Lord Nash
Main Page: Lord Nash (Conservative - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Nash's debates with the Department for Education
(9 years, 7 months ago)
Lords Chamber
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they will take to ensure that arts subjects have equal weighting in the new Progress 8 measure.
My Lords, a rich cultural and creative learning experience is an essential part of a good education, and Progress 8 will provide schools with more incentive to enter pupils for arts subjects than the existing performance table measures. The current indicator captures only five subjects, including English and maths. Progress 8 will capture eight subjects, leaving more space for arts subjects.
I thank the Minister for his vocal recognition of the importance of arts subjects. However, the question relates to the formal place of arts subjects in schools and the widespread concern that they have been downgraded as a result of the reorganisation of performance measures. Since arts subjects fuel our economy and enrich our cultural life, does the Minister not agree that they should be entitled to the same prioritisation and levers through Ofsted and Progress 8 as the subjects associated with the EBacc?
I entirely agree with the noble Baroness on the importance of arts subjects, but we are starting from a very low base. Under the last Government, the number of pupils taking a core academic suite of subjects collapsed from 50% to 22%. Under this Government, the figure is back up to nearly 40%. We hope that with Progress 8 building on our EBacc we will now see an increase in arts subjects—and we have seen an increase in arts GCSEs in 2013 and 2014.
Does my noble friend agree that dance and music, in particular, form part of an all-round education?
My Lords, does the Minister agree that the encouragement of arts or liberal humanities subjects is for the benefit of human flourishing and is also essential for preventing the development of extremism in religion and politics, and is therefore to be positively encouraged by government?
My Lords, I think that everybody in this House would accept that the Government’s focus on STEM subjects has its merits, but does the Minister agree that the crude distinction made recently by his right honourable friend the Secretary of State between the value of STEM subjects and the value of arts-based subjects is unhelpful and that whatever he says about schools being encouraged to offer the arts, it is almost inevitable that subjects that are not promoted will be marginalised and that pupils will lose out?
On average, pupils take over 11 key stage 4 subjects, so there is plenty of scope for the arts. The Secretary of State does not underestimate their importance, but we need to encourage more young people—particularly young women—to consider widening their options to STEM subjects.
Does the Minister agree that much of the advance of this country’s influence on the world in the last few years has lain in the field of film, literature, theatre, drama and television? In area after area we have received remarkable awards from international bodies and a widespread recognition of the extraordinary contribution that the arts and theatre in this country have made to our standing in the world.
My Lords, is the Minister aware that the Progress 8 measure could be the kiss of death for languages, as it does not stipulate which EBacc subjects need to be taken? The recent increase in take-up because of the EBacc is likely to be reversed, and some head teachers are already saying that languages will be downgraded in light of the Progress 8 measure. What will Her Majesty’s Government do to counter that?
My Lords, to follow the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, another area where the UK has an international lead is in design and technology. The Government recently announced that they are postponing the structure of the new design and technology course. When will they announce it?
Does my noble friend agree that the introduction of the new Progress 8 measure will enable every child to have a broad and balanced curriculum—much more so than in the past?
I agree entirely. We want every child to engage in a broad and balanced curriculum; Ofsted will inspect against that, and, as I have already said, many more options are now available through Progress 8. Previously we had what the shadow Secretary of State described as the “great crime” of the C/D borderline; we will now value many more subjects widely and will rate Bs to As and Es to Ds much more highly than we have in the past.
Does the Minister agree that none the less, if the current weighting formally undervalues elements of arts and culture within the curriculum such as art, music and sport and the other areas we have heard about in this interesting exchange, should that not be reviewed? This is about whether we have a broad and balanced curriculum, as the Minister acknowledged, which in turn requires schools to be inspected on a broad and balanced basis. Surely it becomes more important to us every day that our education policy shapes our young people to have a broad and balanced outlook.
Ofsted does inspect on a broad and balanced curriculum; it looks in part at how pupils will participate in and respond to artistic, sporting and cultural opportunities. However, I refer to my earlier point, which the Benches opposite did not like: we started from a very low base. I should think that all Members of the House should be very pleased with the increase in and substantial enhancement of cultural and academic courses that we have produced.
My Lords, will the Minister say what plans the Government have to address teacher shortages in arts and languages subjects, and will he say if he has a plan to evaluate Progress 8 in the medium term?
We have our bursaries for arts. In music, for instance, there is £9,000 for music graduates with a first. We now have nearly 500 teaching schools and have designated 145 schools as specialist leaders of education in arts subjects. However, of course we will evaluate the performance of the Progress 8 measures as we go along.