Higher Education: Part-time and Mature Students
Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts(8 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville (Con)
My Lords, can my noble friend remind me which Government were in power in 2008?
Schools: Arts Subjects
Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts(10 years, 3 months ago)
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Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville (Con)
My Lords, pursuant to the ante-penultimate question, my noble friend’s department published an excellent analysis of 14 schools’ arts departments about 30 years ago—the 14 presumably being chosen to include an independent school. Has such an analysis been mounted during the past 30 years and, if not, would my noble friend consider one?
Schools: Careers Advisers
Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts(11 years, 12 months ago)
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Lord Hill of Oareford
The general point to which the noble Baroness refers would be well illustrated in the kind of work that we want to do with university technical colleges, trying to make sure that girls, for example, have the opportunity to study and get those technical qualifications that will lead to well paid jobs. In terms specifically of the guidance, consistent with my earlier answer, our overall approach is to say that we would trust schools to take the best judgment as to what is in the interests of their pupils, whether that is boys or girls. But I agree with her that careers guidance is important for children of both sexes.
Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville
My Lords, I realise that most of your Lordships’ House will have received qualified careers advice for, otherwise, they would not be here. However, can my noble friend tell me what qualifications are needed in order to give qualified advice?
Lord Hill of Oareford
My Lords, if I had received good careers advice, I would not be here. In terms of what qualifications we look for in good careers advisers, the accredited providers of careers advice will have to meet a quality standard set by the national careers service. However, generally, we can all benefit from advice from a whole range of people. We have all had it in different ways, which is why we are where we are.
Children: Sexual Exploitation
Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts(13 years, 3 months ago)
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Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville
My Lords, there are nine working days in your Lordships’ House in the first 15 days in February. On two-thirds of those nine days, the first Oral Question is in the name of one of the right reverend Prelates on the Bishops’ Bench. I do not know whether it is a convention of your Lordships’ House that the Bench of Bishops always takes the top of the Order Paper if a right reverend Prelate has a Question to ask or whether that is an index of the enthusiasm of right reverend Prelates straining like greyhounds in the slips to be the first away. On top of that, on Thursday the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester has the first two-and-a-half-hour debate, which is on the role of marriage and marriage support.
This episcopal procession is led today by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester, with his Question for Short Debate, which is itself a harbinger of the similar top Oral Question to be posed on 10 February by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds. We are all in the debt of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester for having triggered all this activity and for the skill with which he has launched it. Having used more than a third of my allotted span with this willing obeisance to the Bishops’ Bench, I shall use the final strait to make one observation and to ask one question.
My observation is that, when these matters were brought dramatically to public attention and general concern by a series of articles in the Times, the thought was aired that the police had been inhibited from raising the profile of these matters for fear that they would be liable to charges of racism. I can understand that inhibition. I had to ponder a similar dilemma more than 50 years ago, although in a different context and to a different degree. I chose then to make indiscretion the better part of valour. However, I hope that the climate will have been so changed by recent developments that this inhibition will be lifted. I share the views of my noble friend Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, as a consequence of eight years as president of St Andrew’s Youth Club, half a mile from this Palace, whose reputation is that oxymoron, “the oldest youth club in the world”.
There are lots of questions that one could ask, but, in a debate of short speeches, my noble friend the Minister is liable to be reduced to a St Sebastianic barrage of questions and one must not be self-indulgent. Mine relates to trafficked girls, an issue that has already been mentioned. I am aware of the Christian organisation thus concerned that goes under the name of Chaste—for the benefit of the Hansard writer, I spell that title with “te” rather than “ed”—but how far is the fact that prostitution among such girls is a criminal offence at the specified age an obstacle to the resolution of such traffic?
Education: Pupils and Young People
Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts(13 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville
My Lords, it is as much a privilege as a pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London, whose leadership within his great diocese is, appositely to this debate, a lesson for us all. I offer a warm word of thanks to my noble friend Lady Perry. We first met within the old DES under the late, great Sir Keith Joseph, later Lord Joseph. She has always been a champion—nay, a heroine—on the issues underlying this debate. So she has been today.
The virtue of a debate of short speeches is to concentrate the mind. I have only one subject to raise with my noble friend the Minister: the supply of male teachers in primary schools. I had a great friend from Oxford who won the top history scholarship of his year, then got a first. He played cricket, hockey and squash for the college, secured a short-service commission as a captain in the Royal Army Education Corps and spent the rest of his career as a teacher in primary schools—not even, to the best of my knowledge, becoming a head teacher. Finally, in retirement—or possibly earlier—he was a schools examination marker at a much higher level. We shared many interests, sometimes of an old fogeyish kind, and we corresponded regularly until his sad death early last year. He was much preoccupied with the subject I am raising.
I yield to no one in my admiration for the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, who was an outstanding Minister for both education and transport. He was so in charge of all his briefs that he almost invited supplementary oral questions by making his answers so precise, comprehensive and short that there was always time for more questions. Not all Ministers have that polymath confidence and fluency. When I asked the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, an Oral Question about the state of play on my subject today, he was more reassuring than I expected. Perhaps the numbers were simply, if modestly, moving in the right direction. The fact remains that in 2009-10 male teachers made up just 12 per cent of registered primary school teachers and 28 per cent of primary schools in England had no registered male teachers at all.
Why do I worry about it? My noble friend Lord Baker of Dorking and I are of the same age, give or take three months. We therefore entered the primary stage at around the same time and during the war. He has always been a constructive martinet on grammar, spelling and punctuation. I share that enthusiasm. We jointly suppose it is because, during the war, the absence of so many at the war meant that we were taught by teachers of an earlier generation, who may well have themselves been educated in the Victorian and Edwardian eras.
I do not know where my noble friend Lord Baker was at school in the war, although I believe it was in the north-west. I was at a rural preparatory school in Buckinghamshire where, even during the war, the majority of the staff were still male. I pay tribute to the excellence of the teaching we received. I do not want to make too much of this but the same male majority was true of the prep schools attended by my three sons on the Isle of Purbeck, 30 or more years ago. Their great school rival was the similar school down the road, attended by the late, great Michael Foot. I do wonder, however, if there is not a monograph to be written on the scale of the effect of this male majority of teachers at that age on the comparative overall performance of the independent sector.
I raise one other consideration. During the 1998 defence review under the previous Government, when I was still in the other place, my own defence of the two TA units in my inner city constituency included in my armoury the fact that 43 per cent of their cadet force recruits were from ethnic minorities and 53 per cent were from single-parent families. There is no doubt that a male-oriented environment in those TA units went some way to providing structure in what were sometimes fairly broken lives. Both my TA units survived the cull.
I end with a debt of honour to one of my own teachers from the war, not least because at 93 he is still alive and can read it. When we look back on those who had formative effects on us up to the age of 25 but outside our own families—I reiterate the significance of this in depleted families—they are sometimes clergy, sometimes sports coaches, sometimes contemporary friends but predominantly from the ranks of our teachers. Freddie Madden was a history postgraduate student at Christ Church College, Oxford, when war broke out. He could not serve because of health problems. He was planning an academic career, which he resumed at Oxford in the winter of 1946-47. He deliberately declined to teach history so that he would not gain any academic advantage over his contemporaries who were away fighting. He taught English grammar and literature brilliantly, and beyond that introduced us to a wider culture. This is at the margins of the issue I am raising because of the special wartime circumstances, but the impact of his teaching was not and is not.