Social Mobility Commission

Lord Bishop of Norwich Excerpts

Monday 23rd April 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, the Government govern for all of Britain, including rural areas, where I live, so I can assure the noble Lord that that will be an important part of the criteria in the interview process.

[The Lord Bishop of Norwich]

My Lords, greater social mobility was one of the drivers of the original academies programme set up by the last Labour Government, which was why some of us supported it so strongly. Does the Minister believe that that still holds true for academies now and that widening educational opportunities for the disadvantaged is the key factor in promoting social mobility?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

The right reverend Prelate is correct, and we ought to record our great debt of gratitude to him personally as one of the very first academy sponsors in Norfolk. I have seen the work that he has done. The short answer is yes. We have taken 1,950 previously largely failing schools into sponsored academy status. At the time they came in, only 10% of them were rated good or better. Today, 70% of those are good or better, which accounts for about 450,000 children. So I see the academy programme as a vital plank in social mobility.

Technical and Further Education Bill

Lord Bishop of Norwich Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 1st February 2017 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Norwich]

My Lords, I am glad to add my voice to the chorus of welcome for the Bill—on these Benches we are professionally interested in choruses.

Those who read the City & Guilds report Sense & Instability, which was published just over a couple of years ago, will remember the bleak picture painted there of three decades of skills and employment policy. The authors pointed out—with a degree of sardonic humour, I think—that, in 30 years, there have been 13 major Acts of Parliament dealing with these issues, enough reports to fill a medium-sized bookcase, no fewer than 61 Ministers and 10 occasions when skills and employment have shifted between government departments. “Tinkering”, “amnesia” and “disruption” were among the milder terms employed in that very powerful report.

As the authors of that report saw, resolving our long-standing weakness in technical and vocational education would not only be fundamental to improving productivity and creating a more skilled workforce but ought to be a powerful driver of opportunity and social mobility. Of course, it should also be a liberation of the human spirit—the Latin root of “education” reminds us that it is all about being led out into life, as the noble Baroness has just reminded us—and the best education leads to human flourishing not simply in economic terms but socially, aesthetically, spiritually and all the rest. For those reasons, I strongly support the Bill’s ambition to place technical professional education on the same footing as the more academic routes.

From these Benches, we welcome especially a number of the Bill’s principal objectives, including: the structural importance of having clear responsibility for apprenticeships and technical education through the extensive role given to the institute; the radical simplification of the great maze of vocational qualifications currently offered; and a more rigorous process for the development of standards.

While the prominence given to insolvency in the Bill seems at first sight disturbing, given the hand-to-mouth precariousness of further education finance, at least this is the first time, as far as I can see, that an insolvency regime has given explicit priority to the safeguarding of the interests of the students themselves. So we warmly welcome the Bill, even if there are a few caveats.

Another caveat seems obvious: I could not see any explicit definition of “technical education” in the Bill or the accompanying literature. Some clarification here would surely be desirable and would have practical implications. For example, many schools and sixth-form colleges offer a combination of GCSE and A-level qualifications, identified in the Post-16 Skills Plan as one of the main academic routes, alongside subjects generally considered technical or general vocational courses, such as BTEC national diplomas, City & Guilds programmes and the like. I am also glad to see a growing emphasis on higher and degree apprenticeships, to which the noble Lord, Lord Baker, referred.

The recently announced industrial strategy emphasises —one might even say that it presupposes—much greater collaboration across the sectors involved, between colleges and employers and between FE institutions and universities and so on. In my own diocese we have a first-rate example of this, in my view, in City College Norwich, which is not only the largest provider of education for 16 to 18 year-olds in Norfolk but also offers a wide range of apprenticeships and degree and other higher education programmes.

Each year at least 500 students come to Norwich Cathedral for City College graduation ceremonies. I have heard there a good many stories of young people who thought themselves failures at school, in their early years of secondary education, but gradually progressed through the range of opportunities offered at City College and ended up with not just first degrees but further degrees and highly skilled work.

Good collaboration with other institutions is absolutely essential to that sort of progress, as well as a breadth of understanding on the part of the institution about what further education may provide. Just last week, I was licensing a new chaplain to City College who is working with the “well-being team”. I did not know that it had a well-being team until recently, but the fact that the college has such a team suggests a healthy and holistic approach to education.

A famous aphorism claims that you can never be too rich or too thin. Perhaps this Bill adds a third criterion: you can never have too many regulatory bodies. As the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education comes, or has come, into being—I am not sure of its acronym yet; IFATE does not seem all that cheerful—there is surely a need to avoid overlap between its remit and so many other bodies, such as Ofqual, not least in its role as regulator for English and maths qualifications, and Ofsted, with its responsibilities for FE and work-based learning. I cannot see quite yet how we will prevent the sort of unhealthy overlap that can result from so many regulatory bodies. But, overall, I sound a note of welcome for the Bill and I wish the Minister well as he guides us through the next stages.

Grammar Schools

Lord Bishop of Norwich Excerpts

Thursday 13th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Norwich]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, for securing this debate. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ely, our lead bishop on education, cannot be in his place today, but I am glad to contribute from these Benches and to hear an excellent maiden speech from the noble Baroness, Lady Vere.

Like many others in your Lordships’ House, I attended a grammar school. I was also the first in my family to receive a university education. At Northampton Grammar School for Boys, as it then was, you imbibed an ethos and culture which simply assumed you would seek university entrance. My grammar school was hierarchical, full of petty rules and almost entirely male—the perfect preparation for a career in the Church of England.

I am not sure whether many of our masters knew much about teaching. Quite a few had no teaching qualification at all, but they were bright, interesting and knowledgeable, and loved talking about what they knew. You caught the excitement of knowledge from them, especially from the most eccentric of them, who, if they had a lesson plan, kept it very quiet. Even at the time, we thought that most of them would never survive teaching in a secondary modern—and that is the problem. I fully understand why grammar schools are thought to be the engines of social mobility for some, even if it is contested territory, but I never hear anyone saying, “Bring back secondary moderns”. We can relabel them as high schools, or give them some other title, but they remain schools where around a quarter of the pupils, and the most able in any area, are missing.

The challenge for the Government, surely, in taking these proposals forward is to ensure that no one is educationally disadvantaged. The emphasis must remain on ensuring that every child can attend an excellent school. I remember only too well the shaming threats at my primary school about the prospect of wearing the green blazer, which was the secondary modern uniform. We were threatened that if we did not work hard, that is what would happen to us. How the Government would prevent that happening again seems to me absolutely fundamental to this proposal.

Selection through academic ability is not the only form of selection in the proposals in the Government’s consultation, although we have not mentioned any of the others. I welcome the vote of confidence from the Government in the quality of education provided by schools with religious designation. This is indicated by the removal of the cap on faith-based admissions. However, such a move will have a minimal impact on the fundamental principle on which the Church of England’s engagement in education rests. Our schools educate around 1 million children and the overwhelming majority are community schools providing the best possible education for every child, regardless of faith. Just as the ministry of parishes in the Church of England is to a designated local population, and not to a congregation, so it is that our schools are intended to serve the common good and the wider community. That is why they are attended by children of other world faiths or those whose parents have no faith at all. It is also why, within my own diocese of Norwich, admission criteria make scarcely any mention of faith but are based on catchment areas, with looked-after children and siblings, for example, as the priorities, not the children of regular churchgoers.

I am pleased that the Government have chosen to make Norwich one of the six opportunity areas announced by the Secretary of State last week. The Social Mobility Commission named Norwich as the second-worst cold spot for social mobility in the country—a distinction the people of Norwich do not want. Chloe Smith, the Member for Norwich North in the other place, formed a steering group in response to this, bringing public sector, business, voluntary and faith leaders together, and I am glad to play a part in that. I would be grateful if the Minister could tell us what parameters there are on the new funding and whether there is more information about it.

The Church of England remains committed to its broad role in education, and actually we are looking forward to expanding our capacity in technical and special education. It was the failure to embrace technical schools in the old system that was one of its greatest weaknesses. If my grammar school had one educational advantage, I suspect it was that it operated within a relatively settled framework. There is a weariness among the teaching profession—I speak on behalf of my daughter, who is a teacher—about the constant reshaping and fiddling within our educational framework. If the Minister could promise us the prospect of a more settled period in education, that would be a blessing in itself.

Education: English Baccalaureate

Lord Bishop of Norwich Excerpts

Thursday 4th February 2016 Grand Committee

[The Lord Bishop of Norwich]

My Lords, like others, I am very grateful to the noble Earl for securing this short debate. The importance of this subject is out of all proportion to the length of our discussion.

I agree with so much that has been said but I shall concentrate on two specific issues. The first, noble Lords will not be surprised to hear, concerns the omission of religious education from the English baccalaureate. I realise that it is not the only omission—I would rather like art, music and much else to be there, too—but I believe that it is a serious mistake that is going to be deleterious to a rounded education.

I believe that the previous Secretary of State, Michael Gove, thought it unnecessary to include religious education since it is a statutory subject. That is true, but it is not enough. During my secondary education 50 years ago—a frighteningly long time—religious education was statutory, although I think it was called “religious knowledge” then. That meant one lesson a week by an uninterested teacher for a form of boys who looked at the 40 minutes as time off or a time to play up. It was good life experience for a future bishop to experience such religious indifference but it was not a rounded education—although it might have been argued that it was quite a good introduction to juvenile sin, not least my own.

The impression given was that religion was a fading phenomenon that we did not really need to bother about in preparation for life. How wrong that has proved to be, for bad reasons as well as good; just as there can be bad politics, there can be bad religion, and there is a lot of it in the world. We need much greater religious literacy to understand the world in which we live and to understand the difference between good and bad religion—for instance, there is a growing danger that we regard anyone who is deeply religious as an extremist. Far more people around the world define their identity through their religion than we seem to understand in a country like ours that has a largely secular mindset, yet the huge rise in the number of students taking GCSE and A-level religious studies in recent years—it has been one of the fastest-growing subjects—indicates the interest generated in the subject among young people. It has been a subject of equal standing with others in a way that it will not be in future, and I think that the decision to exclude it will inevitably be harmful. That is what nearly every religious education teacher that I speak to thinks. So I ask the Minister, whose fairness and passion for young people I admire, either to assure me of a reconsideration or to suggest ways in which statutory religious study might avoid the marginalisation that I experienced at school.

My second point is related not to the baccalaureate at all but to international school links and their significance for a rounded education. I am still a governor of the first academy to be set up in Norfolk, where I was originally a co-sponsor. Last year I was one of a group of governors who met the Ofsted inspectors—happily, the academy got a good outcome—and we were asked the ritual question about “promoting British values”. I commented that what we were seeking to nurture was actually future citizens who had an international outlook. We have very strong links with schools in the Netherlands and the Far East—the latter more able to come here than we are able to get there—but it is quicker to get to Holland from Norwich than it is to London, especially given our train service.

We also try to take as many students as possible on overseas visits. Many who come from the estate on which the school is based and the surrounding area experience very little travel of any sort. In this setting, experience of other cultures is essential for a rounded education. Finding the financial resources is a challenge but it can be done, and I would be grateful to know from the Minister what advice, if any, the department gives schools on international links, and whether Ofsted normally makes any inquiries about such things. The inspectors I met did not seem to be familiar with investigating such things, but I believe that a rounded education needs the widest possible context.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Bishop of Norwich Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd June 2015 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Norwich]

My Lords, the gracious Speech said that the Government intend,

“to improve schools … and create more academies”.

I declare an interest as one of the sponsors of the first academy in Norfolk, the Open Academy, set up under the last Labour Government. It is now part of a thriving diocesan academies trust committed to school improvement. So I support the Government’s overall aim to improve schools, but there are areas where the direction of travel needs a few extra signposts.

The annual investment of the Church of England in our educational system runs into many millions of pounds. There are 4,500 Church of England primary schools and around 200 secondary schools. But direct responsibility for school improvement lies with the Church of England only in its academies. We do not currently have the power provided to local authorities to intervene where our voluntary schools do not perform as they should. Diocesan boards of education work closely with such schools, supporting them in a host of ways, but have no formal power when a school’s performance causes concern. So I ask the Minister whether his department will grant diocesan boards of education such powers, because dioceses are sometimes criticised for failing to take action without the capacity to do so.

The original aim of the academies’ programme was to improve the educational opportunities for young people in areas of social deprivation. That is how I got involved. The Open Academy in Norwich, which I mentioned earlier, has just been rated good by Ofsted and is on a journey to becoming an outstanding school. Not long ago the police noticed a remarkable drop in the recorded crime rate within a half-mile radius of the school and an even more striking reduction in ASBOs. The local population talks of a greater calmness on the estate. It is equally important that scarcely a pupil has left the academy in recent years without going into further or higher education, employment or training.

However, the recent Ofsted inspection, good as its outcome was, did not suggest much analysis of the school’s social context or its social and economic impact. Something profound was missed. I would be grateful to know how our schools are seen by the Government as agencies of social and community transformation.

Only once was there a change of gear in that inspection when, as governors, we were asked what we were doing to promote British values. I inquired, politely, what British values were and was told that tolerance was among them. Yet we do not tolerate bullying, disrespect, violent behaviour, possession of drugs and a good deal else. We need to get our language right if we are to impart the right values in our schools.

Language matters. During the election campaign we heard a great deal about hard-working families from all sides of the political divide. This always seemed to mean families whose members were in employment. Back in the 1990s, when I was involved in poverty hearings, I vowed never to equate hard work only with employment and jobs again. I remember a young woman at a poverty hearing in Cornwall describing how she had been seeking a permanent job for more than two years and saying that it was very hard work indeed being poor and unemployed and attempting to make ends meet while also sending off applications for jobs when, time after time, no one responded. She had had some temporary employment but said that it was much harder work being unemployed than it was in a job. I am not sure that the language we use about the poor and unemployed is always sensitive to this basic truth.

If language matters, so too does culture. In relation to education, it is altering the culture of a failing school which is the hardest thing to do. It is about reshaping expectations and nurturing creativity but also building the right ethos. I remember being told years ago that as a diocesan bishop I could delegate almost everything to suffragan bishops, archdeacons and other members of my staff. However, there was one thing I could not delegate—the ethos of the diocese. Ethos is very hard to pin down, especially the ethos of a nation. The Prime Minister of the day helps to shape the ethos of the country and I am glad the beginning of the gracious Speech invoked the one-nation approach and governing in the interests of everyone. It struck exactly the right note and the legislative programme will be judged in this light.

One of the strongest shapers of the ethos of our nation continues to be the BBC. It is truly British. Its range and reach seem to irritate some people but it is one of the most socially cohesive of all our institutions—as one would have seen at Norwich over the recent bank holiday weekend when 50,000 young people gathered in devotion to Taylor Swift and many of the pop stars of our time, only a few of whom I have heard of. Many others in Norwich—indeed, rather more—were on pilgrimage to Wembley on a quest to get Norwich City back in the Premier League, a happily successful mission.

The range and reach of the BBC stretch well beyond these shores, of course, and I have never understood why the World Service ceased to be financed from the Foreign Office. In terms of soft power in the world we have a treasure which is the envy of other nations, not least because people in every part of the world regard the BBC as impartial and trustworthy. In a world in which cultures of trust need building—desperately in many places—to possess such a building block in the BBC should be something we cherish. I hope we will remember that in the run-up to the renewal of the charter.

Schools: Academies

Lord Bishop of Norwich Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd March 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

My noble friend will know from his experience over 25 years as a primary head that all schools are facing cost pressures from national insurance and pensions, so any prudent school will have some level of cash reserves. I mentioned capital requirements for academies. The education sector has a lot to learn from the business sector in terms of efficiencies. We have found that when business people and educationalists work well together through the academies programme the effects can be quite dramatic. I cannot make promises for ever, but there are no plans as far as this Government are concerned to bring profit-making to the school system.

[The Lord Bishop of Norwich]

My Lords, some academies and other schools have secured private funding which they ring-fence to finance a chaplain, international links or some other good purpose. For the avoidance of doubt, will the Minister give an assurance that such funds are not to be treated as free reserves? Further, will he encourage academies to secure such funding?

[Lord Nash]

I entirely agree with the right reverend Prelate and I pay tribute to his very good work in the school system in Norfolk. We should welcome such funds into the school system. We should welcome people who bring these funds and give their time freely. It is a development that we should seek to encourage.

Birmingham Schools

Lord Bishop of Norwich Excerpts

Monday 9th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

I agree entirely with the noble Baroness’s comments on the aims. As for the drip-drip, people sometimes refer to the slowness with which some of these Ofsted reports have officially come into the public domain, but it is important in these cases that we give the schools time to respond and that Ofsted can therefore check its facts. However, as far as the timing of this is concerned, we had to act and we have done so.

[The Lord Bishop of Norwich]

My Lords—

[Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean]

My Lords, I wonder whether—

[Noble Lords]

Bishop!

[The Lord Bishop of Norwich]

My Lords, the Minister may not be aware that earlier this afternoon in his maiden speech, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chelmsford said that good religious education is one of the best ways of countering religious extremism. I would be interested to know whether the Minister agrees. Given that none of the schools subject to these inspections in Birmingham were faith schools—although listening to our discussion, you would have thought otherwise—does it not seem that appropriate, well balanced and enriching religious education may have been an area of neglect? I cannot help but wonder whether this has been facilitated too easily by the way in which religious education has sometimes been marginalised in the curriculum by the Department for Education in recent years and whether we are reaping some reward for that.

[Lord Nash]

I agree entirely with the comments made by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich. This certainly raises issues on how we inspect for religious education.

Children: Adoption

Lord Bishop of Norwich Excerpts

Tuesday 10th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

My Lords, as I said, I understand the point of view expressed by my noble friend Lord Waddington and always listen to him most carefully, as I do to the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours. However, there is not much that I can add to my previous reply to my noble friend Lord Waddington.

[The Lord Bishop of Norwich]

My Lords, a significant number of faith-based children’s agencies are still providing adoption services in compliance with the Equality Act, while others are now restricted in that area to providing services after adoption. Does the Minister agree that, taken together, all these faith-based children’s agencies provide a key service to vulnerable children—one that could be further extended?