Education: Development of Excellence

Lord Bichard Excerpts

Thursday 18th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bichard]

My Lords, I, too, wish to thank the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, for instigating this debate, but in doing so perhaps I may also pay tribute to her huge commitment over many years to the cause of education. We are all grateful for that.

There is one thing on which we all agree: we want to see excellence in education. But, as ever, life becomes more difficult when we seek to define exactly what we mean by excellence. Does it mean that the graduates of our system are proficient in the core academic subjects? Does it mean that we have a credible, fair and reliable way of assessing their merits, and of course an outstanding teaching force as well? Does it mean that we enable every pupil to realise their particular talent and therefore to realise their life potential? Do we prepare young people for the world of work and to play a responsible part in their community as citizens and as parents? Does it mean that we are preparing young people for a lifetime of learning? Or, sometimes, does it just mean that we protect some of the most vulnerable young people in our society from harm, providing a place of safety in what for them is a very unsafe world? Rather inconveniently, perhaps, it means all of these things, so that if we fail in any of them, we really do not have an excellent education system at all.

Like many noble Lords, I believe that excellence in education is about all of these things, and I worry a little that at the moment we are in danger of being perceived as focusing too much on one element, that of the traditional core academic subjects. I want to draw upon two bodies of evidence to justify that concern. One is well researched and the other is a bit more anecdotal. The register of interests discloses that I am an adviser to a company called the Ten group on professional support services which provides online support to 20% of all schools in this country by answering questions which are posed by school leaders. In any week, Ten receives 150 or so questions from school leaders, so it is in a good position to know what schools are interested in and concerned about, and how their priorities are changing. What has been happening over the past few months? Ten has had far fewer requests about issues such as pupils’ health and well-being and child protection. It has seen a 68% decrease in requests for information about community cohesion, and a significant reduction in requests about extended services and activities to engage the local community. And—hear this—it has seen a huge increase in requests for information about inspection, such that they now account for 12% of all the requests made this year as compared with just 4% last year. For me, these are interesting and slightly worrying trends that suggest not only a narrowing definition of excellence and the purpose of education, but also an unhealthy preoccupation with external regulation.

My anecdote comes from having recently presented prizes at what is by any standards an outstanding school that specialises in the visual and creative arts. I am not going to name the school, but its work in those fields is as good as I have ever seen. By the way, last year it managed to get 12 pupils into Oxford and Cambridge and, as important for me, three pupils into Central Saint Martins College. My worry when I spoke to the staff and my worry when I ran a little seminar on design for senior students was that time and time again I was challenged about whether the Government are really behind the creative subjects, and time and time again I said, “They must be, because the creative industries are such an important part of our economy”.

We are in danger of people misunderstanding the signals, so we need to be careful to value all aspects of education in our public statements, and I would say especially the creative arts.