National Curriculum

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Tuesday 26th March 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am a great fan of the national curriculum review. It is set out with the right principles underlying it of increasing emphasis on knowledge and on ambition and is well executed. The current consultation is a real consultation. I have had several conversations with departmental officials and found them more than willing to listen. I am hoping that today we shall have an example of a Minister who is more than willing to listen. We shall see. Therefore, I encourage my noble friend Lord Storey to write in and say what he wants to say about sex education. I suspect that some members of the ministerial team live quite sheltered lives down in Sussex and Norfolk. I can tell them—as I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Nash, can—that life in central London is a bit different and that the worst bits of the internet are well into primary schools in year 5, and we want our children to be helped to resist them and overcome them. Leaving things until secondary school is not good enough. However, as I say, I encourage my noble friend and others to write in and say that.

I very much hope that my right honourable friend will resist those of the 100 who want him to change the history curriculum. I am delighted that we have got history away from the academics who think that history is about studying history, and to understand that it is about people—us—our roots and why we are and who we are. I encourage him to get through the whole of British history in the primary curriculum. Simon Jenkins compresses it into 250 very readable pages, which I hope my daughter will get through in six months, or perhaps rather less, at a rate of a chapter a day. History is not a burden to be considered but an essential part of being British. I am delighted to see it back.

The noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, focused on the design and technology curriculum. It has, indeed, been filleted. All that is left is horticulture, cooking and DIY. Therefore, I very much hope that my noble friend the Minister will say to his colleague Michael Gove, “Look at what has been done here. This is the most marvellous opportunity. Here we have a subject which has imploded on itself, where, in most schools in the country, the teaching is disconnected from anything else. There is far too much low-quality teaching in craft and design and where we have swept it out of the curriculum let us put something in its place. Why don’t you, Michael, do what you have done so triumphantly in computing and challenge the engineering, design and materials industry to come up with something worth while in this space because technology has now made this possible? You can get, at no great price, decent computers. You can get very good programmes to put on them. You can get lovely machines to stick on the end of both of that—things like 3D printers and computer-controlled routers and laser cutters. You can create quite sophisticated things. Put an end to these useless wooden bookshelves that fall apart on the second day of use and start to create in this space something which should be the foundation for pupils to enjoy engineering and take a real delight in what they can do and create, and a foundation for people who will go on enthusiastically to careers in engineering, design and other such areas”. If we do this, we will find that what emerges in the design and technology space supports what we want to see being done in the main subjects. Mathematics can be brought back at an advanced level. You can take the sort of approach that Conrad Wolfram wants and bring really sophisticated mathematical analysis into how to make something of a particular shape. There is an awful lot of physics in studying how to build something and then control it properly.

Opportunities will arise to deal with the presently separate art and design curriculums because they will be using computers. Schools are being given the opportunity to create real interfaces with business because when they are equipped with this kit, which as I say is not a great price, they will have something that every small and medium-sized enterprise involved in manufacturing will envy and want to come and use out of hours. They will want to co-operate with the school, which means that the school will have access to people in industry. The kit is up to date and what people in industry as well as schools want, and there will be real opportunities for creating the kind of collaboration that we would like to see. Beyond everything else, it would make sense of the opportunities being provided by the new computing curriculum. I hope very much that this is a cause which my noble friend will espouse.