Education: Development of Excellence

Lord Bishop of Manchester Excerpts

Thursday 18th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Manchester]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for this debate. The recent Church School of the Future review highlights the Church of England’s aspiration for the 1 million pupils in our schools to experience excellent education. The Manchester diocese educates more children in these schools than any other diocese. We entirely support the noble Baroness’s emphasis on not narrowing our understanding or means of achieving excellence. I offer your Lordships an example.

The Resurrection Church of England primary school in downtown Manchester has an inspirational head teacher who is deeply concerned about the low standard of writing in her pupils. She addressed this by encouraging each year 6 pupil to write to a VIP, including the heads of the Armed Forces and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Their carefully written and illustrated letters invariably elicit responses. As a result, these pupils have an annual visit to Carrington to meet Sir Alex Ferguson and the United team; they have an annual residential visit to an RAF base where they sit in a Tornado; and each year they visit Lambeth Palace for a picnic and then go on to see the London sites and visit the National Gallery. There, they choose a picture on which to base the choreography of the Resurrection school dance, which is a stunning and moving performance that they give for visitors. Last year, they chose Titian’s “Noli me Tangere” and this year they chose Caravaggio’s “The Supper at Emmaus”. Most of these children will never have been in an aeroplane, a Tube train, a palace, let alone have lunch in one, or seen anything like the masterpieces in the National Gallery.

The Resurrection school in Manchester is a supreme example of providing an excellent education with a Christian ethos by imaginatively looking beyond the narrow confines of leagues tables and resisting the utilitarian tendency to see the goal of education as simply league tables and economically viable and employable young people. In achieving that, as the school undoubtedly does in its numeracy and literary skills, Maureen Hogarth, the head teacher, and her staff also achieve excellence in these children’s holistic education by broadening it to include social, moral, cultural and spiritual development. In so doing, they inspire confidence and accomplishment in pupils who have all kinds of abilities and come from many different backgrounds, some of them deeply deprived.

I also want from these Benches to endorse strongly what the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, said about not including religious education in the English baccalaureate or the newly announced EBCs. I fear that religious education will languish on the sidelines even though it is said to be compulsory. That will deprive pupils of the ability to understand and engage meaningfully with issues of faith, which undeniably play a vital part in the lives of 75% of the world’s population. It really is very unwise to try to sidestep that important subject.

Finally, as the bishop of a diocese that contains the highest concentration of university population in Europe, I completely endorse the noble Baroness’s views about maintaining the high place in the world of British universities, including, of course, the excellent University of Manchester.