Schools: Financial Education

Lord Hampton Excerpts

Wednesday 31st January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a state secondary school teacher in design and technology. I join in the thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Sater, for raising this important topic.

As ever, we are talking about the difference between following the curriculum and educating our children. Nick Gibb has been quoted as describing having “good maths” as the gateway to lifelong financial stability, and pointed out that financial knowledge already forms a compulsory part of the national curriculum in secondary school. However, as has been mentioned, only 41% of young adults are financially literate—whatever that means. I would contend that that figure is much lower in reality.

Core skills in maths need to be taught but we also need to get to a stage where students can learn financial skills—such as how to compare offers in a supermarket, read a simple balance sheet, shop around for a mortgage or fill in a tax return—as well as other vital skills that are either ignored or left for excellent charities such as Young Enterprise to fulfil during those rare PSHE days. At this point, I must declare that Young Enterprise used to be a client of mine when I was a photographer many years ago.

Might it be not only that children could learn some very useful skills but that those skills could perhaps be used in later life for them to start a business, employ people and pay their taxes? In fact, I think that every student who leaves school at 18 should have started at least one business while they were at school. Would that not be fun to learn and teach? Might it inspire students to return to school and teachers to enjoy teaching?

Schools: Safeguarding

Lord Hampton Excerpts

Thursday 7th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst, and I would like to introduce him to my 12 year-old daughter if he feels that girls cannot compete against boys at sports. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, for giving us the opportunity to talk on such a vital topic. I can only stand here and admire the expertise in the Chamber.

To say that safeguarding in schools is important is like saying that it is useful to be able to breathe, so I assume that all noble Lords agree on this basic point. As, I believe, the only working teacher in both Houses of Parliament, I thought I would give the House my view of safeguarding from the trenches, as it were. I work in a very high-performing school in a challenging part of Hackney—which, incidentally, bans mobile phones. As Peter J Hughes, our CEO, wrote in his recent book on school leadership:

“Children in our Hackney community die. Children in our hackney community are often routinely stopped under Operation Trident. Children in our Hackney community are strip-searched and subjected to adultification in presumed places of safety. I am very aware that these are three very powerful statements, but they are true and they are every carer’s, parent’s, teacher’s, principal’s, CEO’s and community’s worst nightmare. It is something we cannot and will not ignore”.


It is against a backdrop like this that a school has get its safeguarding right. Safeguarding is everyone’s responsibility. This is repeatedly drummed into teachers, ancillary workers and students. A change of behaviour in the playground, a dirty shirt collar or a new pair of trainers can be an indicator of abuse or grooming. Every one of those has to be reported, for it could be the final piece in a jigsaw puzzle. Playgrounds are great places to spot how a behaviour has changed, a pattern has emerged, a gang has formed, or a student has been isolated by online bullying. This is the front line—the short-term reaction—but in fact safeguarding is more than that. Schools should be fun places where pupils want to learn and teachers want to teach, and can succeed in this only when we begin to get some of the 1.8 million children who, according to the Children’s Commissioner, regularly miss school back into regular attendance. On this topic, I ask the Minister to comment on the Children’s Commissioner’s call that every school should have a legal duty to report its attendance daily.

As the Government’s guidance says:

“It is about the culture a school creates to keep its pupils safe so that they can benefit fully from all that schooling offers”.


That can be as simple as not setting an essay question like “A trip to the beach” or “A walk in the woods”, because a significant amount of children will not have experienced this and they could feel isolated. We are told not to celebrate the end of term because, for many children, school holidays signal the end of any structure to their life, including a hot meal, and a descent into chaos or just sheer boredom. For the majority, this is not abuse in the classic sense; it is just that parents and carers are too busy or distracted to provide more than the basics of life without any further stimulation or companionship.

Schools are where students can receive kindness, from their friends and teachers, and build and nurture relationships. Any teacher will tell you that it is the genuine connections with students that make them go to work each day. It is also about the environment of the school. The head teacher of my school, Rebecca Warren, always talks about the broken-window syndrome, whereby if something is left unfixed, be it damage or graffiti, more serious damage will follow. We underestimate the impact that school surroundings make on students; if small damages go unrepaired, then there is a sign of a more substantial malaise in the school. I think we also underestimate the subconscious effect on students that, if the school does not care about the building, it does not care about them. This is one thing that does not require much money, just organisation. The worry is that this could be another, as yet unseen, consequence of the RAAC saga.

Safeguarding needs to be baked into the curriculum and this is where Government and schools can do more to help changing behaviours in students, thereby helping from within. There are some lessons that need to be threaded through the term, rather than just saved for PHSCE, the once-a-term day when these topics are normally discussed. Many parents and children see this day as another Inset day, particularly those who hold beliefs that are challenged by the subjects studied then. Surely they are the students who would most benefit from a balanced debate on such subjects. Tender is a charity that uses drama workshops to provide a safe space where young people can rehearse for real-life scenarios and recognise what makes something healthy or unhealthy behaviour. By using this in drama lessons that all students study, say in year 7, all students can get a deep understanding of the issues. This could be more useful than a lifetime of PHSCE days, and I would be interested to hear the Minister’s view on embedding more strategies for safeguarding and general well-being into the curriculum, rather than on drop-down days.

I have been trying to be as optimistic as I can around this subject and I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, that things have improved. There are great stories of great people doing great work but, while there are so many children living in poverty, a school is limited to what it can do. I spoke to a safeguarding lead recently who said that if they were one of these children today, particularly the boys, they would be in a gang, for so many of them feel that it is the only way they can earn money, perhaps for their family or even for a new set of trainers, because they see no other way out beyond starting to carry packages for cash. My Lords, we have a lot of work to do.

Schools: Special Educational Needs

Lord Hampton Excerpts

Wednesday 15th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, as ever, I declare my interest as a teacher. Will the Government reconsider the priority given to parental preference in educational placements for children with EHC plans, given the opinion of many professionals that this is not in the best interests of the child or of efficient education provision, and that the popular schools are at breaking point?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

As the noble Lord knows, a number of these things are under review, and we will test them as part of our pathfinders and in the improvement plan. It is very important that that balance be kept between the professional judgment of teachers, to which the noble Lord referred, and the sense of confidence that parents have in the system.

Access to Musical Education in School

Lord Hampton Excerpts

Wednesday 18th October 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Boateng, for initiating this very important debate. As ever, I must declare my interest as a teacher of design and technology in a state secondary school. The Minister is going to be rather surprised and, perhaps, relieved that she and I are not going to go through one of our recent dances where I complain about the crushing weight of the curriculum and she replies that a knowledge-rich curriculum is good for everyone. No, I am going to suggest that there is, perhaps, some good news for once, because I think there is a simple first fix for addressing the problem of inequalities in access to musical education in schools.

When one thinks of music lessons, one tends to think of a single child playing an instrument, which, of course, is expensive and at the far end of the spectrum where most parents and children do not want to go, even if they could afford it. We must think of music lessons initially as a more collaborative process, whereby everyone gets to join in. As the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, said, we cannot all sing in tune, but nearly all of us can clap, stamp or make a rhythmic noise. It is that unity—the training to get a group making sounds in unison—that is at the heart of music’s benefit to students, for this encompasses discipline, athleticism and co-ordination in a way that not even sport can better, often for students who hate PE. From this may come a lifelong love of music that will, perhaps, encourage students to continue the subject on to GCSE, take up an instrument, or follow it towards a career in the music industry.

The school where I teach has a thriving music department. We take the newly arrived year-7s and give them choir practice for an hour a week during the school day. After six weeks, at a parents’ evening, the parents are treated to 220 year-7s, around half of whom will be eligible for pupil premium, singing “Moving On Up” in three-part harmony. I also speak as a parent when I say that it is an experience that truly makes the hair stand up on the back of one’s neck. As a team-building, confidence-building, stress-relieving exercise for students, this is hard to beat. The music lessons then continue as part of the curriculum until the end of year 9, when GCSE choices are made.

For a rewarding music experience for all pupils, therefore, schools just need to provide the willingness to give music the opportunity to thrive: the room to do it in and the expert teachers with the enthusiasm to teach it. Therein lies the problem. As noble Lords have said, schools are under pressure. Teachers are leaving the profession and, from our experiences, new teachers are hard to find. Reintroducing bursaries in 2024 for music teachers can only be a good thing, but it will take time for that to filter through. The value of music must be recognised so that teachers, who are vital to any subject, may be persuaded to stay and can see their work valued.

Taught properly by specialist music teachers, the value of music can be as an effective way to foster the benefits of teamwork for all, to improve behaviour, to reduce stress and to benefit cognitive learning skills in maths and communication for a minimal cost. Why would anyone not encourage this?

Education: Advanced British Standard

Lord Hampton Excerpts

Tuesday 17th October 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I am afraid that I cannot reassure the noble Baroness of that. She will be aware that we have carried out extensive reform of our qualifications and will know that, as of August 2022, we had removed 5,500 qualifications with low or no enrolments. However, we still have the most complicated and duplicative landscape of qualifications in this area —at least 7,000 available qualifications—which we will address through our reform programme.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, as ever, I declare my interest as a secondary school teacher. The Minister said that the ABS will develop maths and English capabilities. For anybody who has just guided their son through the maths GCSE and maths A-level—as I have, rather badly—are we saying that the maths GCSE is not good enough? Surely that is enough maths for anybody.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I do not think that it is enough maths for everybody. As the House knows, we are an outlier in the G7 in not requiring maths to 18. We have made tremendous progress with our maths hubs and teaching for mastery pro approach. We can see that in Ofsted’s recent report on school maths, which described how a

“resounding, positive shift in mathematics education has taken place in primary schools”.

We are determined to invest more in maths and give every child the opportunity to succeed in maths.

Schools: Music, Art, Craft and Dance

Lord Hampton Excerpts

Monday 16th October 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The Government have been very supportive of partnerships between the independent sector and state-funded schools. I absolutely recognise the important work done by the 1,700 schemes and I hope we see many more in future.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interests in the register. We now have EBacc, Progress 8 and the new BritBacc—I presume that is what it is called—which all exclude creative subjects. Does the Minister agree that, until the Government stop their obsession with mandatory A-level maths and their focus on purely academic subjects, there is little chance of revitalising the teaching of creative arts in schools and therefore recruiting teachers to teach them?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

To clarify, there is no mandatory maths A-level; there will be the provision of maths to 18, which will take us to the same position as every other G7 country. The noble Lord is a teacher and understands better than I do how children learn but, through the EBacc, we are delivering an important rich store of knowledge from which children can apply their creativity, critical thinking and imagination.

Children’s Social Care Implementation Strategy (Public Services Committee Report)

Lord Hampton Excerpts

Wednesday 20th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I echo the thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, for tabling this Motion and for the very real concern she and the committee have shown for such an important issue. There are many others in this Chamber far more expert than me on social care, but I was moved to speak in this debate by the fact that I see the results of these policies weekly. As some noble Lords may know, I am a teacher in a state academy in Hackney. Like the noble Lord, Lord Willis of Knaresborough, I am at the gritty end of this subject, where the consequences of these decisions are often manifest.

As Action for Children recently reported, 53% of young people with a social care referral failed either English or maths at GCSE. Of the 2004-05 birth cohort, 58% of young people with a social care referral were persistently absent at some point in their school careers, missing 10% or more of their classes in a school year.

Schools can provide a safe, structured environment for children, and teachers are the weathervanes of social care. We are trained to spot signs of abuse, neglect and bullying and most schools have a clear system of reporting. Those reports, often of tiny changes or instinctive hunches, can become part of a jigsaw puzzle whose final picture could lead to a referral and future action. A case study in the strategy talks about two young people who disclose physical abuse to their teachers. It is the referral from the school that leads Jackson and Madison to be placed with foster parents. Children will often open up to a trusted teacher when they will not talk to anyone else. Through teachers, the missing voices of young people can be heard—something the strategy has been heavily criticised for.

When I talked to members of the safeguarding team at school, one of their top concerns was the wide variation in care between boroughs—some are excellent, while others do not even answer phone calls or emails about referrals. A child can get lost in the cracks if they move boroughs, which can be used deliberately by the families to disappear from the system. As the response says, the strategy will have an impact only in a few areas, and then only as a pilot programme. This will surely exacerbate the problem.

It was also said that the threshold is exceptionally high. For social care to open a case, there needs to be a significant risk. This is completely understandable, as it does not have the resources to complete early intervention work, but this results in firefighting as opposed to early help in prevention when it could be most effective, as the noble Baronesses, Lady Morris of Yardley and Lady Tyler of Enfield, have said. If care workers are transitory and lasting relationships can never be built, that is never going to happen. The focus on recruitment and particularly retention of staff as a priority is vital. Otherwise, much of the other work is pointless.

All this, I am afraid, is dependent on money. If the committee’s report is true and the strategy lacks the political buy-in and funding to deliver reforms for young people and families, it would be a huge lost opportunity for change. I am also concerned that, in the strategy and the report, the increasing burden of work that falls on schools is hardly acknowledged. I am also unclear quite how schools are to be embedded into the new plan. The strategy recommends that schools should be made a statutory safeguarding partner and contribute to the strategic and operating delivery of multiagency working. It also recommends that they have a greater role in supporting and protecting vulnerable children without making clear how or what budget will be provided for the extra training, and necessary staff, that will inevitably be needed for the extra responsibility alongside their main job, which is usually to teach.

The strategy is called Stable Homes, Built on Love. Might it not be better to aim for stable lives, built on love?

Life Skills and Citizenship

Lord Hampton Excerpts

Thursday 7th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, as a state secondary school teacher myself, I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, and thank her for this opportunity. The teaching of these subjects is part of a more fundamental discussion—as the noble Lord, Lord Knight, just said—about our whole curriculum.

The Skills Builder Partnership and Edge Foundation recently published a report that estimated that the lack of vital skills, such as problem-solving, teamwork and leadership, cost the UK economy £22 billion pounds last year. These skills, like the creative skills that contribute to the UK’s vital creative industry, are not passed on genetically or by osmosis; for most children, they are mainly learned at school. If we can enrich children with these skills, we can improve not only their life chances but the chances of those around them.

We should be teaching life skills and citizenship all day every day to our students as an embedded part of every subject, not as a separate subject. Problem-solving, both mental and practical, should have a much larger share of the curriculum. Teamwork, critical thinking and analysis, physical activity, manual dexterity and personal health and well-being would be far more useful than the rote learning that still clings to much of our national curriculum.

We should not be educating children so that they can go on to university; we should be educating children so that they can go into life. University should be a choice, not an inevitability and, whether they choose to go or not, our school leavers should be robust, practical, critical thinkers who are better prepared for a life as healthy, compassionate, ambitious, self-aware, resilient and employable citizens.

Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete in Education Settings

Lord Hampton Excerpts

Monday 4th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I remind the noble Lord that the Government made a full survey of the school estate. We carried out the first one I think between 2017 and 2019 and we are in the middle of the second one at the moment. That looks at the condition grade across schools. I have the figures in front of me: in the first survey, 95% of individual condition grades—which literally look at the window frames; I am not sure about door handles but the walls, the roofs, et cetera—were graded as good or satisfactory, and 2.4% were poor or bad: 2.1% were poor and 0.3% were bad.

The noble Lord will also know that all our funding to schools for condition is prioritised based on condition need. He also knows that if there is an urgent request we will always consider it. We have already identified some the of so-called system builds, such as Laingspan and Intergrid. Almost all of that has been completely resolved and plans are in place for all of it to be removed. We have a programme of surveys starting later this year looking at the remaining construction types to understand them better and understand whether they might pose a risk.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a working teacher. I congratulate the Minister on the speed of her response to this development. We have heard a lot about buildings and children, but can the Government assure the House that they will provide extra support and counselling for senior leadership teams to reflect the extreme pressures during these difficult times, particularly those that have no local network in their area?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The noble Lord makes an important point. I visited a school on Friday where we identified RAAC earlier in the summer. It was about to reopen. I had not got down the drive and that was literally the first point that the head teacher raised. I take this opportunity to again thank all those head teachers who are dealing with this at the moment.

On the individual issue about what support to offer head teachers, that really would come better from the school itself, the trust or the local authority. For us to try to do that in Sanctuary Buildings might not be the best route—but, as I said, we will consider all reasonable requests for revenue funding and we absolutely recognise the pressure that this issue puts on school leaders.

Higher Education: Arts and Humanities

Lord Hampton Excerpts

Wednesday 28th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I feel that the noble Baroness and I listen to different bits of what the Government say about this. It was only last month that the Government announced their plans to grow the creative industries from the current £108 billion by a further £50 billion, and a million more jobs by 2030. We are making a major investment in the sector, particularly in performance and screen technology research labs based in Yorkshire, Dundee, Belfast and Buckinghamshire.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a secondary school teacher and head of a design and technology department. According to the Art Now report published by the APPG for Art, Craft and Design in Education, 67% of art and design teachers questioned are thinking of leaving the profession. What are the Government trying to do to stop this entire waste of talent?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The noble Lord asks an important question, and part of this is about being clear about the value we put on those qualifications. As I mentioned in my opening reply, we are introducing a new T-level in this area in 2024 and further apprenticeship opportunities the following year.