Education: Development of Excellence

Lord Northbourne Excerpts

Thursday 18th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Northbourne]

My Lords, you must be weary. I shall make only one short but important point. I want to draw attention to an area of education in which I believe there is a serious and lamentable lack of excellence in our education system today. Ofsted tells us that in most of our secondary schools personal, social, health and economic education is being badly taught or not taught at all. Ofsted reports tell us that PSHE teaching in most secondary schools is very much a Cinderella subject. It is mostly taught, if taught at all, by teachers with no specialist qualification in the subject, given little or no curriculum time and edged out by examination subjects. In contrast, Ofsted tells us that PSHE in primary schools is, on the whole, well or at least satisfactorily taught.

Most young people of secondary school age are keen to understand more about the responsibility and challenges they are going to encounter in adult life, not least the challenges of parenthood. These issues need to be explored interactively but under guidance as part of every secondary school’s PSHE education programme and as part of the adolescent’s preparation for life. Ministers justify the status quo by quoting an Ofsted figure for all schools. That figure shows that in 74% of all schools, Ofsted considers that PSHE teaching is “satisfactory” or better than satisfactory. Does that figure contradict that report saying that it is bad in secondary schools? I am no statistician, but it seems that if you add together the large number of satisfactory primary schools with the much smaller number of secondary schools, which are unsatisfactory, you are bound to get a confusing and misleading answer. The Ofsted reports on secondary schools make the picture absolutely clear; most secondary schools are failing their pupils in this area.

In my view, it is irresponsible not to prepare adolescents adequately for the challenges and opportunities of adult life in a way that is excellent. It is irresponsible to leave them to rely mainly on soap operas for the knowledge they need and irresponsible of us not to encourage and support them in exploring what the future holds for them. Will the Government please look seriously at the possibility of setting up or sponsoring, at one of the major teacher training establishments, a pilot project to establish and develop specialist teaching skills in this area?