Education: Development of Excellence

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Thursday 18th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to take part in this debate. Like others, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Perry on her excellent speech. We have heard some splendid and very moving speeches. I refer particularly to the speech of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester and to the speeches of my noble friends Lord Harris and Lord Baker. In the brief time at my disposal, I should like just to talk of four things in four minutes that would develop excellence in education.

The first is the teaching of history, which has not yet been touched upon save briefly by the noble Lord, Lord Rees. I believe that every child leaving school in this country should, at the very least, have a chronological knowledge of the history of his or her own country without missing out great chunks. This does not happen at the moment and we should put that right.

Secondly, I was very moved by what my noble friend Lord Baker said when he quoted the psalm:

“Prosper thou the work of our hands”.

For some 25 years, I have run a scheme called the William Morris Craft Fellowship, which we give to marvellous young craftsmen and women to broaden their knowledge and give them a greater ability to manage heritage building projects. I very much liked what my noble friend Lord Lloyd-Webber said. I would like craftsmen and women to be more prominent in the public eye and the work that they do to be more appreciated so that, in our schools, young people feel challenged to take up the crafts and believe that, if they follow a craft career, they are not having second best but are in fact doing something that will contribute to future generations’ enjoyment.

Thirdly, I very much believe that we do not give our young people the opportunity to emerge into the world when they leave school as proper citizens. I would like citizenship education to play a real part in the curriculum and not just be a sort of reluctant add-on extra. At the moment, a group of us in this House are working towards getting a citizenship certificate that all young people would take. That would concentrate their thoughts on community participation and awaken their instincts—they all have them—of loyalty and responsibility. We would then have a generation of children coming out of our schools who felt that they belonged to a community and had obligations to that community. We really ought to face this one. A group of us had a meeting with Nick Hurd in the Cabinet Office just before the House rose in July but we are trying to further this. I hope that those Members of your Lordships’ House who did not know of this initiative and would like to take part in it will let me know.

Finally, I take up the points made by my noble friend Lady Perry when she talked about our universities, how excellent the very best of them are and how vital it is that we nurture them. I will say one thing about the visa situation. It is far better that someone who is not entitled to be here comes into this country than that we shut out a future Nobel Prize winner. We ought to take away visas from the general immigration statistics. I really hope that if nothing else comes out of this debate, my noble friend Lord Hill of Oareford will promise to talk to those responsible in Government to try and bring some sense and balance to what at the moment is a chaotic and unsatisfactory situation.

My four minutes are up. This debate has illustrated the need for more general debates in this House. Now that we are not going to have the nonsense of debating its abolition, let us have more general debates when we can talk about the issues that really interest and concern our fellow citizens.