Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Layard Excerpts

Report stage
Thursday 21st October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, I have added my name to Amendment 60 on the lifetime guarantee tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Watson, but I shall first say a few words about Amendment 50, which has been so eloquently introduced by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke. It was good to go down memory lane with NVQs and YTS; I remember them well. I am concerned about subsection (1) in the proposed new clause, which requires funding for an approved course

“if he or she has not already studied at that level.”

We have put quite a lot of effort into trying to get funding for people to study at levels equal to or lower than qualifications they already have, if that is going to enable them to get into a new job. To restrict this to people who do not have a level 3 qualification might well be problematic. But oh, how much I agree with him about apprenticeships. In my mind, an apprentice is somebody starting out in work, not a middle manager doing an MBA. Having something to try to ensure that apprenticeship levy funding goes to young people is essential if that system is to work properly.

On Amendment 60, it is important that the lifetime skills guarantee is on a statutory footing if it is to have any impact at all. Both these amendments refer to courses up to level 3. It is important that we do not overlook qualifications at levels 1 and 2, because often they are the gateway to learning for people who have been put off education at an early age, as I have said before. Level 1 learners can be people who are encouraged for the first time to find learning accessible, enjoyable and fulfilling, when at school academic learning and GCSEs had been nothing but off-putting and a source of failure. That is something we need to be sure to support. Once such people discover that a national qualification is within their grasp and their ability, they will often find the confidence to continue to upskill and to gain employment in areas that they previously assumed were unobtainable. If the Government are serious about levelling up, they must start at the lowest levels. Amendment 60 would be a definite boost to that agenda, and I hope the Minister will look on it favourably.

[Lord Layard (Lab)]

I support Amendment 50, which could transform the lives of hundreds of thousands of our young people. Given the time, I shall make just four points. The problem is much bigger than most people, maybe myself included, have realised. In 2019-20, the proportion of all 18 year-olds who were in no form of education or work-based training was 30%. That 30% of the 50% not going to university are getting no education beyond the age of 17. This is completely extraordinary and shocking. What is the reason? It is that there simply are not enough places for these people to study and acquire skills compared with people going down the academic route.

The lack of places is almost entirely due to the completely different way in which those places are funded. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke, said, when young people go down the academic route, the funding automatically follows the student year by year, but for the other 50% the budget is simply set by the Treasury. It is capped in total and college by college. The current funding for 2021-22, including recent additions, is still less than half what it was in nominal terms in 2010. This is extraordinary and shows the failure of the system that this sort of thing can happen. It is difficult to think of any case of greater discrimination in any other aspect of our public life. I cannot think of any more extreme class-based discrimination than in that area.

What is the remedy? It is clear that the only approach which is fair to other 50% and which will adequately address the problem is to fund the other 50% the same way as the privileged 50% who go down the academic route—to make the money automatically follow these students. The proposal is that every student up to level 3 exercising the lifetime skills guarantee and taking an approved course—not just anything—should be automatically funded according to a national tariff. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke, explained, that is the essential part of the first half of this amendment.

The second half relates to apprenticeships. When I was very young, I worked for the Robbins committee. It established the principle that there should be enough places for anybody who qualified for a place and who wanted to exercise access to it. That has always applied to higher education, ever since the Robbins report. It has never applied to the other 50%; they just have not been thought of in that way at all. That really has to change.

As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke, said, we now have a severe lack of apprenticeships for young people. There is huge, well-documented excess demand but supply is falling. The system is completely unresponsive and far too much of the apprenticeship money is being diverted to the over-25s. I will give two reasons why I think that is wrong. First, what is the key duty of any system of education and training? The first key duty is of course to get everybody off to a proper start. Good initial training is the central feature of any just, efficient system.

There is an extra, economic fact about the use of resources which I think is very relevant. The Department for Education’s own figures show that the benefit-cost ratio is much higher—in fact, double—for apprenticeships for the under-25s compared with those for the over-25s. For the sake of justice and efficiency, we have to redirect this money to an important degree back to the under-25s.

I would have thought this was a central proposal for any levelling-up agenda. We have a problem which is a major cause, almost the main cause, of our low national productivity per head. It is also a major cause of the spread of low incomes among the lower part of the workforce. If we are looking for items for a levelling-up agenda, surely this should be near the top.

I hope that as many noble Lords as possible will support this amendment and that the Government will also support it. If the Government find that they cannot support this proposal, I worry about the whole future of the levelling-up agenda.

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, I agree with every word of what my noble friend Lord Layard and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke, said. When I spoke in Committee, I gave the figures that show that the number of apprentices under the age of 25 is now lower than it was when the apprenticeship levy was introduced. Rarely has there been a policy which has failed so catastrophically to deliver its objective.

I do not want to repeat what my noble friend and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke, said; their points about the failure to create apprenticeships in the private sector were very well made. The point I want to address to the Minister and introduce to the debate relates to one of the other really significant failures in the creation of apprenticeships, namely the failure to create apprentices in the public sector. This has been another very long-running and serious failure.

The worst provider of apprentices in the country among large organisations is the Civil Service, which had no scheme of creating apprentices at all before 2015. I met the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, who was the head of the Civil Service then, and some of us worked very closely with him to get the Civil Service apprenticeship scheme going. There was quite a lot of foot-dragging and reluctance to do it. The Civil Service has a graduate fast stream and recruits tens of thousands of graduates each year across the different parts of the organisation, but had no apprenticeship scheme. An apprenticeship scheme was created and I checked before coming into the House where it had got to.

The other remarkable thing about it was the thing that persuaded the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, to go for it: it turned out that the department responsible for apprentices—it keeps changing its name; I think it was then called the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, but it may have been something else—had, I think, three apprentices under the age of 21. The department of apprentices was one of the worst apprenticeship providers in the entire country. That was the department, with its Ministers, that was supposed to preach to the private sector about how it should create apprenticeships.

Schools: Well-being and Personal and Social Needs

Lord Layard Excerpts

Thursday 14th June 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Layard]

My Lords, if parents are asked what they want a school to do for their children, they almost always say two things: first they say, “I want my child to learn”, and then they say, “I want my child to be happy”. The question is this: are those in conflict? The scientific evidence is absolutely clear: they are not in conflict. In order to learn you need to be happy, with peace of mind and inner calm. Einstein once said that to make scientific discoveries, you need to be happy, and the same is true of children. Here is a recent analysis of a sample of American eighth graders who were tested at the beginning of the year on their IQ and their resilience. At the end of the year they were given their academic grades and, as a predictor of those grades, resilience was twice as important as IQ. You have to have the character as well as the brain.

Fortunately we now have a great deal more evidence about how to produce resilient, happy young people who do not engage in risky or anti-social behaviours. There have been hundreds of randomised controlled trials of highly structured programmes covering social and emotional learning, sex and relationships education and healthy living. I shall set out a meta-analysis of the effects of those programmes, each of which took about 18 hours of the child’s time. The effect on the emotional well-being of children was something like 11 percentile points up—from 50 to 61. The effect on behaviour was an extra 11 percentile points, and the effect on academic achievement was an extra 11 percentile points. These programmes are working on every dimension. So let us abandon the idea of a conflict between the objectives and ask schools to do exactly what parents want them to do. What a surprising suggestion.

What this would mean is complicated, so I want to make just three points. First, I turn to the whole school approach. Obviously, the whole school has to commit itself to making the happiness of its children one of its prime objectives. This should be a decision that is made after a great deal of debate involving teachers, parents and governors. I belong to a movement called Action for Happiness, which is preparing a code for schools that might wish to take a step of this kind. One would hope that every school will make the happiness of its children one of its prime objectives. That means going beyond what all schools are now expected to do—anti-bullying, anti-racism, anti-drugs—by trying to build up positive attitudes and adopting a positive lifestyle that children can enjoy, including replacing the desire to pass exams with the love of learning.

Secondly, I turn to explicit training in life skills, which is a particular part of the curriculum that is otherwise known as PSHE. Of course, this can be done very badly or very well. Undoubtedly, there are inspired teachers who can think it through for themselves, but these are very difficult subjects to teach. They can hardly just be given to someone who has a gap in their timetable. It is easy to teach these subjects in a way that makes no difference. We should not live in a Pollyanna world where we think that all this is easy and can be carried out successfully. It needs a great deal of thought and application. For example, the evaluation of the secondary SEAL programme, the only part of the programme that has been scientifically evaluated, shows that it makes no difference to anything. That is an important finding. The reason given—I must say that I foresaw this—was that the programme was not sufficiently structured to ensure that ordinary teachers could be guaranteed to achieve a result. We need to rely on much more structured, manualised programmes that have been scientifically evaluated to show that they make a difference. Perhaps I may declare an interest. I belong to a group that is aiming to put together a set of programmes from the hundreds I mentioned earlier in my remarks which could constitute the complete PSHE secondary school curriculum. If that was shown to work, we would be able to develop PSHE as a proper subject in schools and as a specialism within the PGCE.

I shall go back for a moment to the fundamental aim of all these programmes, which is to give children control over their minds. The idea is that we can all gain more control over our minds and our thoughts, which is particularly important because changing our thoughts can change our feelings and our behaviour.

This brings me to my last point, which is about mental health. This should obviously be a part of the basic training programme for every teacher and schools should become much better at identifying mental health problems among their children. In fact, the Good Childhood Inquiry that I was involved with suggested piloting a questionnaire tool to be used at periodic intervals over a child’s life, which would have the effect not only of helping to identify children who were in trouble—and many emotionally disturbed children do not show it; they are not always behaviourally disturbed—but of motivating schools to take the outcome of well-being much more seriously because they were actually measuring it.

Of course, once a child has been identified as having a mental health problem, there must be facilities available to treat them. I was appalled to read this morning that half of all mental health services are experiencing budget cuts at the moment, in many cases of 25% or more. This is an outrage. This is obviously such a big area of unmet need already in our country. We also know that mental illness among children has increased since the 1970s. A nationally representative survey has been conducted four times, supported by a local survey in the west of Scotland. Both these surveys found that there is twice as much emotional and behavioural difficulty among 15 year-olds as there was in the 1970s. The reasons given in subsequent questioning are, not surprisingly, more anxiety about looks, possessions and, of course, exams.

This brings us back to the question of whether we can shift our schools from exam factories to schools for life. I think we really have to do that and I really hope that the Minister can persuade his Secretary of State to open his powerful mind to that issue.

Education Bill

Lord Layard Excerpts

Tuesday 1st November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wall of New Barnet]

My Lords, I, too, have put my name to Amendment 89ZZA. I welcome the opportunity to extend the congratulations that my noble friend Lord Young extended to the noble Baroness. I am sure she will be an asset to the team.

I just want to add to more or less everything that my noble friend said in the context of apprenticeships. What surprises me is the semi-reluctant manner in which the Bill is worded. It does not reflect at all the ambitions that the Government talk about in the goals that they have set to achieve apprenticeships or, perhaps more importantly, the way employers constantly remind the Government of the importance of apprenticeships. I know that my noble friend Lord Young referred to employers who still feel that apprenticeships are a burden. However, there are hundreds of employers who see them as an advantage to their businesses and have a real commitment to them. They feel that the Government may be saying one thing but doing another. That is, to say the least, very unfortunate, since apprentices are the core of major businesses.

My own experience is in the engineering sector, as noble Lords will know. Outside that sector, apprentices are now becoming much more important to the hospitality sector and others. Therefore, it surprises me that mixed messages are going out, the result of which is very confusing. I welcome what the noble Baroness said in responding to my noble friend. However, stronger language could be used in the drafting of the Bill—words such as “encourage” rather than “take note of” or other such phrases that are used in the Bill. Anything that can strengthen the enthusiasm that is out there is important.

My noble friend made particular reference to and emphasised the young apprentices who are coming in. There are major issues around young people not being able to engage with apprenticeships, although there are lots of schemes. I am certainly involved in one—the SEMTA Sector Skills Council, through its academy—that encourages young people to come off the unemployment register and works with SMEs to place those young people in businesses. There is a quid pro quo relationship in how that might be funded to give those young individuals a start in life. All the stuff that we hear about—the disruption that is often attributed to young people, and to which they contribute—really can be helped by individuals having a purpose. One of the things that I have found, as I am sure other noble Lords have, is that when you talk to young people who are on apprenticeships, they are absolutely delighted. When they come through them, they are even more thrilled. This is not about attracting a certain type of young person; it is about opening it up to everybody, because it is an opportunity. It is also an ambition for a lot of people. The country, as well as employers, needs these people,

I want to make a couple of quick comments about the other amendments in this section and about the procurements issue in particular. My noble friend referred to our Government’s intentions on this. Employers say to me and to people I work with, “You never see the Government doing this, yet we are being encouraged to do it”. If you consider the relationship between the SMEs and prime businesses, you would consider those people to be part of the procurement process; they buy from them and prime companies demand that SMEs have apprentice-trained people inside their businesses to ensure the quality of the product that they are producing on their behalf. We need some matching up of words—I was going to say rhetoric, but that is probably too harsh, given the way the noble Baroness has come back to us—to ensure that we are talking the same language and, more importantly, that these people have that opportunity. It is the Government’s policy to increase apprentices. We should be knocking at an open door when we have this discussion, rather than feeling that we are challenging them. I am delighted to be part of tabling this amendment.

[Lord Layard]

My Lords, I warmly welcome the government amendments that have been proposed, and I think the same goes for the noble Lords, Lord Wakeham, Lord Willis and Lord Sutherland, with whom I tabled a related amendment in Committee. Our aim was very simple; it was to ensure that there was a clear route to skill via an apprenticeship for young people who did not want to go down the academic route and, for this to become a well understood reality, that the National Apprenticeship Service had a clear duty to make reasonable efforts to ensure that the provision was there for all who wanted to take advantage of it. That is what this amendment now proposes.

I would have preferred a stronger duty on the National Apprenticeship Service, like the noble Lords who spoke earlier. However, I believe that this government amendment is a major step forward, and I pay a warm tribute to John Hayes, the Minister in the other place who is responsible for this, for his passionate commitment to apprenticeships and his vision in proposing this new clause. It is a major improvement in the Bill and it will be a major improvement in our whole educational system for 16 to 19 year-olds, although an even better one would be that proposed by my noble friends.

[Lord Willis of Knaresborough]

I support particularly Amendment 89ZZB in the name of my noble friend Lord Hill. I echo the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Layard, who has done a remarkable job in seeing this all the way through Committee and Report, and I compliment the Minister, and indeed his friend in the other place, John Hayes, for the way in which they have listened to the arguments. To have had an education Bill that did not actually mention apprenticeships was a mistake. It is always good when a sinner repents and comes forward with a confession. This is a confession that is worth noting. The Minister will go home happy tonight in that knowledge.

The whole move back towards an apprenticeship service is something that the previous Government should rightly be proud of. It was supported on all sides of the House, but it was an initiative that was long overdue. The fact that this week we have seen such a dramatic rise in the number of apprenticeships, despite the fact that we have a severe downturn in the economy—I will not say recession—is something that again we should welcome very strongly indeed. Apprenticeships are very much here to stay. I am delighted to be going up to Newcastle on 22 November to open a new apprenticeship centre organised by Siemens, which is trying to work with other employers in the north-east. That is the next step.

Education Bill

Lord Layard Excerpts

Wednesday 26th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Gould of Potternewton]

My Lords, my name is on the amendment if your Lordships would do me the courtesy of letting me speak. The value of this amendment is that it brings together the different elements of well-being, the interventions schools can make and the inspectorate regime. As the two previous speakers said, it is a great tragedy that such an important amendment has been usurped in this way, and actually been depicted in a completely false light.

I would like to start by quoting from a head teacher in a school in my home town of Brighton and Hove about the advantage of well-being being taught in schools. She says that,

“well-being is central to effective learning: through our in-depth and evidence-based focus on these areas, our practice has really developed and is clearly having a positive impact on the children”.

That is what this amendment is about, and that view is actually reinforced by the Government’s Healthy Schools toolkit, which says that,

“schools play an important role in supporting the health and well-being of children and young people—and we will make sure that schools have access to evidence of best practice”.

Again, that is what this amendment is calling for. This amendment would be a significant factor in providing the necessary framework to improve outcomes for our young people. Crucially, it ensures that the chief inspector’s report provides the evidence that determines that the outcomes have been achieved; that the school creates an environment of health and well-being; that the teaching is age-appropriate; that the school community has been involved; and that the programme can be sustained by the school.

The well-being of a child underpins the ability of that child to learn, fulfilling their potential, increasing their educational attainment, and improving their life chances. Young people need to be safeguarded against the consequences of risk and the consequences of some of their actions, so they can gain the knowledge and skills they need to be aware, healthy and safe.

The Government in the PSHE review makes all the arguments for the value of PSHE: that there needs to be room in the life of the school for an exploration of wider social issues that contribute to the well-being and engagement of all pupils. It goes on to say that Ofsted stated in 2010 that the weaker areas of provision were sex and relationships, drugs and mental health, and that there was ineffective assessment and tracking of pupils’ progress.

Again this amendment will help to overcome those weaknesses, and it should be seen as a package. For instance, citizenship is not only about the structure of our society and where we all fit in, but also about how we behave in our own communities. It is about tolerance and understanding diversity, and very often it is that lack of understanding that can be the cause of bullying in schools and sexual harassment—the latter a subject that many schools fail to recognise. Unwanted sexual contact is often a specific form of abuse that girls suffer routinely, and it really needs to be monitored.

This brings me to PSHE and SRE. The commitment by the Government to teaching sexual consent has to be welcomed, but it cannot be dissociated from the questions of how to avoid risk and the dangers of alcohol and drug-taking, which require specific education that gives young people self-esteem and the confidence to be in control. Yet self-esteem so often relates to image. We have to empower young people to be media-literate and to be able to cope with and challenge the bombardment of inappropriate images which often create bad eating habits.

To be effective, the interrelationship requires a level of co-ordination across the school to have a real impact on the well-being of the child. Health and well-being should be supported by the whole school community, with a well-being school group whose membership should include every aspect of the school: teachers, governors, students, the school nurse, the school cook, parents and carers. We can then ensure high-quality Ofsted-inspected lessons that range from personal finance to awareness of and sensitivity to diverse faiths and cultural beliefs, understanding discrimination, the wrongness of prejudice and bullying, the consequences of risky sex, drugs and alcohol misuse, and the importance of staying healthy. I genuinely believe that not to do so is failing this generation of children and young people. The Government, quite rightly, want young people to be responsible members of society. That can be achieved if they are prepared to provide the necessary framework to make it happen. This amendment is that framework.

[Lord Layard]

My Lords, this is a most important amendment because when surveys are done asking parents what they want most from a school, the majority say it is that their children should be happy. If this is so, it should surely be a major objective for our schools—it is as simple as that. Yet the existing pressures on our schools are in a very different direction and we are in danger of turning our schools into nothing much more than exam factories. We must surely do something drastic to reassert the importance of the development of character and of the personal well-being of children within the school. This is a matter not of either/or but of both/and: exams and academic achievement are extremely important, but so too is well-being.

On top of that, as the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, pointed out earlier, there is very strong evidence that happier children do better in terms of academic achievement. How can we get the rebalancing? I would be surprised if there were anybody in this House who did not believe that some rebalancing was needed in the objectives of our schools. I assume that we all feel that. The only way we can do that is by incentives, and the reality is that schools do what they think Ofsted wants them to do—it is as simple as that. Surely, Ofsted should be reporting on the ways in which schools are promoting the well-being of the pupils as well as the other objectives on which they already report. Should they not be reporting on what parents want for their children? If this is one of the things that parents most want for their children, if should surely be a major feature of Ofsted’s reports. Parents want their children to develop as rounded people who are learning not just how to earn a living but how to live.

In this year of youth riots, I find it extraordinary that the Government cannot add pupil well-being to the priorities for Ofsted in Clause 40. We have been told of a reassuring letter from the Secretary of State, but he is just one Secretary of State. We are debating legislation, and it is not enough to have that reassuring letter; it has to be in the Bill. If it cannot be within Clause 40, which apparently it cannot, I urge the Government to find some way of having this ancillary sanction that strengthens the rebalancing in the direction in which I think all your Lordships would like to see movement.

Education Bill

Lord Layard Excerpts

Wednesday 14th September 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Layard]

I rise to speak to Amendment 144B. When the four of us tabled the amendment, we thought that it was very important, but since then the riots have shown that it is even more important than we thought. If you look at the situation in our country, it is clear that academic young people are offered a clear route to a skill and a useful role in society. They can see where they are going. That is not the case for less academic young people. There is no clear route that they can see they are entitled to go down. The result is low levels of skills and a degree of alienation. That is why in 2007 the Economic Affairs Committee, under the wonderful chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, supported the idea of an entitlement to an apprenticeship. Following that, the 2008 Act enacted that there should be an entitlement to an apprenticeship for 16 to 19 year-olds. The body charged with finding places was the National Apprenticeship Service, which was set up at the same time. However, no employer can be forced to take on an apprentice, and for that reason the present Government have judged that the entitlement is putting them into an unduly exposed position from a legal point of view. Therefore, the Bill repeals the entitlement. That is a very serious thing to do.

At the same time, the Government are doing a very welcome thing, which is introducing an automatic funding mechanism whereby any employer who wishes to take on a 16 to 19 year-old as an apprentice, and can find one, will get automatic funding. However, that is quite different from an explicit commitment to find enough places for all those 16 to 19 year-olds who want them. It is a laissez-faire mechanism that has a strength but also a serious weakness. Nothing is being said about the shape of the educational system that we are trying to create for our 16 to 19 year-old population. The purpose of this amendment is to construct that bit of the building block of our educational system for 16 to 19 year-olds by saying that for those who do not want to go down the full-time academic route, the apprenticeship route is open. It is making a statement and putting an obligation on the National Apprenticeship Service to bring it about.

If you look at this from a young person’s point of view, we are raising the education participation age. It is quite difficult to see how we are going to be able to do that in a way that is acceptable to young people unless these apprenticeship places are available to them. We need legislation that states the main aims of our education system. For that 16 to 19 year-old group, we have a lacuna. We cannot fill it by ministerial statements and assurances, as Ministers come and go. We expect the basic structure of our educational system to be reflected in the laws of the country.

When we drafted this amendment, we leant over backwards to protect the Government against the threat of legal redress. The draft says that the National Apprenticeship Service shall,

“subject to guidance from the Secretary of State, make all reasonable efforts to ensure that an apprenticeship is offered to those”,

16 to 19 year-olds who want one. So “all reasonable efforts” are to be made and those can be defined in guidance. This combines a clear statement of what we want with protection against judicial review. Some of us have already had useful discussions with Ministers about this. Of course, we would be happy to consider alternative wording, provided it did not weaken the existing wording. I think that that is an extremely important point, because it is what we owe our young people.

[Lord Wakeham]

My Lords, I am here simply to add my support to the noble Lord, Lord Layard, who was a very distinguished member of the Select Committee which produced our report on apprenticeships. However, as I have sat here all afternoon, I could not help reflecting that it is probably nearly 40 years since I first sat on a parliamentary committee dealing with a Bill. I do not do much of that these days. Things have not changed very much, but I have had a very pleasurable afternoon listening to the way things seem to be going.

I do not have much to say about this, but one thing worries me about the report. I agree with a great deal of what the noble Lord, Lord Young of Norwood Green, said—certainly at the beginning of his speech. At the end I thought he was a little off key, but most of it was pretty good stuff. What staggered me about this exercise was how many of our kids leave school and get an apprenticeship but simply do not have the literacy or numeracy skills to enable them to take on an apprenticeship. You cannot leave that to officials. Someone in the Government must have responsibility for encouraging a move in the right direction.

Secondly, I thought that there was a failure by many schools to tell people about apprenticeships. Children who are likely to go down that educational route need to start thinking about it around the age of 14. In my experience on the Select Committee, one thing stuck in my mind. We visited an old people’s home where girls were training to look after the old people. For many years as they grew up, those girls knew that they wanted to do this. They got there but no one had told them that unless you have a basic knowledge of arithmetic you simply are not capable of dispensing medicines to the old people. That failure of schools and of 16 to 18 year-old apprenticeships is at the core of many of our problems. The noble Lord spent longer talking about it than I am going to, although it is still very important. I am here just to give him support.

--- Later in debate ---

Tabled by

[Lord Layard]

144B: Clause 67, page 53, line 34, at end insert—
“( ) At the end of section 85(1)(a) of ASCLA 2009 insert “and, subject to guidance from the Secretary of State, make all reasonable efforts to ensure that an apprenticeship is offered to those of them who desire one and have at least 5 passes at GCSE”.”

[Lord Layard]

Perhaps I may just thank the Minister for his reply and say that I look forward to ongoing discussions.

Amendment 144B not moved.

Education Bill

Lord Layard Excerpts

Wednesday 13th July 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Turner of Camden]

My Lords, I support wholeheartedly what my noble friend Lady Massey has just said, particularly in relation to children learning about different faiths and so on and that being part of general education. Amendment 85B is very good and extremely well intentioned. The only problem I have is with its wording. Subsection (7) outlines the principles of PSHE, which of course are absolutely admirable, that it “endeavours to promote equality”, of course; “encourages acceptance of diversity”, of course; and,

“emphasises the importance of both rights and responsibilities”.

Of course we all agree with that; it is absolutely right. However, subsection (8) says:

“Subsections (4) to (7) are not to be read as preventing the governing body or head teacher of a school within subsection (9)”—

that is, schools with a religious character,

“from causing or allowing PSHE to be taught in a way that reflects the school’s religious character”.

That gives me a problem because subsection (7) could lead us into difficulty when it says, “endeavours to promote equality”. We are all aware that there are religions that, if you look at their precepts, are in dispute with the equality law that we have, and we want all citizens of this country to accept the rights that the equality law gives them. That sort of wording might lead us into some difficulty.

I do not have the same problem with Amendment 98, which has just been spoken to by my noble friend Lady Massey. Frankly, I would prefer that wording and that amendment to the wording in the amendment that is presently before us. However, I support the feeling behind both amendments, I think that it is right, and I congratulate both noble Baronesses on their commitment to these ideas, which I wholeheartedly support.

[Lord Layard]

My Lords, I congratulate the proposers of these amendments because they deal with one of the central purposes of education. In surveys, when parents are asked what they most want for their children in school, they say they most want children to be happy and to learn how to live. Secondly, they say they want them to learn their subjects. The tragic situation is that many people, including some senior politicians, think that these two objectives are in contradiction to and competition with each other. Of course, the opposite is true. These objectives are mutually reinforcing and this is really the essence of the point that needs to be made today. The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, referred to it and I want to give you a bit of evidence that by the teaching of PSHE we serve two objectives: teaching children how to manage their lives but also enabling them, through being happier and more balanced, to learn their subjects better.

Here is one piece of interesting evidence. Some 207 programmes in imparting life skills that were developed mainly in the United States were surveyed in terms of their effects on young people. Each programme covered a part of the PSHE curriculum that has been outlined in the amendment and was rigorously evaluated in comparison with a control group. From the so-called meta-analysis, one obtains the average effect of all these programmes on the well-being of the pupils and their academic achievements. Here is the effect on the emotional well-being and balance of the child: the average programme lifted the average child by 11 percentile points—11 places in the ranking in which children are ranked from 0 to 100—and that represents a substantial effect. Guess what the effect on academic performance was. It was also 11 percentile points. So it is not a question of either life skills or academic attainment, it is both. If noble Lords are interested in these programmes, information on them can be found on a wonderful website, casel.org. The other point that emerges from these surveys is that the better of the 207 programmes have much larger effects.

The future of PSHE, particularly in secondary schools, has to involve a much greater use of such programmes because it is an extraordinarily difficult subject to teach. We have not talked about that very much but most people, if thrown in at the deep end, would have a lot of difficulty in teaching most of these subjects. We need much more serious teacher training in these areas and much better materials. There is some progress in this country in this area, but very little. To achieve progress in the quality of the teaching, these subjects must be firmly established in the curriculum. That is what these amendments are about. I welcome them and hope that the Government will take them seriously.

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield]

My Lords, I should like to speak in support of these amendments and to talk briefly about the critical importance of relationship education within the PSHE curriculum and its links to pupils’ wider emotional health and well-being, which we have just heard about. Before doing so, I should declare an interest as chief executive of the charity Relate, which delivers relationship education to children in all four key stages in about 50 primary and secondary schools across the country.

I often feel that I am on a personal mission to try to change the terminology in this debate to “relationships” —in capitals—and sex education, rather than the other way around, which very much puts the cart before the horse in a rather unhelpful way. That is because when sex education and relationships education are coupled together in that order, the debate too often gets bogged down and polarised, and focuses almost solely on parents’ right to withdraw their children from sex education. We should be focusing on children’s emotional health and well-being.

Relationships education, when delivered appropriately by experts in the field—classroom teachers are the first to admit that this is not often their specialism and can feel uncomfortable in this role—has many benefits, not least when it focuses on the quality of relationships whereby young people learn how to distinguish a good relationship from a bad one. This is crucial because, sadly, too many children see few examples of good relationships in their home life and, without help, are likely to repeat these patterns in their own relationships. It is also critical that young people understand, for example, how to manage conflict and cope with family breakdown, how to recognise and understand abusive behaviour in relationships and what they need to do to seek help in those situations.

As we have heard today, survey evidence shows that young people want opportunities to discuss things that feel relevant to their lives, like their emotions, relationships and their sex lives or sexual health. In addition, research from the Sex Education Forum showed that 84 per cent of parents see both school and home as the main source of sex and relationships education and that both should be involved. To me, this is the nub of the matter. With regard to school or the home it is never a question of either/or but very much both/and.

Education Bill

Lord Layard Excerpts

Tuesday 14th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Layard]

My Lords, I should like to follow that up by talking about apprenticeships. Where the Bill proposes a major backward step is in its repealing of the so-called apprenticeship entitlement, whereby any 17 or 18 year-old with five GCSE passes who wants an apprenticeship must be offered a place. What I have described is a crucial provision of the 2009 Act, which will come into force in 2015, but if the Bill as it stands is passed, it will be dropped.

The importance of this is obvious. It would make clear that there is a route to skills for all our young people. Of course, for the academically minded there is already a clear route through A-levels. If they want a place, they are legally entitled to one, and they know it. From the age of 14 or earlier, they can see a way forward. But for the other half of our young people, there is no clear way forward. They are entitled to stay on in full-time vocational education, but that does not lead to the ticket to a trade, and many employers are not interested in young people who go this way. What I would say most of these young people want is not full-time education, but to learn while earning. Many employers also find that type of learning the most effective. We have to establish the apprenticeship route, that of learning while earning, as the standard route to skills for those not taking the academic route.

Until recently, far too few people have taken the apprenticeship route, and the result has been frightening numbers of disaffected youth, reflected in the problem of the NEETs, and among those in work are too many with low skills, low productivity and low pay. Indeed, the main reason for lower productivity in Britain than in Germany or France is our shocking neglect of this particular group of young people.

However, we are now in a good place to remedy this failure. In 2007, the previous Government’s White Paper proposed the entitlement I have described. It was endorsed in 2008 by the Economic Affairs Committee of this House under the leadership of the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, and there followed the 2009 Act which established the entitlement. As a result of all that, there has been the large increase in the number of apprenticeship places for 16 to 19 year-olds which has been talked about, and I stress that they have been available for this group, not just for adult apprentices. So, starts for 16 to 19 year-olds increased by 18 per cent in 2009-10 and by some 14 per cent in 2010-11. Even more important is that in the recent spending review, enough money has been provided to ensure that by 2015, the entitlement set out in the 2009 Act can be met. We are poised to deliver a revolution for this group of young people.

So why repeal the entitlement? Money is not the issue, as I have just explained. The issue is simply one of will. The Government are worried that they cannot find places, that employers will not step up to the plate. I should like to make three encouraging points about the situation so far as employers are concerned.

First, there has been the extraordinary response over the past two years that I have just referred to. Secondly, there is a very good provision in the Bill, which I welcome, whereby an employer will be entitled automatically to take the money provided for an apprenticeship if they find a young person they would like to take on. What is being introduced is a good decentralising feature, and I am sure that it will lead many more employers to become interested in providing apprenticeship places. Thirdly, there is a huge opportunity for more places. It is an extraordinary fact that only one-third of large enterprises with over 500 workers employ any apprentices at all. So there is a good opportunity to find places and thus provide opportunities for our young people.

The National Apprenticeship Service was created precisely for the purpose of finding places for young people, but it needs a clear remit. It was given that remit in the provisions of the 2009 Act, which was that the service had to ensure that every young person could find an apprenticeship place. This Bill has got to have something like that. Perhaps that is too strong a legal obligation; it may be something that the Government feel is too risky, and I understand that. However, why can we not have in the Bill something like a provision that gives a clear instruction to the National Apprenticeship Service to make all reasonable efforts to find a place for every young person aged under 19 with five GCSEs who wants such a place? That could be subject to guidance from the Secretary of State. There would be no legal challenge that any young person could make to the situation that they found themselves in, but it would lay down a clear mission for the National Apprenticeship Service and a clear obligation to ensure that each young person had a chance that they could look forward to.

We must have in the Bill a statement of the clear strategic purpose of the NAS for 16 to 19 year-olds. It would be wonderful if the Minister could think of such an amendment to bring forward in Committee. If he cannot, there is a group of us who would be interested in doing so. Unless we can make this a solid system that provides for this group of young people, we will simply perpetuate the shocking discrimination that is embedded in our present provision for different types of young people.

Academies Bill [HL]

Lord Layard Excerpts

Monday 28th June 2010 Lords Chamber

Finally, perhaps I may seek clarification about how the amendment stands in relation to providing parents with the right to withdraw their children from sex education, which obtains in all other schools.

[Lord Layard]

My Lords, I strongly support the two amendments in this group. In the past 40 years, there have been four surveys of the mental health of 15 year-olds in Britain. These show that the number of young people suffering from emotional and behavioural problems is twice as high now as it was 40 years ago. That is a shocking fact. It is terrible for young people and for the rest of us. We are talking about the health not only of young people, but also of the society that is affected by their behaviour. If we take into account the extraordinary costs for young people and for adults of the problems of young people not knowing how to live, we cannot turn our backs on the emotional and behavioural aspects of their education. We have been moving towards a disastrous situation in which our schools have increasingly become exam factories—factories for helping people to earn a living, not to learn how to live.

It is possible to teach people how to live. This can be done not only through the school’s ethos, which is extremely important—as has rightly been stressed, this could be the most important thing—but also through structured teaching of life skills. We already know a lot about how to do this, and we are learning more. For example, the Penn Resilience Programme, now used in 30 schools in this country, has been shown to reduce teenage depression markedly, and to increase school attendance, with emotional and behavioural consequences. Many other equally effective programmes cover areas such as developing altruism, learning about healthy living and avoiding risky behaviour, learning about mental health and learning about parenting—there are programmes that teach young people how to be parents, and others that cover nearly all the topics in the QCA’s excellent programme of study for personal and social well-being.

There is also plenty of evidence of the effectiveness of sex education. For example, one striking case is the comparison between our country and the Netherlands, where sex and relationship education, including parenting, begins in primary schools. There, the teenage pregnancy rate is one-fifth of the rate in this county. Therefore, we have plenty of evidence on which to proceed.

These are difficult subjects to teach and that is why I am enormously worried about the coalition Government’s approach of leaving them to individual schools. If they are difficult to teach, the most obvious thing to do is to have a concerted programme of teacher training. That can be done only at the national level but, as many speakers have already said, it will not happen unless there is a clear statement that education in life skills is a key element in the complete education of every child.

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, I speak on this matter in a personal capacity and I absolutely support the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Massey. I also support much of the spirit behind the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, although I think that it is a bit too late to provide sex and relationships education to 14 year-olds, given the hundreds of girls under the age of 14 who get pregnant every year. Good PSHE includes all the information that young people need to lead an ordinary but successful life, or even an extraordinary life. It is not academic but what are schools doing if not preparing young people for the lives that they will lead when they leave and, indeed, the lives that they lead while they are still at school?

Much has been said this afternoon about the importance of teaching about parenting, and I absolutely agree. Noble Lords may have heard about the programme in which school nurses give out baby dolls to young women. These dolls scream in the middle of the night, they need burping, they need their nappy changing and they need feeding regularly. I recently heard about one school nurse who gave out a batch of these dolls and when they came back at the end of the week most of the young girls said, “Oh my goodness. I couldn’t possibly”, apart from one who said, “It was wonderful. I can’t wait to get pregnant”, so it does not always work.

Over the years, I have said a good deal on this subject in your Lordships’ House, so, in an effort not to repeat myself, I did some new front-line research last week with two teenagers who are doing work experience in Parliament. One told me about a girl in her sister’s class at school who at the age of 13 had a one year-old baby. Both of them said that they have to go to PSHE lessons but to quote one of them, “We don’t do anything”, and to quote the other, “We watch a lot of videos”. One said, “We had a lesson on drugs recently and they just said, ‘Don’t do drugs. Drugs are bad’. It was useless”. She also told me that she did not have any sex education until she was 17 and that they do not teach about contraception or abortion in their Catholic school except in RE, where they say, “Don’t do it; it’s a sin”.

That is just not good enough. I realise that this is a very small sample of hearsay evidence but it lines up with what I have heard from many other teenagers over the years. It tell me that, first, teachers are not properly trained to deliver PSHE; secondly, teachers are not confident to teach PSHE, and that is why they rely so much on videos; thirdly, the quality of PSHE varies immensely and is very poor in some places; and, fourthly, some children are not receiving the information to which they are entitled and which protects their well-being.

The only way to deal with all those things is to make the subject part of the national curriculum in maintained schools and mandatory in academies and all other schools that do not have to follow the rest of the national curriculum. All establishments which educate children and young people have a duty to have regard to their well-being. However, they cannot do that successfully if they do not give them the information that they need to live a happy life. Young girls’ life chances are being severely affected because they may not have the information or the self-confidence to avoid unwanted pregnancies, and often the state has to pick up the bill in the interests of the young girl and, in particular, her baby. Unless children have information about the dangers of tobacco, alcohol and drugs, they may unwittingly become addicted at great cost to themselves and the country before they can turn round.

Much has been said about teacher training and, as usual, my noble friend Lady Williams has put her finger on it. Fully trained teachers cannot be produced in an instant, but her suggestion that the Government should show their intention to make the subject mandatory, given sufficient time to undertake the training of new teachers in initial teacher training or CPD for existing teachers, would be a solution to that problem. The noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, said that often the subject is given to Joe Bloggs the geography teacher. In my experience, it was given to Jill Bloggs the biology teacher or, in my case, Joan Walmsley the biology teacher. I taught it but I was not properly trained and I did not have the necessary confidence. I did my best but it was a very long time ago and the problem is that that is still happening.

I know that the Government are to have a curriculum review, which will be an opportunity to look very carefully at what we teach our children in schools. We need to give them the tools for life and not just academic qualifications for work. We must redress the damage that was done before the election when this measure very nearly got into legislation, but was prevented by the vagaries of our parliamentary procedures. I hope that the Minister will be able to reassure me that this subject will be considered during the curriculum review.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Massey of Darwen]

My Lords, I thank all those who have spoken in this interesting debate. As someone said, this is not a political issue; it is about the welfare of children and about how schools deal with this important subject, as well as engaging parents. The noble Lord was lucky to have a hen and egg when he had sex education; I had to knit a uterus. I will test him on that.

As we have said, personal, social and health education is about living not just in the future but now. Children live now. Three clear issues have emerged. One is about engaging parents. Of course I agree with engaging parents in personal, social and health education. Sadly, some parents do not want to be engaged and some simply cannot. They do not talk to children about relationships or health issues. Perhaps if we taught personal, social and health education to this generation of children, they would be able to talk to their children about personal, social and health education. Let us try to break the cycle.

Another issue was trained teachers. I still maintain that, if something is statutory in the curriculum, you will get teachers trained and you will get curriculum materials circulated. If it is not statutory, you will not get that; it will be at somebody’s whim—it will be Joan Walmsley teaching whatever she was teaching at her school. There will be no curriculum materials. Both are essential.

Another important issue is saving money. It also saves potential misery. The noble Lord, Lord Layard, spoke about the misery of depression, drug use and teenage pregnancy and about the importance of breaking the cycle of deprivation.

I look forward to the curriculum review, which many noble Lords have mentioned. However, I do not want this to drag on. We could end up with it just faltering. I noted with interest the suggestion of the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Crosby. I need to think about the question of delaying this for three years. This is an urgent issue. Children are suffering from the misery of not having the chance to discuss issues about sexual relationships, drugs, alcohol and so on. We have to get on with it.

Would the Minister be prepared to meet with a group of us to talk about this before Report, because the curriculum review will clearly not be issued before then? I intend to withdraw the amendment for now, but I will certainly return to the issue at Report if we do not get a satisfactory response.

[Lord Layard]

I am most grateful to the noble Baroness for giving way. Because I will not have an opportunity to speak later, I just wanted to say that I strongly support her suggestion.

[Baroness Massey of Darwen]

I ask the Minister to meet with a group of us. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment for now, but I will certainly bring something back at Report unless this issue is resolved.