Education for 11 to 16 Year-olds (Committee Report)

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Friday 26th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow that excellent speech from the noble Baroness. I should, however, start by reminding your Lordships of my education interests in the register, particularly as chair of the boards of the E-ACT multi-academy trust, STEM Learning and CENTURY Tech. I also sit on Pearson’s qualifications committee.

I pay tribute to the committee’s chair, the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, for the way in which he has introduced the debate and the inclusive way in which he facilitated things and helped us to come up with a strong report. I also thank fellow committee members, our staff and our advisers, and I am grateful to my friends Michael Shaw, Rosie Clayton, Liz Robinson and many others in helping me to think about these issues in preparation for today.

When we started as a committee, we explicitly agreed that, because of where we were in the political cycle, this was going to be more about influencing manifestos than the then Government. The inadequate government response and the new Government’s curriculum review reinforce that view.

The symptoms of problems in our schools are the current crises in pupil attendance and teacher retention. Those in our schools are voting with their feet. We need learning opportunities that better engage students and prepare them for the future. We need teachers who feel more motivated and empowered, improved protection of students' and staff's mental health and well-being, and assessment models that do not destine some learners to fail.

Currently, everything in our schools is aligned around a narrow aim. When the then Schools Minister Nick Gibb gave evidence, he revealed his thinking. It was all about aligning schooling to the needs of Russell group universities. After his 13 years in office, initial teacher training, the early careers framework, Oak National Academy, the curriculum, inspection, accountability and regulation are all aligned around that aim. Yet less than 40% go straight from school to university at 18. This narrow focus is failing at least a third of our children, and disproportionately the disadvantaged. It is failing the economy and is stuck in the past. That is why I very much welcome the Government’s curriculum and assessment review led by Becky Francis.

Broadening and rethinking curriculum and assessment gives us a chance to let all learners show what they can achieve at a more rigorous, deeper level in much more complex, real-world situations. The rise of AI means an education that leaves young people simply repeating facts and will not be good enough; the AI will always outcompete humans on that basis.

We should be raising, instead of lowering, our collective expectations of what learners can show us. Creating the space for that will mean more agency for teachers and students, more learning experiences that stick in the long-term memory and a more future-proof education.

It should also create more opportunities for joy. Of course, not every learner will be delighted by every lesson, but instead of seeing rigour and joy as opposites in education, why should our goal not be to create, in words coined by my friend Jenny Anderson, “joyful rigour”? If we succeed, it will not just be the students who benefit. Teachers deserve greater agency and joy in what they do. We can create a system that reminds them, parents and whole communities that, fundamentally, education is beautiful.

The curriculum review’s remit is a reflection of the committee’s report, but your Lordships also asked us to have a particular focus on young people’s readiness for a digital and green future. The Labour Party’s National Policy Forum agreed last year that

“A Labour government will integrate learning about climate change and sustainability throughout the curriculum in schools and on vocational courses, and provide training and support for teachers”.


Can I ask the Minister whether this will be delivered through the curriculum review? I remind your Lordships in this context of my failed Private Member’s Bill a couple of years ago that sought an additional aim of the national curriculum to instil,

“an ethos and ability to care for oneself, others and the natural environment, for present and future generations”.

Beyond that important issue, the core problem for the review to grapple with is how prescriptive to be. What is required learning as opposed to the required outcomes? Here, the big constraint is time. How are we going to retain academic rigour and add sports, the arts, learning that is vocational, more relevant, more practical and more project-based?

We heard from witnesses that the current curriculum has too much detail. I was told by a former official that in 2010, when he was in the room, the new Ministers Gove and Gibb reviewed the curriculum, saying that it was cluttered with too much detail and without enough room for the big ideas. It is easier to add to a curriculum than to take away, and I guess part of the reason for the review is once more to strip out detail and focus on big ideas once more.

However, I also think that aspects are outdated. The required reading for English in secondary is backward-looking and not inclusive of our diverse British population. Conrad Wolfram is one of the world’s biggest employers of advanced mathematicians and argues that maths as a subject in schools is weighed down with too much hand calculation that is now exclusively done better by machines. Instead, I hope that the review talks to more than just maths academics and gets the views of users of maths like engineers and physicists. I hope that we have data handling and manipulation across the humanities and sciences as part of numeracy to 18.

Stripping out content will still not be enough, however. We are still asking too much of the timetable if we add all that our report calls for, so we need to evolve a bigger change.

I applaud the Secretary of State’s desire to reset the relationship with the profession. We must allow teachers more flexibility on content and subjects. By all means specify big ideas, but lean on pedagogy for relevance and real-life problem-solving. That, in turn, requires reviewing and reinvesting in pre-service and in-service training, which is also good for retention.

We can also deploy technology better to support pedagogy—the ugly phrase PedTech. To do that, school leaders need good advice, and I would advocate repurposing Oak to be a new light-touch Becta. With less specificity in the curriculum, we should then align assessment, inspection outcomes and accountability to ensure an inclusive system that delivers for all children.

I, like the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, am grateful to the Skills Builder Partnership for sharing the universal framework developed by Sir John Holman of basic, essential and technical skills. I commend it to your Lordships. Everything is underpinned by the basics of literacy, numeracy, digital and oracy. These should be studied all through and assessed across the curriculum, possibly with an approach more akin to competency-based music grading exams than to general exams at 16.

The basics are then built on by essential skills, sometimes called life skills, those highly transferrable skills that everyone needs to succeed in almost any job in life. The eight skills they specify are speaking, listening, problem solving, creativity, aiming high, staying positive, teamwork and leadership. I suggest that these should largely be assessed through extended project-type qualifications and the nature of question items in traditional assessments that would be continued for technical skills and knowledge.

We should also think about modern foreign languages, music and sport being core to key stage 1, where the cognitive and physical development of young children would be enhanced by these subjects in particular. This would create a significant CPD requirement for primary teachers, but that should not lessen our ambition.

However we arrive at the right place in the curriculum, through prescription or through trust, we must shift the accountability away from the EBacc and Progress 8. I look forward to understanding better the Government’s thinking on school report cards as how we do that.

I am grateful to my noble friends for referencing my work on school inspections. I add only that we should quickly look to adjust the Ofsted inspection framework to focus on these basic and essential skills, plus more on personal development and leadership and governance, and less on the minutiae of the curriculum.

Finally, I want to say a little on the distorting effect of university admissions requirements on schools’ efforts to be inclusive. In an informal session, Sam Friedman reminded the committee of the dependencies in the system that all culminate in the desire for aspirant parents to get their children into a good university. There is nothing wrong with that, but it leads to a focus on A-levels above all other qualifications. Surely universities can do better in assessing the potential of students than paper and pen tests in hot sports halls every summer.

If we are to move to graded exams in literacy and numeracy when ready, extended project qualifications that play to the passions of pupils, and other exams more akin to GCSEs in a mix, we can move to a more portfolio approach, creating a passport for university admission and for work that includes learner profiles and micro-credentials.

There is a new Government, I hope resulting in less assessment at 16 but more assessment of the basics, more labour market relevance through essential skills and a system that is much more inclusive and relevant to every child, and both more rigorous and more joyful for both teachers and learners. I commend the report to the House.