Schools Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Lucas and Baroness Blower

Committee stage
Wednesday 8th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

No, my Lords, nor do I; I think it would work much better in that sort of way. The Government are good at making declaratory statements such as, “We’re going to do this: we’re going to abolish the sale of petrol engine cars in 2030”. We all know how effective that sort of statement can be. What is the difficulty if the Government were to say, “We are going for this sort of process; we’re going to have a period of consultation; it will end on this date; it’ll be in a Bill in Parliament in a year’s time, and that’s how it’s going to be worked out”? They would get exactly the same process as is envisaged by my noble friend Lady Penn—

[Baroness Blower (Lab)]

I intervene briefly to say that an enormous amount of work could and should be done on the curriculum. The fact is that we are into the 21st century, and fantastic work is being done by educators all over the place about how we best educate our young people for the best possible outcomes. Yet, we have this odd divide between the schools that have to do the national curriculum and those that do not.

As my noble friend Lady Morris said, we should look at what the entitlements and requirements of an educated society are in order to rise to the challenges we obviously face as we move forward. Those should be things that are available to all young people. There might well be an argument for saying that those schools that are currently maintained schools but are required to do every last detail of the national curriculum might flourish more if they had some of those curriculum freedoms. So there is a big advantage to being able to talk in the round about our vision for what educated young people would be when they leave our education system. After all, there is common agreement now that young people will stay in school until they are 18 or 19. Gone are the days when they would leave at 16. There is such a lot to gain from having a much broader discussion about what an entitlement to a broad and balanced curriculum actually looks like, not just for the good of the individual but for the good of society at large.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

Yes, my Lords, and I imagine that we will have it as a part of the process of deciding how to turn maintained schools into academies. There is a really important debate to be had on where we should be resting, and I look forward to it. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Health and Care Bill

Debate between Lord Lucas and Baroness Blower

Lords Hansard - Part 2 & Report stage
Wednesday 16th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blower (Lab)]

My Lords, this is a key opportunity to do something really significant for the health of the nation, from the youngest to the oldest, and for all the groups we refer to as “excluded.” This is a key moment. If the Minister can respond positively to the questions put to him by the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, he will be doing a very good job for the nation.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I entirely support my noble friend Lord Moynihan when he asks for proper accountability. That is what drives the few examples of successful cross-departmental co-operation. One of the recent missed opportunities is Defra not picking up on aspects of the Glover report that deal with people getting out into the landscape. To make a difference to that, Defra has to care and it has to be brought to account, but there also has to be a good enough mechanism to ensure that if Defra does propose to do something, someone is going to fund it. That would certainly apply too to schools’ collaboration with local sports clubs. Parents up and down the land want that to happen. But how is that going to be afforded? How is that going to be made to happen? Who is holding the systems accountable? There has to be some system whereby accountability and interest flow through—as my noble friend said, ideally, to Parliament—to make that happen.

I have written to the Minister on perioperative care, which is another example. How does the NHS collaborate with all the other people who might provide the support required for effective perioperative care? They are not in the NHS; it does not work that way. You can have a system that just involves spending the money and ticking the box because that money has been spent; or you can have one with real accountability, in which people care whether you get the results and are measuring that, and who feed that through to someone with a central interest in things. So I am really going to listen to the Minister with great interest on this.