Free Schools and Academies

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I do not often speak about education. I think this is probably the first time I have ever done so. I was tempted to intervene for two reasons. First, we have heard some very powerful arguments today in favour of the status quo. Secondly, the noble Lord, Lord Hampton—he is almost my noble friend—teaches at a school in Hackney where my grandson has the honour of being a pupil and being taught by the noble Lord. The feedback I get from my grandson—they are usually pretty honest, children of 15 or 16—is that it is the most wonderful school you could possibly ever want to go to because “They make me work”.

My granddaughter is at school in Hackney, but not at Mossbourne; she is having a good time there and learning a lot. What we learned from my discussions with the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, and the school is that what it delivers, apart from the ambition, which the noble Lord, Lord Baker, mentioned, and quality and hard work, is an enormous variety of things that the students might want to choose from. They range from workshops, training in industry, medicine, architecture and the Duke of Edinburgh. They do rowing at Hackney, which must be difficult at the river there—well, there is none—as well as music and everything like that. The school offers them a variety of things and makes sure that they jolly well do them.

I live in Cornwall now, and I find that you cannot get local tradesmen to do welding or carpentry, because the schools do not teach that. We have to get to a situation where different types of schools offer different facilities, and it is up to the parents or guardians or whoever to choose, with the students, where they would like to work hard to get a place. If they have to work hard to get a place, that is quite a good start for the rest of life.

I am thrilled with what Mossbourne is doing. I am not going to go on about it, because my noble friend has spoken very highly of it, but I hope that parental pressure and support from other offspring and everything else will help the Government decide what to do in future. I do not see the need for massive change; the key is to improve the bad ones, and there are plenty of them. They need money, resources and committed teachers, and lots of them, but the key is to get the right output variety that will suit the students, where they live and what their capabilities are, so they can do a decent job and enjoy it.