Education and Adoption Bill

Lord Northbourne Excerpts

Tuesday 20th October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Northbourne (CB)]

My Lords, I shall not detain your Lordships for long. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Addington, on many of the things he said, with which I agree. In so far as the Bill is going to provide for better education for many children, of course I must—and do—support it, but I have one concern: what is the definition of “coasting”? It raises the problem of what education is for—what are we trying to achieve?

For clever children, academic success is fairly easy, but what about the non-clever children and the disadvantaged children? It is those children whose education I happen to have had the luck and the honour to be concerned with during my life. I was a governor of Weavers Field School for children with emotional and behavioural difficulties; there was also the other school down at Eastbourne, Caldecott College, Toynbee Hall and a whole range of things. We were doing things for and with young people who really had very little academic potential.

I fear that the decision about what is and what is not a coasting school will be based entirely on academic performance. Many of the schools that are taking terrific care of and doing wonderful work with disadvantaged children do not produce academic results because those children do not have the potential to achieve academic results. I hope that in his summing up the Minister will be able to tell me what the criterion for a coasting school is.