Children and Families Bill
Lord Bichard Excerpts(11 years, 1 month ago)
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The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Bichard) (CB)
Welcome. If there is a Division in the Chamber while we are sitting, the Committee will adjourn as soon as the Division Bells are rung and resume after 10 minutes.
Amendment 26
Education: English Baccalaureate Certificate
Lord Bichard Excerpts(11 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Nash
My Lords, the point underlying this Question may be a little confusion about the stimulus to the system we have created through the EBacc and a broad and balanced curriculum. I should like to reassure the noble Baroness that the Government are determined to ensure that all pupils study a broad and balanced curriculum so that they have the cultural capital to be able to compete both in this country and in the modern world. We have had to stimulate some behaviour through the EBacc because all the international evidence we have studied shows that successful international countries include these core academic subjects, and that stimulus has been extremely successful. Over the past two years, the proportion of pupils taking the EBacc has risen from 23% to 49%, and for those schools with a high element of free school meals, it has risen from 10% to 41%. However, we will also be exhorting all schools to teach a broad and balanced curriculum, as they are obliged to do and as Ofsted inspects for.
Lord Bichard
My Lords, does the Minister agree that the creative industries represent one of the most important sectors of the British economy? However, is he aware of the acute concern across that sector about the way the Government appear to undervalue the teaching and learning of creative skills, not least in the proposals for the EBacc? Further, could he use his considerable influence to persuade the Secretary of State for Education just once to make a public speech that recognises the importance of creative skills?
Lord Nash
The Government do recognise the importance of creative skills. As I have said, we are keen for all pupils to have the cultural capital that enables them to compete. As my old friend Sir Peter Lampl at the Sutton Trust has pointed out, 7% of the population of this country go to independent, private, fee-paying schools and get 44% of the top jobs. Some 4.9% go to grammar schools and get 27% of the top jobs, while the rest, 88%, get less than 30% of the top jobs. In order to enable our pupils to compete both in this country and internationally, they need a broad curriculum and they must have that cultural capital. However, I hear what the noble Lord says and I will take these matters away for consideration.
Education: Development of Excellence
Lord Bichard Excerpts(12 years, 1 month ago)
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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.
Education Bill
Lord Bichard Excerpts(13 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Bichard
My Lords, if you are the last of 50 speakers, you can at least be reasonably sure that some members of the audience have been looking forward to your contribution, which, as we all know, is not always the case. As a former Permanent Secretary in the Department for Education and Employment, as it was then, I know only too well how many different and strongly held views there are on how to improve our education system. It was my privilege to listen to them for six years, and it has been my privilege to sit in on this excellent debate this evening.
What that experience taught me is that there is probably only one thing on which everyone agrees: that the key to better education lies in the quality of teaching. All the available research confirms that, Ofsted inspections confirm that and anyone who has spent any real time in our schools knows that. Whatever the kind of school, whatever the structure, what counts is the quality of the teaching. So, when the Government entitled their education White Paper last year The Importance of Teaching, I was greatly encouraged, even more so because in their foreword to that White Paper, the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister proclaimed that:
“The first, and most important, lesson is that no education system can be better than the quality of its teachers”.
That seemed to me to herald a move away from the previous emphasis on structure, which I believe had become excessive, and back towards the need to improve the capability and quality of classroom teachers. So I came to this Education Bill hoping to see further evidence that, taking the White Paper, the Bill and other ministerial statements together, we were really developing a comprehensive strategy that would take teaching in this country to new levels. After all, the Secretary of State himself said that:
“The importance of teaching cannot be over-stated. And that is why there is a fierce urgency to our plans for reform”.
As other noble Lords have said, there is much in this Bill to commend and to agree with, but I am disappointed that there is little to suggest that there is yet a real strategy to drive up teaching quality. It is true that there are a number of initiatives. The abolition of the Training and Development Agency for Schools might not seem to be sending out quite the positive message of hope on professional development that we would like, but doubling the numbers on Teach First and introducing Teach Next are a good step forward. But, looking more closely, an increase from 560 to 1,140 by the end of the Parliament is hardly mould-breaking.
The Government are also committed to developing a national network of teaching schools to lead the training and professional development of teachers and head teachers, which in itself is an interesting idea. But we urgently need more details to reassure ourselves that this can be implemented while avoiding the danger of recycling mediocrity and while achieving the necessary consistency that the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, pointed to earlier, without losing the generic understanding of how you adapt your teaching style to different situations, which on the face of it you are more likely to achieve through a national system.
The Government are also committed to reforming initial teacher training, not least to increase the proportion of time trainees spend in the classroom focusing on core teaching skills. Again, I can support that. But relying on initial teacher training to transform the quality of teaching will take several decades to achieve. Our focus needs to be on how we help to support existing teachers to improve their performance. Of course, reducing the bureaucratic burden on schools, and affording schools and teachers other freedoms as described in this Bill, will remove some of the constraints which can prevent good teachers realising their potential.
They do not of themselves create good teachers or turn average teachers into world beaters. That requires the very best possible continuing professional development and the effective use of the available research on best teaching practice here and abroad, taking account not least of the role of new technology. It also requires us to recruit and retain high calibre people in the profession. I for one would have liked to see a little more of that kind of content in the Bill and a little less about the structure. I hope that the Minister will be able to reassure the House that a convincing strategy on teacher professional development will be published shortly, that that strategy will be vigorously implemented and that its success will be independently assessed.
Education: Pupils and Young People
Lord Bichard Excerpts(14 years ago)
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Lord Bichard
My Lords, let me join the whole House in thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, for giving us an opportunity to debate one of the most important subjects of all. When I looked at the list of speakers, two things struck me. The first was that this would be a very high quality debate and, secondly, that speaking at number 20, it would be difficult to say something new and innovative. I will do my best.
This has been an exceptional debate, partly because many of us in this House have struggled in different capacities over many years to close the achievement gap in this country. Like me, many of us will take pride in our efforts, but will be disappointed, nay frustrated, that we have not been more successful. Perhaps this debate is not just a debate but a chance for us all to rededicate ourselves to the task with even greater urgency and determination. In doing that, perhaps we should remind ourselves that failure does not bring with it just economic and social costs, but huge costs in human terms.
I shall refer to two groups to illustrate that. Let us take NEETs, which is the awful term for young people “neither in employment, education nor training”. We have in this country nearly 1 million young people who we refer to as NEETs. Our performance has long compared poorly with just about every other developed country. Of course, that brings economic and social costs. I was shocked to hear from a senior official in the Department for Education and Skills recently that in the north of England, 15 per cent of long-term NEETs die within 10 years. It is therefore no exaggeration to say that for the most vulnerable children and young people in this society education really is a matter of life and death.
Another vulnerable group, children looked after in care, already has been touched on by the noble Earl, Lord Listowel. There have been improvements, but that is from a very low base. There are 59,000 children in care in this country, 6,000 of whom are in care homes. They represent 0.1 per cent of the child population. Yet, one-third of all prisoners have been in care; 42 per cent of prostitutes interviewed recently for a paper have been in care; 20 per cent of 16 to 19 year-old women who leave care become mothers within a year; and parents who have been through the care system are twice as likely to lose the right to care for their children. Those appalling statistics have to be linked to the fact that half of all children in care leave school with no formal qualifications at all. Although 8 per cent now go on to further and higher education, that compares terribly with a country such as Denmark where 60 per cent go on to higher education.
However, if we are to redouble our efforts and rededicate ourselves to this task, we need to be prepared to ask ourselves some searching and perhaps uncomfortable questions. I have five questions. First, do we still seek to impose a one-size-fits-all system on pupils who are so diverse in their talents, their background and their needs? In particular, do we still continue to undervalue vocational education, which is seen by many young people as being far more relevant than the more traditional academic subjects? For me, education is about liberating and developing the talent of every individual child. If that talent is more vocational than academic, we should embrace it rather than accept it reluctantly, as we have sometimes seemed to do.
Secondly, have we all placed a disproportionate emphasis on the structure of our education system at the expense of standards, content and, most of all, as a number of noble Lords have said, teaching quality? The British are obsessed with structure. We all love it. Politicians and civil servants love it because if you change it, it gives the impression of having done something. But all research points to the fact that the most important thing is the quality of teaching. Do we need to revisit the quality, not just of initial teacher training, but, as has been said, continuing professional development? Could we be more imaginative in allowing the best teachers to help and to support their peers? I think that we could.
Thirdly, have we drawn sufficiently on the contribution of the many high-quality voluntary organisations which have the capacity and the skills to re-engage young people who are alienated from the system and to deliver relevant education and training to them? For seven years, I chaired one of the largest of those organisations, Rathbone, and we had a good track record. However, I rarely felt that we were seen by the Government, schools or colleges as partners, but more as a convenient backstop.
Fourthly, have we been too determined to deliver education in traditional settings, by which I mean schools and colleges, when many young people have long since become alienated from those institutions? For me what matters is that young people receive an education. If they are more likely to participate in a work-place setting or some halfway house, so be it.
Finally, have we realised the potential of creative subjects, such as art, performance, film and design, to capture the imagination of some of these young people? I should declare an interest. I chair a charity called FILMCLUB, which has received generous funding from the previous Government and from this Government. We aim to educate children by screening, discussing and reviewing quality films. We now have film clubs in 5,500 schools. We have 160,000 children every week engaged in those film clubs and 60 per cent of school leaders say that it is an effective way of narrowing the gap.
Over the years, when I have visited schools and sat in on lessons, I have been struck constantly how arts subjects can inspire and light up young people, many of whom are alienated from the system.
Lord Bichard
We need to ask ourselves those questions if we are going to make changes.