Education: Pupils and Young People

Lord De Mauley Excerpts

Thursday 28th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Perry on securing this valuable debate and my noble friend Lord Hill on turning up—it just shows that you can’t keep a good man down. I agree with my noble friend Lady Perry that we must be ambitious for children. I agree also with the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, about the importance of an evidence base. However, since I was a teacher, the internet has come along and teachers are lucky to have access to more information about what works and a greater opportunity to disseminate best practice than any generation of teachers that went before.

An excellent education is what we seek for all children and for those who come back to education for a second chance, having failed for whatever reason the first time. I shall focus on getting the foundations right, because without good foundations the building will topple.

Getting the foundations right falls into two categories. First, there is the task of getting to know the child and his/her particular needs as early as possible so that the right education can be provided. That means very early contact with trained professionals who can identify whether the child has any particular barrier, physical or mental, to their benefiting from normal education provision. If a barrier is identified, it is then important that suitable provision is made to help them get over it, without parents having to go into battle to obtain it. It may be physical mobility problems, sensory impairment, neurological problems, speech and language impairment, autism, dyslexia, learning difficulties, behaviour problems or emotional problems arising out of a chaotic home background. It may be impaired brain development, resulting from exposure to physical or emotional violence in the home. All these things get in the way of a child fulfilling their potential in the classroom.

It is for this reason that I am delighted to welcome my Government’s announcements about free early-years places for deprived two year-olds and the pupil premium. I welcome also their intention to provide diagnostic tests for all children soon after they start school. However, I urge my ministerial colleagues to bring the age down to two or three if possible and to ensure that the tests are carried out by fully trained professionals capable of diagnosing the wide range of conditions that exist. That is a tall order, but well worth achieving because of the enormous cost-benefit in the long run.

There are considerable difficulties in providing enough professionals with the right skills. Many of us have spoken in the past about the problem of getting speech and language therapists. They often fall between two stools, working in schools but paid for by the PCTs. I hope that the forthcoming NHS reforms may help that situation.

There is also the problem of educational psychologists on which several noble Lords have received a briefing from the Association of Educational Psychologists. It tells us that the Children's Workforce Development Council has frozen recruitment for EP training from 2011 onwards. Combined with the ageing profile of the profession, that could have a serious effect on the availability of these services to some of the most vulnerable children. Will my noble friend say whether the Government intend to look into this?

The second area of getting the foundations right is learning to read and write. You cannot get an education unless you are literate. If you look at a young baby, the first way in which it communicates is not by writing something down: it listens. It listens to the voice of its mother and its father. It detects not just words, but the tone of voice, kindness, persuasion, anger and frustration. It knows immediately what mood its parent is in and often mirrors that in its response. Then it learns to vocalise and eventually to speak. Your Lordships may see what I am getting at. We must foster listening and speaking before we trouble children with reading and writing.

Until a child can express a thought in words, it cannot be expected to turn that word into a squiggle on a page. That is why it is so important to address communication difficulties early. That is why I have always been sceptical about imposing phonics on all children at a particular age without reference to the teacher’s professional judgment about whether the child is ready for that style of learning which, I admit, works well for many.

There is a need for more children’s radio than we have on offer at the moment and I took the opportunity of promoting that idea to Sir Michael Lyons when I met him last month. If you want a child to concentrate on language, pictures can be distracting. They have their place, especially in early reading books associating words with pictures, but if you want to encourage a child to listen you should sometimes ask him to concentrate on that.

Stories and rhymes read aloud in programmes aimed correctly at different age groups lend themselves perfectly to the medium of radio. It grieves me that all we have now is a single catch-all programme on Radio 4 that does not succeed in serving any age group at all and is not listened to by many. I urge the BBC to pilot a new children’s radio station. It could be very exciting, especially if it was as well researched as “Teletubbies”. It could serve all children, but particularly the many thousands for whom English is not their first language and young children who are learning to listen and speak before they read.

Finally, I mention the important issue of life skills and the well-being of the child, which makes him ready to learn. A child cannot learn if he is distressed, and many schools these days find themselves needing to take care of a child’s emotional needs before they can help him to learn.

[Lord De Mauley]

I draw your Lordships’ attention to the fact that this debate is time limited and Back-Benchers’ contributions are limited to five minutes.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Bichard]

My Lords, let me join the whole House in thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, for giving us an opportunity to debate one of the most important subjects of all. When I looked at the list of speakers, two things struck me. The first was that this would be a very high quality debate and, secondly, that speaking at number 20, it would be difficult to say something new and innovative. I will do my best.

This has been an exceptional debate, partly because many of us in this House have struggled in different capacities over many years to close the achievement gap in this country. Like me, many of us will take pride in our efforts, but will be disappointed, nay frustrated, that we have not been more successful. Perhaps this debate is not just a debate but a chance for us all to rededicate ourselves to the task with even greater urgency and determination. In doing that, perhaps we should remind ourselves that failure does not bring with it just economic and social costs, but huge costs in human terms.

I shall refer to two groups to illustrate that. Let us take NEETs, which is the awful term for young people “neither in employment, education nor training”. We have in this country nearly 1 million young people who we refer to as NEETs. Our performance has long compared poorly with just about every other developed country. Of course, that brings economic and social costs. I was shocked to hear from a senior official in the Department for Education and Skills recently that in the north of England, 15 per cent of long-term NEETs die within 10 years. It is therefore no exaggeration to say that for the most vulnerable children and young people in this society education really is a matter of life and death.

Another vulnerable group, children looked after in care, already has been touched on by the noble Earl, Lord Listowel. There have been improvements, but that is from a very low base. There are 59,000 children in care in this country, 6,000 of whom are in care homes. They represent 0.1 per cent of the child population. Yet, one-third of all prisoners have been in care; 42 per cent of prostitutes interviewed recently for a paper have been in care; 20 per cent of 16 to 19 year-old women who leave care become mothers within a year; and parents who have been through the care system are twice as likely to lose the right to care for their children. Those appalling statistics have to be linked to the fact that half of all children in care leave school with no formal qualifications at all. Although 8 per cent now go on to further and higher education, that compares terribly with a country such as Denmark where 60 per cent go on to higher education.

However, if we are to redouble our efforts and rededicate ourselves to this task, we need to be prepared to ask ourselves some searching and perhaps uncomfortable questions. I have five questions. First, do we still seek to impose a one-size-fits-all system on pupils who are so diverse in their talents, their background and their needs? In particular, do we still continue to undervalue vocational education, which is seen by many young people as being far more relevant than the more traditional academic subjects? For me, education is about liberating and developing the talent of every individual child. If that talent is more vocational than academic, we should embrace it rather than accept it reluctantly, as we have sometimes seemed to do.

Secondly, have we all placed a disproportionate emphasis on the structure of our education system at the expense of standards, content and, most of all, as a number of noble Lords have said, teaching quality? The British are obsessed with structure. We all love it. Politicians and civil servants love it because if you change it, it gives the impression of having done something. But all research points to the fact that the most important thing is the quality of teaching. Do we need to revisit the quality, not just of initial teacher training, but, as has been said, continuing professional development? Could we be more imaginative in allowing the best teachers to help and to support their peers? I think that we could.

Thirdly, have we drawn sufficiently on the contribution of the many high-quality voluntary organisations which have the capacity and the skills to re-engage young people who are alienated from the system and to deliver relevant education and training to them? For seven years, I chaired one of the largest of those organisations, Rathbone, and we had a good track record. However, I rarely felt that we were seen by the Government, schools or colleges as partners, but more as a convenient backstop.

Fourthly, have we been too determined to deliver education in traditional settings, by which I mean schools and colleges, when many young people have long since become alienated from those institutions? For me what matters is that young people receive an education. If they are more likely to participate in a work-place setting or some halfway house, so be it.

Finally, have we realised the potential of creative subjects, such as art, performance, film and design, to capture the imagination of some of these young people? I should declare an interest. I chair a charity called FILMCLUB, which has received generous funding from the previous Government and from this Government. We aim to educate children by screening, discussing and reviewing quality films. We now have film clubs in 5,500 schools. We have 160,000 children every week engaged in those film clubs and 60 per cent of school leaders say that it is an effective way of narrowing the gap.

Over the years, when I have visited schools and sat in on lessons, I have been struck constantly how arts subjects can inspire and light up young people, many of whom are alienated from the system.

[Lord De Mauley]

My Lords—

[Lord Bichard]

We need to ask ourselves those questions if we are going to make changes.

[Lord De Mauley]

The noble Lord is into the eighth minute.