Ethnicity Pay Gap

Lord Boateng Excerpts

Thursday 25th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I am more than happy to take this back to the department and share my noble friend’s reflections, but I remind the House that there is no ethnicity pay gap for people born in this country from roughly half the ethnic-minority groups. In fact, in a number of cases there is a pay gap in the other direction. The issue is much greater for those not born in the UK, and there we need to understand to what extent that reflects level of qualification, level of language, age and a number of other factors.

[Lord Boateng (Lab)]

My Lords, when the TUC and the CBI are both in agreement that this is a policy that should be introduced and mandated—and the Government spend a great deal of time and effort recruiting workers from overseas to fill gaps in our own labour market—why do the Government not accept the wisdom of the TUC and the CBI? They surely know more about the operation of markets than any Government do.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

As I said, the Government have done extensive work engaging with employers in this area. We have the important work of the Inclusive Britain report. An employer of, say, 250 employees would typically have 25 ethnic-minority employees, if it was in line with the national average. With 18 separate ethnicities, the noble Lord can do the maths on the sample size.

Access to Musical Education in School

Lord Boateng Excerpts

Wednesday 18th October 2023 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Boateng]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what plans they have to address inequalities in access to musical education in school.

[Lord Boateng (Lab)]

My Lords, in raising this Question for Short Debate, I declare my interest as an unremunerated, independent, non-executive director of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

Music matters. It drives both personal and intellectual development, lifts our spirits and the soul, and drives the creative industries that add so very much to our economy. So access to music matters—access to performances, and the opportunity to perform and to be employed in the industry of which music plays such a part. It matters.

For all this to be possible, music teachers matter. I cannot say those words without naming three: Leonora Rennel, Iris du Pré and Hans Seeling. More than 50 years ago, in the music block of a state school on a council estate of a new town called Hemel Hempstead, they gave me the opportunities that I have enjoyed ever since. They gave me access to music and the capacity to find in it something that has nurtured me, as I know it has all Members of this House present at this debate. We could not have a more distinguished list of contributors, as music has nurtured us all. All of us will be able to name the music teachers who were important in our lives.

Equity and access to music, and to the best qualified music teachers, matters. It is under threat today perhaps more than it has been at any time of our lives, despite the good intentions of government and numerous plans. I have no doubt that we will hear a lot from the Minister, whose sincerity and commitment in this area is beyond question, about those intentions and a refreshed national plan for music education. But however welcome the good intentions are and however much we applaud the ambitions, the lack of capacity and resource in the system is a grave concern. Our very own All-Party Parliamentary Group for Music Education concluded in its report, Music Education: State of the Nation, that

“the overall picture is one of serious decline. If the pace continues, music education in England will be restricted to a privileged few within a decade, and the UK will have lost a major part of the talent pipeline to its world-renowned music industry”.

The facts speak for themselves. The Independent Society of Musicians states in no uncertain terms that this year’s exam results are “a wake-up call”. They are, and they tell their own story: a 36% drop in GCSE and a 45% drop in A-level music entries in England, Wales and Northern Ireland since 2010. There is a crisis in teacher training and recruitment, with schools increasingly forced to cut music provision or use non-specialists to teach music as a result.

It is also a picture of increasing inequality. All too often, those in a private school have access to the very best of music but those in a state school simply do not. In the most deprived areas, many do not have any access to music education at all. There is increasing pressure on resources and the current annual funding for music hubs of £75 million per year, however welcome, needs to be seen in context. It amounts to roughly £9.34 per pupil per year. Compare that to the £73.63 per pupil per year that we spend on sport. There is simply no comparison, yet both ought to be and are valued in our national life.

I have no doubt that we will hear much about the £25 million that has been ring-fenced to buy instruments, but that £25 million is less than we spent on training the rowing team for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. I know whose results I prefer and whose are truly outstanding. I am fond of rowing and encourage my grandson to row, but it does not play the part in our national life that music does.

We have a crisis. It needs to be addressed by funding but also by looking at the way in which we value music within our education system. The fact is that the English baccalaureate does not value the subject. I fear that the measures we use to establish the school league tables do not emphasise the importance of exposure to music education. This creates a perverse disincentive to teach music and to expose young people to music in our schools. How do the Minister and the Government propose to address that issue? What measures will they bring forward to ensure that these refreshed music hubs do what they are meant to?

The funding for music hubs is less than the £83 million- plus we were spending before they came into being. How are music hubs to be incentivised in their partnerships with schools, unless there is a statutory duty on schools to deliver a musical education? There is none. Do the Government intend to address that lacuna—that massive hole in all that we seek and aspire to do for young people in music education?

The Institute for Fiscal Studies has reported a 9% drop in funding per student between 2010 and 2020. There was a promise in this Government’s last manifesto for a £90 million arts premium. Whatever happened to that? There is an issue about funding that we simply cannot escape. When it comes to teacher training, the figures show that the number of secondary school music teachers fell by 15%, from 8,043 in 2011 to 6,837 in 2020. The ITT census for 2023 shows that only 64% of the target for music trainees has in fact been reached. So how do the Government intend to restore and fund a sufficient number of places for trainee specialist teachers of music?

We know it works, and we know it makes a difference. The work that the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra is doing in Hull and Brent in driving talent and workforce development for the profession, and the improvement in schools such as Feversham Primary in Bradford, which went from a failing school to an outstanding school after it introduced three hours-plus of music per week for each individual student, tell their own story. There is an African proverb that says:

“Music speaks louder than words”.


Our education system needs to amplify the voice of music.

Initial Teacher Training Providers

Lord Boateng Excerpts

Monday 5th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I obviously cannot comment on those providers that are currently appealing if they did not receive reaccreditation. There are some very strong providers among the new ones—the National Institute of Teaching and the Ambition Institute, among others—but as I mentioned in reply to an earlier question, we are focusing very much on building partnerships with those that have received accreditation and those that were unsuccessful.

[Lord Boateng (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as chancellor of the University of Greenwich. Does the Minister recognise that there are very many real concerns among universities that have been teaching and training teachers for many years about this whole process and its inadequacies? When the appeal process is completed, will she meet with a delegation of vice-chancellors and chancellors to discuss the learnings from this exercise?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I hear the noble Lord’s concerns. We believe that the accreditation process was thorough and fair, but I would be delighted to meet the group, as he suggests.