Lord Knight of Weymouth
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Education Bill
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“( ) This section shall only come into force if its provisions have been approved, by a simple majority, in a vote of registered teachers.
( ) For such a vote to be valid, 50 per cent of registered teachers must have voted.”
Lord Knight of Weymouth
My Lords, Amendment 76 repeats the amendment that we debated regarding the General Teaching Council for England, and I will not repeat at any length the arguments that were made then. As with the GTC, in this amendment we are looking to trust teachers, which seems to be a theme of the Committee. We are simply saying that if teachers value the TDA and the training and development it has been offering them, we can put it in their hands to decide whether it should continue.
I shall also speak to my Amendment 76ZA. It is no secret that I oppose the abolition of the TDA. I made it clear in the substantial part of my Second Reading speech that I think that the TDA has been doing a good job. People come from around the world to look at how successful we are at recruiting and retaining teachers. Prior to its formation, we missed our targets in teacher recruitment and under-recruited teachers quite chronically. In those days the Whitehall machine used to try to manage teacher recruitment and professional development from the centre. We have excellent civil servants in the Department for Education, but I am an advocate, at times, of putting some things at arms’ length from them, particularly—if we want to learn from history—with the attempts that we had in the past to recruit from the centre, which did not work. They did it so badly that they had to set up the TTA, the successor to today’s TDA, which we are debating.
The TDA is a success. It is still tough-going with the shortage subjects, but the agency has been doing well. It has met its target, even when it was as high as 40,000 teachers a year coming into the profession. That target has been reduced and is currently around 32,000 teachers a year. How did it do it? It did it with a mix of things including bursaries. In an earlier day in Committee, in an exchange with the government Whip who was at the Dispatch Box, I said that I felt that the proposals for bursaries in the document currently being consulted on, setting the maximum for secondary recruits at £20,000 compared with a maximum for primary recruits of £4,000, are sending a difficult signal to our best and brightest graduates about which section of the teaching workforce we value the most. I accept that we need to deal with the shortage subjects. However, we should look at the mix that the TDA uses, because it does not use only bursaries, it also uses proper integrated marketing—and not just TV adverts, although they have been extremely effective and successful and are memorable for those who have time to watch commercial television, but also billboards and proper cross-media advertising, including social media. When deployed, the marketing has always worked because of the professionalism and expertise of the agency working at arm’s length from Whitehall.
I am pretty shocked that there is no mention of marketing in the consultation document, Training our Next Generation of Outstanding Teachers, as if the department does not value it. Perhaps that is true. Perhaps Ministers do not like marketing. It is true that when the Government first came in they issued, I think, some kind of central diktat from the Cabinet Office saying that all government advertising was bad and they would not do any of it, and it was suspended for some time. I gather—it may be just rumour—that soon after the Secretary of State was appointed he went on a tour of the wonderful Sanctuary Buildings in Great Smith Street which included a visit to the eighth floor, at the top of the building, which is where the communications department’s staff hang out. Having checked out the press team and the speech writers, he stumbled across an assembly of desks bristling with awards and said, “What goes on here?”. The reply was “Marketing”. He replied, “I don’t like marketing”, and walked off. That is just what I am told, and it may or may not be true.
Lord Knight of Weymouth
My noble friend says from a sedentary position that it does not sound like the Secretary of State, but it is also true that the Government have now closed down the COI. That also sends a signal about what they think about professional marketing and its importance. As a result of the advertising ban that we had once the Government took office, we have had a significant reduction in applications for people to be teachers, which also suggests that professional marketing works. I gather that we should just about scrape through in meeting the recruitment targets, but with applications 10 to 15 per cent down this year, that makes you question whether we will recruit the same quality, because we will be recruiting from a smaller pool of applicants.
The real problems will come next year because of the lag effect that we normally see around stimulated interest in teaching from people who are thinking about what jobs they will do once they graduate. I really worry about the effect on teacher recruitment for next year, especially in the shortage subjects, science and maths in particular, that we are so concerned about.
Hence the reason for tabling Amendment 76ZA. This repeats the clauses that established the TDA relevant to promoting careers in the school workforce. There were four main aims of the TDA when it was established in statute. I have simply repeated one of them: the aim of promoting careers in the school workforce. It is a probing amendment. I cannot pretend to be an expert parliamentary draftsperson and I cannot pretend to believe that the Minister—however reasonable a chap he might be—is suddenly going to cave in and allow this arm’s-length body to be created. However, the abolition of the Central Office of Information means that there is no other obvious capacity that I know of within government to do a professional job in running and procuring the integrated marketing campaigns to recruit teachers that we know from recent history are so effective in ensuring that we have the best quality recruits into the profession.
Therefore, the amendment proposes an arm’s-length body to perform this function to ensure that we sustain recruitment into teaching. If the Minister disagrees with my reasonable request to set up this arm’s-length body, I simply need him to give me a confident answer as to how this will be done as successfully as the TDA, and that he will ensure this marketing function is taken more seriously than in the current policy document. I beg to move.
The Earl of Listowel
My Lords, perhaps I may ask what the initials COI stand for.
Lord Knight of Weymouth
COI is the Central Office of Information, a substantial agency that works across government in order to provide capacity around buying advertising, marketing and so on. It was announced a couple of weeks ago that it was going to close with the loss of a few hundred jobs. When the initial arm’s-length body review by the Cabinet Office took place soon after the Government came in, resulting in the Public Bodies Bill which is currently in the other place, the signal was that the COI would be retained but—as I said—the decision was made a few weeks ago. On the noble Earl’s Amendment 78, which is also in this group, his proposal to retain an advisory board to government has some attraction to me as a defender of the status quo in that it is a variant on the status quo; it allows the Government to have their way to some extent by taking functions in-house as part of the centralisation of functions that this Bill represents. I would like to see the specific aim around professionalising marketing. I am pretty flexible about this but I think that those functions need to be retained.
The Earl of Listowel
I rise to speak to Amendment 78, which is in my name, and to support Amendment 76, to which I have attached my name. As the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, said, Amendment 78 would simply replace a board. Perhaps we can retain the current board as a special advisory group for the Department for Education.
The amendments are partly in response to a meeting recently of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Skills. The new chair of that group, in post for one year, concluded the meeting by saying two things. First, he said that when he visited Finland and had a meeting with politicians from across the political spectrum, he was very impressed by the strong consensus on education policy. Secondly, he said that the more he learnt about this issue the more it seemed to him that if politics could stay out of education, the better it would be for education. By tabling my amendment, I hope to probe the Government about how one might encourage that position of distancing politics from education.
The noble Lord, Lord Knight, referred to the rather disappointing results in recruiting teachers. It seems to me that this is a golden opportunity to get hold of bright young graduates who might have gone into the City at other times, but who might now choose to go into social care and education. It is sad that we are not getting the cream of the crop. If the noble Lord’s concerns are correct, and this is to some degree to do with interference from the Government, perhaps this is a good illustration of how it is sometimes better for politicians to leave the professionals and experts to do the job. There is an important role for politicians in ensuring that the right experts are appointed and that the criticisms from people sitting in their armchairs are answered.
I refer to the Youth Justice Board, which was an arm’s-length organisation. When there was a spate of thefts of mobile phones and muggings because of that, the Government responded by strengthening the laws around mobile phone theft. Unfortunately, one young man, Joseph Scholes, who had just begun at a children’s home, was out for the day with a group of young people. I understand that he was involved in the periphery of a mobile phone theft. Because of the response to the understandable and popular concern about mobile phone theft, when he was found guilty of being involved in this activity, he was placed in the secure estate, in a young offender institution, even though he was a very vulnerable young man. Unfortunately he hanged himself. The judge recognised that it was not appropriate for him to be placed in the YOI but that he should have been in a more sensitive environment.
Perhaps it is not a particularly good example, but it seems to me that the Youth Justice Board has a similar history to that described by the noble Lord, Lord Knight, which was that the Government despaired of being able to do the right thing in youth justice in 1998 or so. They were disappointed in the outcomes. We have had the highest level of children in custody in western Europe. The Youth Justice Board was set up with good positive outcomes. In the past three years the number of children in custody has reduced by 30 per cent. One sees positive outcomes. I am sorry to go on for so long and shall try to wind up as soon as possible. However, in Hackney, for example, politicians decided to give great authority to two very senior social workers. They challenged a culture in Hackney that had let down a lot of young people and children. After three years, they reduced by 30 per cent the number of children coming into care and saved the council a huge sum in doing so. They did this by putting in charge people who had a lifetime’s experience working in this area and by backing their work.
I think we will see best outcomes for our children if we give as much responsibility to people who have actually done the work, who are experienced professionals, and if we can keep politicians—who nevertheless have an important role—as far away as possible from such decisions. The TDA is a good example of a body which worked as a buffer between politicians and education and had good outcomes. I am looking for reassurance from the Minister that this will not have the adverse consequences that I fear.
Baroness Benjamin
My Lords, the TDA has undertaken excellent work in raising equality in schools. Recruitment from BME groups is important to ensure that white and BME pupils benefit from a more balanced representation of society. The experience of teachers from diverse groups is important. Therefore, I hope that the Minister can confirm that this policy will continue under the new body.
Lord Knight of Weymouth
My Lords, we have had a useful debate and I was pleased to hear the comment that the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, has just made. I listened carefully to the Minister’s reasonable tone in responding to it. I understand the argument that runs through the Bill about increasing ministerial accountability. He knows that I think the Government are being brave because we all know that there are periodic crises in education and Ministers will be a lot more accountable for those than they have been to date.
I say in passing that Ministers are not the only individuals accountable to Parliament. The Permanent Secretary is the accounting officer and is accountable to Parliament through the Public Accounts Committee. I worry who on earth will want to be the next Permanent Secretary at the Department for Education, not just because they will follow a class act in the form of David Bell but because they will be accountable for so much to the Public Accounts Committee. The TDA has a chief accounting officer in the form of the chief executive but the Permanent Secretary will replace the roles of five or six other accounting officers as well as being accountable for his own department. I think that permanent secretaries will also be taking a pay cut. It is going to be a tough task to recruit them. Perhaps the Government need to set up a recruitment agency for permanent secretaries.
Now that we have seen that dip in applicants, perhaps the Minister would be minded to write a letter to tell us how much was saved in the freeze on advertising in terms of the TDA in isolation. Given the current labour market conditions, which we know make teaching more attractive because there are not so many alternative graduate careers, it is extraordinary that we have had that dip. In the end, I did not hear an argument from the Minister which told me why the previous experience of things being run from Whitehall would be improved this time around. I cannot say that I am persuaded but being a co-operative sort of chap, I am happy to withdraw my amendment.
Baroness Brinton
My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendment 76A in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Walmsley. I am also supportive of Amendment 77 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Rix. Internationally, the countries performing well in the PISA rankings recruit teachers from among the brightest graduates in their country. In Finland, prospective teachers must have achieved a first-class degree, and are regarded and treated as top professionals in their country with excellent pay which is considerably above the average for our teachers’ salaries in this country. Interestingly, they are also given total responsibility for the curriculum at a school level.
On the previous group, the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, spoke about Finland and the lack of politics in education. I believe that that is partly because education is such a national priority that all parties do not regard it as a key issue over which they need to fight. Four years ago at an OECD conference, I spoke to Finnish colleagues in higher education. While they are not complacent, they know that their system works and produces excellent results. This Bill aims to trust our professional teachers more and I hope that we will move to a system more along the Finnish lines.
Lord Knight of Weymouth
My Lords, when the noble Baroness met her friends from Finland, I wonder whether she had similar answers to the last time I met the Finnish Education Minister. I asked her why Finnish schools were so successful. She answered that it was because of a culture within the country that loves learning, which is demonstrated not only in the widespread membership of public libraries. She also told me that in Finland it used to be that you were not allowed to get married unless you could prove that you could read. Does the noble Baroness think that that is a good idea for us to copy from Finland?
Lord Hill of Oareford
As I was saying, the Training our Next Generation of Outstanding Teachers document says:
“There is an important role for universities in any future ITT system. They provide trainees with a solid grounding in teaching, and space to reflect on their school experiences. We expect universities to continue to be involved in most teacher training, responding to the demands of schools for high quality training to supplement school-based practical experience”.
Our proposals for teacher training are part of our broader efforts to put schools at the heart of our drive to improve educational standards. In most cases, we expect this to be in strong partnerships with successful universities and we have set out a series of proposals to achieve this. The Universities’ Council for the Education of Teachers, whose members are universities that provide teacher training, has welcomed the publication of the Government’s strategy.
My noble friend Lady Brinton asked for reassurance on a couple of points. First, do all new teachers need to be graduates? The answer to that is yes. Undergraduates can gain a degree through their course and other trainees must hold a degree before entering ITT. Her second question was about accredited ITT providers and the Quality Assurance Agency process. ITT providers that are HE institutions will be covered by these arrangements and be accredited by the TDA and, in future, by the Teaching Agency. As now, school-based ITT is also accredited by the TDA. Both are inspected by Ofsted.
On the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Rix, our proposals for teacher training will ensure that teachers have practical teacher training experience of supporting pupils with additional needs, including SEN. Indeed, we want there to be a stronger focus on support for children with special educational needs. Initial teacher training courses that prepare trainees to meet the qualified teacher status standards currently ensure that teachers are able to differentiate their teaching to meet the needs of each pupil, including those with special educational needs. The White Paper stated that the revised standards should, among other things, provide a stronger focus on responding to pupils with additional needs, including those with special educational needs. An interim report of that review is expected to be submitted in the coming week.
In addition, our Green Paper sets out a range of measures designed to enhance the knowledge, skills and understanding of teachers in relation to teaching children with special educational needs and disabilities. These include: making it easier for more trainees to conduct some, though not all, of their training placements in special settings, including special schools and mainstream schools with specially resourced SEN provision; commissioning a range of free training resources for serving teachers to support children with a range of specific special educational needs; funding a scholarship for teachers’ higher-level professional development to improve their practice, where half of the funding available will be for supporting disabled children and children with special educational needs; and ensuring that networks of new teaching schools will help schools to share practice and resources in meeting the needs of disabled pupils and those with special educational needs.
Lord Knight of Weymouth
I am grateful for the Minister’s patience with me. I am interested in his view of the bachelor of education. Having a training over years rather than a single year or—in the case of Teach First, of which I am an enthusiast—a few weeks, allows, particularly primary school teachers, not only training across the range of subjects that are taught in primary schools, but to drill down in more detail into special educational needs. The feeling out there is that the Government are not as keen on the bachelor of education as postgraduate routes from other subjects. Can the Minister give us some reassurance on that from the Dispatch Box?
Lord Hill of Oareford
As the noble Lord knows, we are keen to encourage people into teaching via a variety of routes, whether through Teach First or through PGCE. In due course, if we can, we want to build on initiatives such as Teach First to see if we can get people who have been successful in other professions to come into teaching. We are keen to make sure that there is a variety of ways. It is true that in terms of the financial support which we announced in the initial teacher training strategy that we published a couple of weeks ago, the focus of the funding that we are making available is on those who have high-quality university degrees in shortage subjects. However, we want to see a range of provision.
I have already written to a number of noble Lords who spoke at Second Reading about teacher training to draw their attention to the publication of our strategy and to invite them to meet the Minister of State for Schools. As the document we published is a discussion document rather than a statement of final policy, I encourage noble Lords with an interest to read it and to let us know what they think. I would be very happy for those who have an interest—I am thinking of my noble friend Lady Brinton and, given his remarks, probably my noble friend Lord Willis as well—to organise a meeting with the Minister of State with responsibility for these important areas so that we can discuss this further with him.
I hope that I have been able to reassure my noble friend Lady Brinton about our continued commitment to high-quality teacher training and the essential role of universities. I also hope that given the range of measures which we are planning to put in place in relation to special educational needs, the noble Lord, Lord Rix, will agree that we do not need this prescription. I ask my noble friend Lady Brinton to withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch
My Lords, I rise to speak to our opposition to the Question that Clause 18 stand part of the Bill. While we welcome the initiative of those who tabled Amendments 78A and 78B, regrettably we do not feel that they have gone far enough in maintaining a national framework of pay and conditions for support staff.
Perhaps I should also make it clear at this stage that I am an ex-UNISON employee, and spent many years observing in schools how the distinctions between teaching and non-teaching staffs have, quite rightly, been breaking down over the years. Support staff are increasingly playing a professional role. They make up a range of functions crucial to the whole school learning environment as teaching assistants, welfare support staff and specialist and technical staff. They make a huge contribution to improving learning outcomes, which was confirmed by Ofsted in its fifth report.
As we have heard, since its establishment the SSSNB has been playing a crucial role in preparing core documents setting out the wide range of non-teaching roles being carried out in schools. As the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, rightly pointed out, when it was established it was not opposed by any party. Since then it has received widespread support from teachers, heads, governors and parents. There was certainly no chorus of concern calling for its abolition. Importantly, its remit when it was established was to combine national consistency and local flexibility in pay and conditions, and it was working to deliver that model. However, when the clause was debated in the Commons the Minister argued that retaining it would involve,
“creating and imposing additional rigidity on schools” .—[Official Report, Commons, Education Bill Committee, 22/3/11; col. 595.]
But that argument fails to recognise that the SSSNB was not like other negotiating bodies. It has the power only to recommend, not prescribe, and as such the local flexibility and autonomy is maintained.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, rightly identified, in abolishing the SSSNB now, the Government are scrapping it before it has had time to finish delivering the job profiles that it was set up to produce. That is wasting good work. Already more than 100 support staff roles have been profiled and were being tested by schools; a school-based job evaluation scheme was being designed; and a pay and conditions model was being developed. Given that these job descriptions would have been recommendations, not prescriptions, it is hard to see how they would have hindered schools going forward. On the contrary, having job profiles could have been used as benchmarks, which would have cut the time and cost. Self-governing schools would otherwise have to use their own time to create their own job descriptions. Apart from the more general use for those benchmark job descriptions, schools and local authorities would then have a greater chance of avoiding being subject to equal pay challenges.
In addition, without the work of the SSSNB, there is a risk—perhaps even a likelihood—that the status of support staff in a largely female workforce will be undermined and that over time their terms and conditions will become less favourable in some schools than is currently the case. Ofsted itself identified that,
“members of the wider workforce and their managers were confused and uncertain about pay and conditions attached to the increasingly diverse roles that have developed as a result of workforce reform”.
It went on to urge the Government to provide more detailed guidance on pay and conditions. This is exactly what was happening. In the Commons Committee stage the Minister said:
“The Secretary of State has made it clear to trade unions and support staff employee organisations that he believes that there is a clear argument for completing some elements of the work begun by the SSSNB, on the basis that the outputs might be of some use to employers and schools”.
He went on to say:
“Those elements include the set of support staff job profiles, for example, and the associated job evaluation scheme. Should trade unions and employers deem that it would be a useful way to proceed with support staff pay and conditions to continue with that development work independently of the Government, I believe that that would be a positive outcome”.—[Official Report, Commons, Education Bill Committee, 22/3/11; col. 596.]
Once again, we seem to be playing the game of dismantling a perfectly good mechanism for dealing with a need in education only to have to assemble it in a different form. That point was made by a number of noble Lords on Second Reading. The Bill seems to be focused on structures rather than on improving educational outcomes, which we are all trying to grapple with. Can the Minister confirm whether those elements will be in place to continue the work that was established by the SSSNB; what organisation they have in mind to continue them; and by when? Interestingly, as the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, said, the people who have been working on the job profiles have not gone away; they have simply been absorbed back into the Office of Manpower Economics, and are therefore available to carry on with the work where they left off, so there is no great saving to be had by abolishing the SSSNB.
Finally, I hope that I will be forgiven if I mention another injustice to support staff arising from the abolition of the SSSNB. Last year when the Chancellor announced a two-year pay freeze in the public sector, he promised that all staff earning less than £21,000 would receive at least £250 in each year. But the Secretary of State for Education says that he has no way of delivering this to school support staff despite having the power to direct it because the SSSNB has been unable to clarify who would qualify. As well as the indirect difficulties that this clause will cause support staff, it makes them all £250 a year worse off. We still believe that school support staff are entitled to fair pay and conditions. The SSSNB would have delivered a framework to make this happen and we believe that it is worth maintaining it to deliver that programme.
Lord Knight of Weymouth
My Lords, I very much want to speak against Clause 18 stand part, and I will talk to the other amendments in due course. I guess that it is just an occupational hazard of being an ex-Minister that when a new Government take over you hold your head in your hands as you watch some of the things that you slaved over to create for many hours, days, weeks and months being abolished at a stroke. There were quite a few in the first few months of this Government, but this is one that I found really hard when I heard that the School Support Staff Negotiating Body was to be scrapped before it really had had a chance to get going.
To some extent, that reflects a view—I am sorry to say a default view in Sanctuary Buildings—that you start thinking about schools in respect of secondary schools and secondary schools in London. You then start thinking about the workforce by thinking simply about teachers. We saw that in earlier clauses, such as Clause 13 which we discussed at some length in Committee, on false allegations being made against teachers not being extended to support staff. That reflects an attitude of mind. We heard in the excellent speech of my noble friend Lady Jones about the importance of support staff. They perform a vital range of functions in schools. An additional 130,000-plus since 1997 are working in schools, performing roles not just in classrooms as high-level teaching assistants. Many of the people in classrooms work one-to-one supporting those with special educational needs. There are also non-classroom roles, from school business managers and those assisting them in the school office, through to caretakers, crossing patrols, dinner ladies—or is it catering assistants? I cannot remember the correct term but dinner ladies will do.
A really important range of roles is performed and valued by schools and those in the school community, such as parents, pupils and staff. I have taken quite an interest in reflecting back on how we should improve schools in the future and the underachievement of white working-class boys, in particular. I have visited and talked to those who are running some of the particularly successful academies doing work in that area. The Richard Rose Federation in Carlisle in Cumbria has turned round a very difficult circumstance. The North Liverpool Academy in, as the name suggests, Liverpool, is within sight of both Anfield and Goodison Park football grounds in a very tough environment for schools to succeed. What was interesting was that, in both circumstances, they are now doing really well in narrowing attainment gaps for white working-class boys. When I asked them how they did it, one of the keys was the deployment of support staff and how they were using learning assistants and others to engage the home.
Baroness Massey of Darwen
My Lords, I salute schools which provide a broad and balanced curriculum and teachers who teach it. But before they can do that they need a curriculum. I do not mind what a school is called or calls itself, but I am passionate about all children and young people receiving an education that equips them not only to survive but to be productive in society. I am also concerned that there should be independent evaluation of whether they are providing that education. Schools can change rapidly.
We hear from senior managers in companies that for them an important issue is that young people should be able to read and that they are numerate. They also say that young people should have the ability to be socially adept, to organise and manage themselves, to work in teams and to present well. Many young people will do that anyway, but many will not. I fear that with an increasing narrowing of the curriculum and emphasis on academic success, many young people will miss out. Schools may be forced to cut down on the disciplines listed in my amendment because of time or cash constraints. Many primary schools already complain about having to teach to pass aptitude tests, and I have witnessed that. Of course academic learning is important, but so is the broader curriculum. What is sometimes forgotten is that the broader curriculum supports academic learning, discipline and attendance. Children do better with access to many forms of learning. Confidence in one area, for example music, can support confidence in other areas, such as mathematics. I have concerns about certain types of schooling encouraged by the Government which may narrow the options for young people.
We will be coming on to PSHE later in the rather lengthy amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, and I, but I shall say a word now about its importance. If young people have an opportunity to discuss with other pupils and responsible adults issues that concern them, such as relationships, sexual and otherwise, alcohol, drugs, transmitted diseases, diet, safety and so on, they will gain two things: knowledge and information about the issue; and the ability to communicate with others, to learn with others and perhaps to manage conflict. Those are very important skills. Recent research shows that the vast majority of parents want pupils to have these skills.
As for the arts, they are important in themselves. Knowing something about literature, drama, music and fine art may inspire a lifelong love of any one of those forms. It may even inspire a child to go on to seek a career in one of them. How will they know their talents and interests if they do not get a feel of them at school? Many children will not have parents who have an interest in the arts or who can afford private tuition or to take them to the theatre or to art galleries. Art education can also be therapeutic and can enhance social skills. Every child should do some form of sport or exercise. It is proven to enhance well-being and improve health. The sport may or may not be team sport. I happen to be very keen on team sports, which involve interaction with others, collaboration, discipline and respect for rules as well as fitness. I also recognise that team sport is not everybody’s bag—but some exercise will be, whether it is dance, movement, yoga, gymnastics and so on. Every child should have the opportunity to participate. Where are the guarantees for sport in government policy? Will initiatives for the inner cities such as cricket’s Chance to Shine continue to be supported? What imaginative schemes not about team sport will be encouraged?
Last Saturday I spoke at a speech day at a prep school in Derbyshire. It is an excellent school with top academic ratings and excellent facilities and has the advantage of being set in the wonderful Derbyshire dales. This school has prizes for art, music and IT as well as for academic subjects. There was a cup for sport, a cup for citizenship and a shield for the hand of friendship for helping others. If that school did not offer music, art, sport and other broad-based opportunities, the parents would be incandescent. They would be incandescent if there were no inspections—the school is inspected by two bodies—and they would be apoplectic if the teacher was not qualified. I fear that what we could see through government policy is an increase in unregulated and unaccountable maintained schools. What sort of inequality might we perpetuate by narrowing the curriculum for children at maintained schools, by even thinking about no inspections for some and by having unqualified teachers? I will move on.
Information technology is an essential skill for young people and most of them are better at it than—certainly—I am, but every child does not have a computer at home and children also need to learn about the downsides of technology, such as spending too much time at it, and the potential dangers, such as online grooming.
Noble Lords may come from different perspectives on faith, and I have specific amendments tabled later on as a humanist, but I am not talking about detail, I am talking about a child’s right to education for life in this country and in this century. I am worried that some schools will not be balanced about faith or no-faith education or about cultural diversity. I have no problem with schools having a particular ethos but I do have a problem with indoctrination masquerading as education. I have a problem with schools being allowed to teach what they like, possibly with unqualified teachers and without inspections. What about the pupils in those schools? What skills and knowledge will they end up with? All children deserve a broad education. All children will be living in a diverse society. They, too, will need skills for employment. They, too, have the right to knowledge on which to base choices. We often hear about how wonderful Chinese academic results are. I looked at this, not in China but in the Library here and found that China, indeed, has higher success rates. If one looks at their curriculum, they have provision for sport, art and music. They also have provision for daily group work and other interactive time on the curriculum—I think it is 10 minutes a day. I am not sure what this time means but the point is that the Chinese curriculum is not just founded on academic subjects.
What this amendment seeks to do is to guarantee that all children have access to balance and breadth in the curriculum in schools. Will the Minister say what the terms of reference are for the curriculum review that is being carried out? What terms of reference are there for the PSHE review, which I believe has not yet started? Who is carrying out the reviews and when will they report to us? Parents should have choice about where their children are educated. Schools should have choice about how that education is carried out, but not at the expense of denying some children the right to experience the wonders of education in its wider sense, both when they are at school and as preparation for when they mature. I beg to move.
Lord Knight of Weymouth
My Lords, I speak in support of this proposed new clause, which I have also put my name to. It is a pleasure to follow on from my noble friend Lady Massey who made the case extremely well. I am sure those who are worried about time would ask what more have I to add. There are a few things. I have not reminded the Committee, although I did at Second Reading, of my interest in respect of education, which some of this discussion may stray into. I advise Apple on education matters, I do some work for TSL Education and I have a number of other education clients overseas.
This amendment, as we have heard, seeks to ensure we have balance in the curriculum. At its heart, the importance of that is ensuring that we give every child the chance to realise their talents. Some of us are not particularly right-brained, some of us are not particularly left-brained. That means that some of us are not desperately academic and some of us might be more creative. We need to ensure that we have a curriculum that can bring out those talents, use them and foster them, so that every child can be a success in later life.
At the root of my support for this amendment are my concerns about some of the changes that Government are making that I think will narrow the curriculum rather than giving it more breadth. I hate to keep harping back to my time but it informs my view. I sought to reduce the amount of prescription in the national curriculum at secondary with a review—perhaps I should have gone further. When instigating the independent review of the primary curriculum by Sir Jim Rose, we also sought to include a lot of balance in the new primary curriculum but unfortunately that has now been abandoned. In both cases, the question is: how do we get every child to want to get up in the morning and go to school? It means making sure that there are things in the day that will motivate them and, in part, what is in the national curriculum informs that.
Lord Knight of Weymouth
The noble Lord obviously speaks with great passion and expertise on these matters. However, to some extent, is it not the case that things have been skewed in terms of medals being won by the product of independent schools by the fact that we are really good, as the noble Lord, Lord Coe, has described it, at sitting-down sports? We are good at rowing, sailing and horse riding, which are expensive sports and out of the reach of many of our state schools.
Lord Moynihan
The noble Lord is absolutely right. If you assess the success of Beijing, regrettably, we were heavily dependent on three sports, which were all sitting-down sports. One of my passionate objectives in terms of success in London 2012 is to make sure that we see more medals come from a much wider base of the 26 summer Olympics sports. That same principle should apply to the Paralympics’ sports as well. I believe that that can be delivered.
It is interesting that when it comes to football in this country, there is a perfect symmetry between the number of professional footballers playing in this country who come from the independent sector, which is 7 per cent, and the 93 per cent who come from the state sector. There is a huge lesson to be learnt about the relationship between schools and local clubs, and parents and volunteers to achieve that. My call is that that should be the basis for all sports in this country and my wish is that we move through the curriculum inclusion of sport to achieve that objective.
Lord Baker of Dorking
My Lords, could I thank the noble Baroness for the kind words that she said about me and fashioning the national curriculum? I am usually criticised more than praised for it these days, but it fell to me and to many hundreds of others to fashion that curriculum 25 years ago. For the first time, we were putting on to the statute book a national curriculum. It was very broad and very balanced; that is what I was criticised for. It could not have been more broad or balanced. It had many things in it which have now been dropped: languages up to 16; art and music up to 16; history and geography up to 16. All of those have disappeared and gone, but it was certainly broad and balanced.
I have now come to the conclusion that if I was given the task of fashioning it today, a much more fundamental change really would be needed. I would actually stop it at 14. I am now quite convinced that the right age of transfer in our English education system is 14, not 11. I draw some strength from that because the Board of Education, meeting in 1941 to plan the pattern of education after the war, in the event of victory—it actually met before El Alamein—said to have selective grammar schools, selective technical colleges and secondary moderns and that the transfer age should be 13 and 14. The decision to change that never went to Ministers, as far as I can see from the records. It was decided by the Permanent Secretary of the day, who simply said, “You can’t have selection at 13 or 14 because grammar schools start at 11”.
It was a great opportunity missed. Why do I say that? First, I have great sympathy with what the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, was saying. During the fashioning of the national curriculum everybody wanted everything in it. Not only that, but he will remember the battles on the content of the national curriculum. I set up independent committees to advise me on maths as on maths there can be no controversy. Surely you can define a maths curriculum. Feudal armies marched across this battlefield. Some said, “You must teach children tables by heart”. Others argued, “No, that is appalling”. Some said, “You mustn’t let them use calculating machines”. Others asked, “Should you teach calculus before 16 or not?”. Blood was spilled on these battlefields. When I came to English, I thought I would outwit all these people by appointing the most reactionary and right-wing educationalists I could find, who wrote the black papers, who would deliver the sort of English curriculum I wanted. I was bitterly disappointed. They produced a curriculum, which said, “Don’t worry about spelling and don’t correct the grammar of little boys and girls who get it wrong at the primary level. Let them enjoy it”. I had to turn to an engineer in Bristol University to right the sense of that. When it came to the history curriculum, I knew perfectly well it was going to be a battlefield, so I appointed someone who owned a castle to write it. He was also a highly intelligent scholar who became the chairman of the British Library and produced a very good curriculum. Having done all of that, why do I now say it should really be at 14?
Lord Knight of Weymouth
I agree with the noble Lord about 14, but I am interested to hear that he would keep a national curriculum for key stage 3 when most secondary schools—if the Government’s ambitions are realised—would become academies and free of the national curriculum. Why would he keep the national curriculum at key stage 3 and does he think academies should stick to it?
Lord Baker of Dorking
I do not support everything that the present Government do. I think a lot of what they are doing is brilliant and wonderful and I speak in favour of that, but up to 14, I would make it a very prescriptive curriculum. Rab Butler said in one of his minutes that all children should go through the common mill of education. I think there is a connective knowledge required in our country that all children should have, whatever part of the country they come from and of whatever race or creed. At 14, there is a natural division of the ways. It is rather like the pattern in Europe. Europe generally distinguishes between upper secondary and lower secondary at the age of 14. What I would like to see slowly develop is four different pathways open for youngsters at 14: an academic pathway, perhaps a bit similar to the grammar school, but wider than that; the technical pathway; the voluntary pathway; and a creative arts pathway. I am coming round to this, it is very true. Do wait; there is better to come.
I am directing my remarks precisely to the curriculum and to this amendment because I am going to say why some of these things should or should not be in and that will take a very long time. Do not tempt me to get into that area. In the requirements mentioned in the amendment—there you are, I am on course again now—there is a spread of different activities. I am engaged in establishing technical schools at 14, which have some of these things in them—in fact, they have all of these things and go rather wider. One might think that by having technical schools, I am narrowing the curriculum. Not at all. In the technical schools, they will have technical subjects to study but they will also study three GCSEs: English, maths and science. We do not think that an IT GCSE is necessary because IT is so infusive today a particular GCSE is not needed for it. They would also have a foreign language: German for engineering, not Goethe; French for business, not Molière. They will also have humanities subjects: history of engineering and great scientists.
When we come to the curriculum, it goes much wider than the amendment. The amendment fights the battles in the way of yesteryear because much of what is said in the amendment is covered in school today. Sport, for example, is legally required up to 16 in schools, and that will be in our academies as well. This is the first occasion we have been able to actually speak in the Committee on the curriculum. It is probably the most important, radical change still waiting to be made in the education system.