancies in our country was 1.3 million. That is a skills gap of 1.3 million people who cannot be employed by industries that are expected to grow—the skills gap is there. I tried to find a speech in the last 12 years from any Secretary of State or any Education Minister about how they proposed to fill the skills gap. I could not find one. In fact, in 2016, the body that measured the skills gap was abolished. We now have an enormous skills gap.
Why do we have that? The reason is that Michael Gove, who did know a great deal about education, imposed his own idea of a curriculum on our system, namely eight academic subjects. He was implementing the theory of an American educationalist called Hirsch who said that if you give the most disadvantaged children access to academic subjects, it will transform their lives. We have been the testbed for that theory for 12 years and it has totally failed. The number of disadvantaged children today is exactly the same as it was in 2010. That is the indictment of Conservative education policy for the last 12 years, so we need a new curriculum.
What has happened as a result? Design technology has been virtually eliminated from schools at age 11 to 16. Cultural subjects, which are now very much in demand because of streaming and Netflix, have fallen by 40%, 50% and 60%. We are not going to get much economic growth from this curriculum, if it lasts much longer.
If you want evidence, do not just listen to me. Chapter 3 on the curriculum and chapter 4 on assessment are the best chapters of the report we are talking about. Chapter 3 says that James Dyson, the greatest engineer in the country, commented to the commission that it was an “economic disaster” that design technology has been excluded from the curriculum. I beg the Government to listen to people such as James Dyson. If they do not think that that is convincing enough, they should listen to Kate Bingham, the lady who ran the vaccination procurement programme so successfully. Chapter 3 cites her saying that if she had a magic wand, she would wave it and create significant practical and technical education in all our schools. A growing number of people are saying this.
Since I have been promoting technical colleges, I have had to deal with eight different Secretaries of State. I tried to meet them all, but two were there for such a short time that they did not have any meetings at all. Of the six I met, not one was a real educationalist, apart from Michael Gove. The others had very little knowledge of education apart from their own school experience. Certainly, apart from Gove, they did not produce any original ideas on education in that period. None of them is remembered for introducing anything novel or interesting. For the last 12 years, our education system has been run by the department; the Ministers have had very little influence on it. I hope that might change.
This report is not the only report to be issued recently. The noble Lord, Lord Shipley, just spoke. In November, our Select Committee produced the report Skills for Every Young Person. The noble Lord, Lord Storey, was also on the committee. The report has about 100 different suggestions. I am told that the draft response prepared by the last Government was going to accept not one. We recommended that the curriculum should be changed fundamentally and that it should be reduced from eight to five subjects—English, maths, two sciences and data skills—and that every school should then choose which others it wants, with a much wider range of subjects including engineering, business studies and particularly the cultural subjects.
It is extraordinary that cultural subjects such as the performing arts, drama and dance have fallen by 40% or 50% at the very time when Netflix and streaming services are expanding rapidly. We are building new film studios in Britain and will eventually produce more films than Hollywood. I am very glad that eight of the university technical colleges I have been promoting now focus on the entertainment industry. We have one at Elstree, next to the film studio, one at Pinewood, and one in Salford Quays, where the television industry is. They are training youngsters in not only the techniques and machinery but the performing arts themselves. This is the sort of education we need in our country.
If the Times Education Commission report was the third report, the fourth was from the Institute for Fiscal Studies. It said that there has been no change in the school disadvantage gap over the last 12 years. Schools are no longer the agents of social mobility. This is perfectly true. You still have that huge number, the forgotten third, who are not benefiting at all from social mobility.
The fifth one was the Institute for Government on the exam question, again advocating a change and moving away from GCSEs and A-levels.
The sixth, which is very interesting, which Labour Party members, I suppose, have read—or some in the Labour Party, because it is by Tony Blair—is called Ending the Big Squeeze on Skills: How to Futureproof Education in England. This is a very well researched and very good report and I hope that the Front Bench of the Labour Party will find a way of debating it in this House. It has some very interesting suggestions.
One idea that goes back to the very first report was from the high mistress of St Paul’s School way back last October. She asked 800 people, mainly teachers, what they wanted. Half were from the public sector, half from the private sector. They all wanted a change in the curriculum. They wanted it to be more creative and more imaginative, developing curiosity, innovation and inventiveness.
The report from Blair says much the same. There should be a commission set up immediately to examine the curriculum and the need for changes to it and to assessment. It is a very commendable report. It is quite substantial.
There is huge volume of opinion now—the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, said exactly the same thing—thinking and talking about education in a very creative way and wanting a change. We have to make the curriculum suited to this age of digital and net zero. We are miles away from it.
Take data skills; these ought to be embedded into the curriculum at all ages. They simply are not. Only about 10% of children take GCSE computing science. The other 90% do not do it. In fact, since the other GCSE was abolished in 2016, computing is now taught 40% less than it was in 2016. This cannot be defended by any government Minister. There are now fewer children in our schools being taught anything about computing and data skills than in 2016, when the rest of the world is roaring ahead. The head of Apple, Tim Cook, has said very clearly that every child should be able to code. Very few people code in our country. But coding clubs are starting in primary schools and they will spread. They want to spread completely over the whole country.
I came across one primary school on the borders of Wales that taught computing from the age of five and six. All the teachers were able to code themselves and they taught the children coding. By 14, they could almost take the GCSE exam. But when they went into the secondary schools in that part of Shropshire and Herefordshire, they would go backwards because the schools were not teaching anything in computing. It can be done. The important thing to appreciate is that those young children should be taught how to use the thing which they all have in their pockets, not just for Instagram, Facebook and Twitter but as a source of huge knowledge and expertise. It can be done. That is the first thing I would say.
In any data curriculum, all students should have access to a computer or a tablet. It is great credit to the Government that they have done a lot of that, but it falls short of all at the moment. They did it very largely because the pandemic required distance learning. Every child, even the most disadvantaged, should have that facility—number one.
This is such a serious issue that next September all children starting at 11 or moving into 16 should be taught computing or data skills. That is a very challenging task—I know that—because there is a teacher shortage. Even now as we are talking, if this Government really wanted to make data skills a major priority, they would be saying to all the teacher training colleges you must start now before Christmas to teach data skills and coding.
It is not just coding. Company after company came to our Select Committee and said, “We want 18 year-olds to have employability skills.” We asked, “What do you mean by employability skills?” They said first, “Data skills are absolutely essential.” Then they said, “We want children who have experience of working in teams.” That does not happen for 11 to 18 year-olds: the only teams are in sport, not education. There is no collaborative problem-solving, which is part of life. They also said that they wanted children to have experience of making things with their hands and designing things on computers, but you cannot design something on a computer until you have been taught CADCAM. CADCAM is not even in the T-level digital curriculum, but it is essential and all children should be able to start learning it.
Coding is not the only thing to learn; one must learn the ability to join IT teams, which most industries now have, which means they must have knowledge of artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and virtual reality. These are all happening in industry today but the education system in our country is just not providing them.
In our UTC at City Airport, we have a sixth form using virtual reality—about 100 youngsters, girls as well as boys, sitting with headsets on their heads and designing things with two big screens ahead of them. I think it is the only sixth form in the country doing that; I have not heard of another one. Companies are using virtual reality much more; it will be very important in education, apart from anything else, and it is being used for design purposes in industry. I already mentioned the views of the chief executive of Apple.
It also applies to the green agenda. Our committee was told that there could be 400,000 jobs in 2030 in what is called the green agenda. This concerns not only climate change but electric vehicles, new fossil fuel substitutes—hydrogen and such things—the sustainability of species, and huge changes in agriculture and horticulture. None of that is anywhere that I can find in the school curriculum, with one exception, which I learned from my grandson, who has just started to do his A-levels. He chose geography—rather surprisingly, I thought, because it was thought not to be very important in my time. But geography is now the one area where you can study climate change. He is fanatical on this: at the age of 16, he refused to fly anywhere, which makes for very expensive holidays by railways and so on. Anyway, I learned that from him. Where else is it done?
The green agenda is multidisciplinary. It deals not only with climate change itself but with agriculture, horticulture, hydrogen, and all these other things. We need it built in to the curriculum as soon as possible.
The Government have launched a competition for 15 new schools. They asked for the initial bids in September and will have the full bids by Christmas. Those free schools should be only two types of schools: special schools for children who have special disabilities of one sort or another, of which there is a lack in the country and there should be more; the others should be technical schools. The last thing we want is more ordinary secondary schools.
I am trying to inject into the Government’s thinking a sense of urgency about this, because if we go on with the present curriculum for the next two years we will have virtually no economic growth. It is not helping to fill the skills gap for our country and our industry. There must be changes. We cannot go on as we have—that is a growing feeling in the country.
The schools I have set up over the past 12 years—we now have 45—have 19,000 students and the best destination record of almost any schools in the country. We produce 20% apprenticeships at 18; other schools produce only 6%.
I know that the Whip is waiting for me, but every Minister so far has spoken for less than 14 minutes, so there is a little bargaining to be done, unless he wishes to move that I should be no longer heard. He could always do that if he would like to.
I would also say, if I may, that we also send 55% of our children to universities and 75% of them do STEM subjects. The rest get local jobs, which means that they do not drift away from their towns down to London. We have to take these issues very seriously and bring such influence as we have to bear on the Government to listen to us, to respond and to act.