Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Thursday 1st May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, what a privilege and a pleasure to follow two such outstanding maiden speeches, one from my former Euro colleague, the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed of Tinsley, and one from my former college chaplain, the noble Lord, Lord Biggar. Even 35 years ago, as an undergraduate and prey to the slight self-absorption that we have when we are teenagers, I was able to recognise the qualities that will so enrich our counsels here—his humility, his intellectual curiosity and above all that generosity of spirit, that largeness of soul that makes him consider other arguments and other people on their own merits.

It was not obvious that he had such intellectual diversity and future controversy inside him. I remember when I first came across him, he looked like any other scruffy academic—he read the Guardian, had a short little beard and dressed like every other academic—and I would have been surprised had I been told then that out of him was going to come this extraordinary ethical balance sheet of colonialism. I think it surprised a lot of his colleagues too, and because he brought to bear that empiricism and that calm curiosity, which should be valued, above all in academic settings, it triggered, as sadly these things do in our rather deranged culture war, a very negative reaction. His book was initially denied a publisher and then it was howled down by people who plainly had not read it when all he was doing was trying to be balanced, in a way that I am sure he will in all our debates here.

The reason why he does this, and the reason why he can be so indifferent to public opinion, is that he has a genuine faith in something bigger than public opinion. Not everyone has the gift of religious faith, but all of us, I hope, can at least exercise the self-respect that allows us to be honest and true to ourselves in difficult times.

I sincerely thank all the former Secretaries of State for education, not just for having been Secretaries of State but—on both sides—for having presided over a rise in standards that, until recently, would have been unimaginable. I think that happened for reasons hinted at by my noble friend Lady Morris: it was the beginning of diversity and freedom in education that allowed people to pilot new ideas to trial new schemes, and that raised standards across the board. She is quite right to say it was not just in academies; it was happening in maintained schools as well. One could make a case that this was the single greatest achievement of the last Labour Government in terms of the impact it had on people’s lives. A measure of its merit is that the new Government adopted it and claimed it as their own. People talk about Cameron and Gove reforms when they were really reforms pioneered by some of the Members opposite—and they worked.

We heard at the beginning from my noble friend Lord Effingham a measure of how they worked, because the reforms in England drove English schools up according to PISA and indeed all the other measures—there are two or three international measures of academic success—but there was a control in that experiment. In Scotland and in Wales there were no such reforms, and those schools more or less stayed where they were or slightly drifted down in those academic rankings. I hope that, by applying a bit of empiricism, we can all agree that those were successful reforms, and, from what Ministers have been saying today and in previous debates, they do not want to undo the successful parts of them.

The specific issue I want to raise—this point was flagged up by my noble friend Lord Baker of Dorking—is the future of the 44 university technical colleges. They are the schools that are set up by local businesses and universities to fill identified skills gaps. They have an extraordinary success rate by any definition; 86% of them are rated good or excellent by Ofsted. There is demand for more of them: new ones are planned in Southampton and, I think, Doncaster, because there is local demand for them.

It is not always appreciated that, because these schools start typically with kids of 13 or 14, by a lot of the academic measures at that age those kids are not at the top of their cohort—a lot of secondary schools really fight to hang on to the kids who are going to push up their standards—and children who have perhaps not done well, sitting in rows and having a classroom-based education, suddenly come into their own. What is extraordinary about these schools is not that they turn out great engineers, which you would kind of expect, but how much better those children then start performing in their English A-levels and the like, because they are responding to a different kind of teaching. They are being treated as if they were already in the workplace, divided into groups and set tasks, and they flourish. It is not for everyone, but they flourish.

That is the real point about the diversity that comes from the freedom to apply the curriculum flexibly or to derogate from parts of it. I think people sometimes have the idea that these technical schools are teaching lots of metalwork. Yes, they do, but they are also teaching 3D printing, advanced electronics, procurement and logistics, and the only way they can fit all that into the school day is by not having as much of that day taken up with modern languages, history, music and so on. There are plenty of other options for children who want a humanities-based education, and I hope we can retain a measure of diversity.

I was encouraged to hear the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, say we should be prepared to amend the Bill to put these things beyond doubt, as has happened on the question of teachers’ pay and some of the other scare stories about the Bill. I was privileged once to spend a day at something that is not quite a UTC but is almost the same thing: the JCB Academy in Rocester. It is housed in one of Richard Arkwright’s earliest mills, and as the children come in they walk past one of his turbines, which has now been repurposed to be a turbine once again.

Arkwright and the other men who made the Industrial Revolution were not academic kids. Almost all of them dropped out of education in their early or mid-teens because they wanted to get into the workshop and start tinkering. Where is the next Richard Arkwright or Matthew Boulton? For goodness’ sake, let us make sure that they are capable of getting the kind of education that will help them and will help our employers and our economy.