Education: Development of Excellence

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Thursday 18th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, there is too much to say and too little time to say it. We have had 25 wonderful years in UK education, ever since my noble friend Lord Baker became Secretary of State for Education. My noble friend Lord Harris illustrated what momentum we have now. The credit is shared equally between our party and the party opposite; both of us should be proud of what we have achieved. Of course, there have been some idiocies and setbacks in between, but we are human. However, there is still a lot to do and I will mention a few things to which we should pay attention.

The first is the continuous professional development of teachers and the spread of good practice. We have never managed to get that right. We now have an organisation called the Teacher Development Trust, which is immensely impressive. It sprang out of nowhere—a young Teach First in its own particular area. I really hope that we will support it. It is the best hope I have seen of getting this issue right.

Secondly, we must bear down on Ofqual. Allowing GCSEs to become norm references in the covert way that it did was destructive for all our young people and for the system as a whole. The examinations need immediate and radical reform.

Thirdly, we must deal with the myth of class sizes. About the only thing that is established from educational research is that class size, starting at the current level of around 30, makes no difference. Possibly the most inefficient way imaginable to spend money in the educational system is to use it to reduce class sizes. We should take advantage of this in dealing with the coming bulge in the number of primary-level children. We should let class sizes float up by a couple. It will make very little difference to educational achievement, and it will give schools a lot of money which they can spend on improving education. If we are going to have evidence-based education, that is the place to start.

Next, we should pick up the initiative that Peter Lampl is taking on, which is bringing independent schools back into the state system. The book written by the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, chronicles how Labour Party policies gave great strength to the independent sector in the middle years of the previous century, and we are all aware of the great strides that he made in laying the foundations for that to be reversed. We now have a once in a generation chance to do something swift and radical, which will bring half the best independent schools back into the state sector—not on the terms that they are suggesting, but not on the terms that the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, suggests either. We need compromise and a really radical and committed approach. It is surely the goal of all of us that we should get back to a much more balanced system. We can wait 100 years and hope that it will happen slowly, or we can do something now, when the conditions are right.

I hope that I will manage to persuade my noble friend to do something about the quality of the information that is available. People grouse about league tables. The problem is not league tables; it is that we have only league tables. There is much less information than there should be, and what we have is not of a good enough quality. If we want information on the all-round quality of schools, we need an annual inspector’s letter to tell it to us; it will never come out of figures. If we want accurate figures and to know what progress kids are making in schools, we need proper baseline assessments, not cobbled-together assessments based on very inadequate key stage 2 examinations. I really hope that the Government will make progress on that.

We must continue to encourage the foundation of new academies and free schools. They really offer opportunity. Last night I was at a presentation for a new free school. The enthusiastic parents were all from the black community. They are the ones who really know that they have been getting a raw deal from the state system. They are the ones who want long hours and real education, and there is no way of offering it to them if not through new schools.