Education: Personal, Social and Health Education

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Wednesday 24th April 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Parekh]

My Lords, I, too, thank my noble friend Lady Massey of Darwen for securing this debate and introducing it so well. I want to bring a slightly different dimension to our debate and talk about the social and political context in which education needs to be seen and located. After all, we are asking what new skills and knowledge are needed in order that people can grow up in our society as sane human beings. Our society has changed profoundly over the past few decades and it is going to change even more. That will present the citizens of the future with new challenges. I want to look in particular at three of these new challenges which have not yet been noted in our debate.

First, there is the challenge caused by globalisation. We are an integral part of an interdependent world. The rest of the world is not beyond our boundaries; in fact, the expression “the rest of the world” does not make sense because it is already here in our midst, shaping us in a profound way. That is so not only in the form of immigrants, but also in the form of new cultures and new modes of ideas. The very idea of a border becomes in a sense problematical. Because we are constantly being exposed to new currents of thought and new ideas, there is inevitably a sense of panic. What is going to happen to us? There is a sense of disorientation and the loss of a sense of belonging. Our children, from a very young age, are faced with the problems of, “Who am I? Where do I belong? How do I retain a sense of continuity while at the same time coping with change?”. The first basic survival skill that they are going to need will be how to maintain a sense of identity that is not frozen. It must be able to cope with change, but at the same time it should not be like a set of clothes which can be discarded in favour of another set. We will have to teach them reflective skills from a young age.

The second profound change our society is undergoing is that we are increasingly multicultural. This is not only because of outsiders but because of choices that our own people are making, such as gay marriage, cohabitation and lots of other things. If we are going to live at peace with ourselves and others in this kind of society, we will require certain multicultural competences and sensibilities. We should learn to appreciate differences, feel at ease in their presence, and also develop an imaginative sympathy. Right from the age of two or three, children should be able to recognise that people can be of different colours and have different ways of life, and feel at ease with them and learn to cope with them. That skill is absolutely crucial as children grow up if we are going to maintain any degree of social cohesion and social harmony.

The third skill that I think is just as important has to do with something that one or two of your Lordships have already mentioned. There is a pervasive culture of indifference to others. We have seen severe cuts to people’s livelihoods brought about by the banking crisis, which I thought would have provoked an enormous sense of injustice and anger. It did not do anything of the kind. Bankers seem to be shameless; what are the rest of us doing? We who failed to mount sufficient pressure on the Government to bring about a regulatory regime are complicit in and partly responsible for the consequences of our deeds. Therefore, these cuts are not happening behind our backs; they are happening because of us.

It is this culture of indifference—“I have nothing to do with it, it is all the Government over there taking decisions”—that has to be countered. That involves a sense of compassion, concern for others and, going a little further, what some philosophers have called the ethical care of the self—a certain sense of pride in oneself, a sense of responsibility for oneself, so that one should be able say, with regard to health education, sex education, or whatever, “I am not that kind of person. I value myself too highly to become pregnant as a teenager or to engage in certain abominable practices”. If one had that kind of pride in oneself, which is more than self-respect and different from self-esteem, one would not dream of doing certain things. Can we instil that culture of care of the self in our children? If we do, we will have solved many of our problems without having recourse to technology or bureaucratic regulation.

Education: Early Years

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Thursday 8th November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, on securing this debate and introducing it so well. Common sense tells us that early years lay the foundations of our intellectual and moral life. If you go beyond common sense and look at research, it confirms what common sense tells us. Obviously, there are some important disagreements among researchers about which early years are more important. A Freudian will say that the important period is between one and two, while Adler and Jung will say that it is between three and four. But that need not concern us. They are all agreed that early years, whichever they happen to be, are important in shaping the adult’s life afterwards.

There is also some disagreement about whether remedial action afterwards can wipe out the damage done in the early years and how effectively it can do that. However, there is agreement among researchers that a good early start is the best policy and that any form of remedial action must be extensive and is inevitably extremely costly. It therefore makes a lot of sense to concentrate on early years rather than to hope that the damage will be wiped out by what we might do to children at a later stage. Early years shape an individual’s life at various levels. They cultivate cognitive skills, train the mind, develop social skills, especially conflict management, between two and three year-olds, which can stand them in good stead when they grow up, and introduce a measure of self-discipline and good habits as to how to organise work, study and life.

The home environment is exceedingly important and plays a crucial role, but it is not enough, because home has a certain intimacy and does not have the kind of impersonality that the school has. Furthermore, a home environment of the right kind is not always available to socially disadvantaged groups. For all these reasons, high-quality pre-school provisions are extremely important, but they are effective and can deliver on their promise only if they satisfy four criteria. First, they must involve parents actively or, if they do not involve them, at least keep them informed about what is going on. Then there is no radical break between the home and the school and between the parental culture and that of the school. All research has shown that parents generally find their association with pre-school provision extremely helpful. It is known that parents who are associated with pre-school provisions generally use less harsh discipline, provide a cognitively more stimulating environment and engage in greater dialogue with their children.

The second condition that pre-school education must meet has to do with something very important, which the term “pre-school” itself tends to obscure. It seems to suggest that what goes on between two and four or two and five is simply a way to keep children preoccupied or is a stepping stone to what goes on in school. To talk about pre-school is to imply that these years have no value in themselves; that they are not autonomous but simply a stepping stone to what happens in primary school, which would therefore decide what goes on in pre-school. Pre-school provisions have their own value and require their own pedagogy, and it is quite important that they should be recognised as having their own social status and command their own respect.

The third condition that pre-school education has to meet has to do with qualified teachers. It is not an area that can be handled by anybody and everybody, and teachers must be qualified up to level 3. They should also be sympathetic to children and they must find ways in which to combine formal teaching with informal teaching. Education at the pre-school level must be child-centred, but that should not mean reducing oneself to the level of a child, as if adults should abdicate their responsibility for educating the child. It should also be easier for teachers engaged in pre-school to acquire qualified teacher status, looking on it as one avenue through which one can acquire that status.

The final condition that pre-school education has to meet is of the following nature. It should aim at curricular content and information but also at certain basic skills and attitudes. Equally important, in a culturally diverse society such as ours, is to get children to feel at ease with the diversity that prevails in society at large. Very often, racist attitudes spring up at that level, when they are reinforced at home. Children notice differences of gender, race and religion. The important question is how they construct, conceptualise and respond to those differences. That is where pre-school education has a very important role to play in countering prejudices that might develop in future. If pre-school education is to play that role, we should also concentrate on the adequate representation of gender and race in the staff in those schools—and by staff I mean not only the teaching staff but the managerial staff.

These basic facts have been grasped by Scandinavian countries, particularly Finland, whose educational system obviously is the envy of the world. If they are properly organised, pre-school educational provisions can also help us overcome class divisions, create a broad sense of social mixing and equality as well as enhance educational performance, and ensure that we produce socially well adjusted men and women.

Education Bill

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Tuesday 14th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh]

My Lords, I owe your Lordships' House my sincere apologies for not being present here when the opening speeches were made. Due to a fatality, the train journey from Hull to London took five and a half hours, as opposed to two and a half, as it normally does. So I ended up spending about three hours more on the train than I would normally do, along with the noble Lord, Lord Prescott, who has just walked into the Chamber. I am most grateful to your Lordships' House for your understanding.

If I had had more time, I would have loved to concentrate on a number of issues, such as the institutional bonfire that the Bill intends to make, as well as the enormous amount of centralisation in which it engages. But I want to use the six minutes at my disposal to concentrate on just one aspect—the anxiety that the Bill is provoking among ethnic minorities and the impact that it is likely to have on them, if one is not careful.

I want to articulate that anxiety at five levels. First, there is almost complete silence on race equality issues in the Bill, the White Paper and ministerial speeches. Ofsted has normally reported on the ethos of the schools and what they do to encourage better relations between different ethnic groups. Apart from a passing reference to that, there is very little about it in the Bill. Ofsted reports have also graded schools, which is normally done on the basis of what is called “contextual value added”. That has been entirely dropped in the Bill. I know that the concept of contextual value-added is complicated; it needs to be refined and can lead to difficulties. But the answer is not to dispense with it altogether as the Bill does, but rather to refine, revise it and make it more applicable.

That is my worry number one. My worry number two has to do with the enormous amount of power given to teachers to search students, confiscate electronic equipment, to delete data on those electronic appliances and so on. This is a disproportionate amount of power. We are dealing with students and not criminals. As Ofsted has said, the amount of indiscipline, which can be a source of worry, is limited to no more than 2 per cent of our schools. More importantly, if we are not careful we might have a situation where the obvious targets and objects of surveillance would be either Afro-Caribbeans or Muslims. One small incident or mistake could easily give a school a bad name or create a scene of nationwide significance. So we need to be extremely careful about how we use those powers.

My third worry has to do with teacher training. It is now going to be in-school training, which has a role but also an obvious difficulty. Think of people coming from shire schools who have never been exposed to ethnic minorities. Where are they to be placed for teacher training? If they are placed in the same sorts of schools—the only schools that might be recognised by the Government—they will never acquire any kind of competence in how to deal with a multi-ethnic society like ours. If, on the other hand, they are placed in inner-city multi-ethnic schools, those schools are under so much pressure that they simply will not have the time or energy to deal with training those teachers. Multiverse played an important role in providing a great many resources for initial teacher training and subsequent professional development but its funding has been withdrawn, which has left a large institutional gap.

My fourth worry has to do with the academies. The academies that the Government are planning are quite different from those that the Labour Government introduced. We now have half a dozen different kinds of academies. It is a mixed bag and it is therefore difficult to generalise, but I suspect what might happen is as follows. Their admissions criteria could be highly discriminatory and if parents have any objection they will have to go all the way to the Secretary of State, which is never going to be easy. There is no local accountability. It is also the case that the exclusion rate in academies is generally twice that in local authority maintained schools, which breeds considerable resentment.

It is also the case that academies, so far at least, have few black students but more money. By contrast, the opposite happens in local authority schools, which have more black students and less money, with the overall result that black children and others tend to receive unequal treatment. Hitherto, the black students used to benefit from local authority support services and the help of voluntary organisations, but their budgets have been cut and they therefore have nowhere to turn to.

I am also a little worried about voluntary-controlled and voluntary-aided schools, if they become academies. The Bill says that, so far as voluntary-controlled schools are concerned, one-fifth of their teachers can come from within the same religious group. Where voluntary-aided schools are concerned, religion can be taken into account in determining their salary, promotion and appointment. I feel deeply concerned about this. If we are not careful, we might have a large number of Muslim or other denominational schools taking full advantage of those provisions and leading to the kinds of trouble that we might not want. We might then complain that they are teaching the wrong kind of Islam or the wrong kind of Christianity.

My fifth and last worry has to do with the fact that the education maintenance allowance is being reduced. That will particularly affect the ethnic minorities, especially Afro-Caribbean, Pakistani and Bangladeshi children. The same thing is likely to happen where English language teaching is concerned; those for whom English is a second language will suffer because the funding is being drastically cut. I very much hope that the Minister will take many of these points into account, because if we are not careful the cumulative effect of this Bill could be pretty dangerous so far as race relations and the educational achievement of our ethnic minority children are concerned.

Marriage

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Thursday 10th February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh]

My Lords, I thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester for securing this debate and introducing it with great passion and eloquence.

I would have liked to speak about the role of marriage and marriage support in general, but I am struck by one absence in the debate as well as in the work that has been done. If one looks at the Hart report, there is virtually nothing about ethnic minorities and their patterns of marriage and matrimonial breakdown. If one looks at the excellent briefing notes provided by the Library, the same absence is very striking. I therefore thought that I would say something about the ways in which this problem is faced within ethnic minority communities.

At one level, ethnic minority communities face the same problems as the rest of society, but there are other areas in which their problems are very different and distinctive and require a great deal of cultural sensibility if they are to be understood in their own terms. The percentage of matrimonial breakdown is much lower in ethnic minority communities and the rate of cohabitation is much lower, as is the rate of divorce. However, the situation is changing. As ethnic minorities are integrating into our society, they are beginning to share some of its weaknesses and mistakes.

If we are to address those problems, we will have to show a great deal of cultural sensibility. That is what I thought multiculturalism was about, and I am sorry that the Prime Minister chose to attack it in his recent rather uneven speech because, ultimately, multiculturalism is an attempt to understand how different communities, historically located in different places and embedded in different conditions, face the same problems and deal with them in their own peculiar ways.

I want to highlight six or seven important problems that ethnic minorities face. The first is forced marriages, which are declining but are still there in very significant numbers. They need to be tackled. If forced marriages are to be tackled effectively, the Government cannot rely on bureaucracy alone but will have to depend on the support of ethnic minority communities. That requires taking ethnic minorities into their confidence.

Secondly, sensitive marriage counselling is absolutely key. When I look at courses on marriage counselling in our colleges and universities, I find that the multicultural dimension is not as fully emphasised or appreciated as it should be. Therefore, we will have to pay some attention to who does the counselling, where it takes place and how the counsellors are trained.

Thirdly, within ethnic minority communities, families have traditionally been joint families. Young couples have been eased into marriage and helped to face the problems of marriage in times of crisis by family elders. In some cases, the elders are here; in some cases, the elders are elsewhere in the countries from which people come or from where women or men have arrived for marriage. I generally find that our visa regulations make it extremely difficult for elders, from the sub-continent in particular, to come here to help out young couples in times of marriage difficulties.

Fourthly, within ethnic minority communities there is a strong network of support. Communities move in at difficult times when they detect the subtle ways in which the marriage is beginning to face problems. I think we have to find some way in which the network of support that ethnic minorities have built up is encouraged, not replaced by bureaucratic methods.

Fifthly in relation to marriage in ethnic minorities, indiscriminate cuts are leading to the closure of all kinds of support networks, especially Sure Start and other mechanisms. Sure Start has played an important role in looking after children and relieving stress that happens to families passing through a difficult crisis. These cuts are going to impact very badly on ethnic minorities as well as on society at large. I very much hope that the Government will rethink the likely consequences of small economies in the long run.

In Asian families, one issue that is not widely noticed is that marital crises occur not only in the first 10 to 15 years of marriage; sometimes, they occur much later in life, when people are in their 60s or even 70s. I was struck by that when I was deputy chair of the Commission for Racial Equality, when these things were constantly brought to our attention. In such families, people get married for all kinds of reasons and perhaps there has been no initial friendship. As a result, during the marriage their children become their bond and, through children, they are able to sustain their relationships. When the children grow up and leave, the two individuals are left facing each other in their two solitudes. No bonds have been built up other than those through their children, who have gone. Grandchildren live miles away and are not able to visit regularly. Therefore, couples in their 60s can begin to drift apart, facing each other in their intense solitude, which leads to domestic violence, mental illness and all kinds of acute problems. When we talk about marriage counselling, let us also bear in mind the problems of elderly couples.

The last issue that I want to raise follows from what I have said so far. Many noble Lords might have been surprised by some of the facts that I have mentioned or some of the problems which I have alerted. This simply goes to show why research into the marital problems of ethnic minorities and the ways of dealing with them is crucial. Whatever research the Government undertake, they must set aside resources for consultation with ethnic minorities.

Finally, on the nature of marriage, I hope that we can make a better case for marriage than that it helps people to avoid Alzheimer’s disease or that it reduces costs to the national budget or whatever. If that is all that marriage does, I do not think it is an institution worth saving. Ultimately, marriage differs from cohabitation in four important respects: it implies mutual commitment; it implies ritualisation of a relationship; it is public, in so far as a public announcement is made; and, finally, it creates a collective unit, which is not simply two individuals together but a single unit encompassing two people. In so far as marriage has these four features, it is better than cohabitation, but one should not make the mistake of thinking that cohabitation is not a viable alternative.

Let us find ways of encouraging marriage and let us recognise the difference between marriage and cohabitation, but let us not turn this into a qualitative, categorical difference, which it is not.

Education: Pupils and Young People

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Thursday 28th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh]

My Lords, I begin by thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, for securing this debate and introducing it with the clarity that we have come to expect of her. I may not agree with everything she said but she presented some extremely interesting views on what we ought to be doing.

I think we all agree that we have one of the most unequal systems of education in the world. Our best schools are better than any that one can think of in other parts of the world but a large number are struggling. We have a tradition of catering to the elite, encouraging excellence among them, but not paying as much attention to excellence so far as the rest of the population is concerned. Consider some of the results. Many of our schools produce rather poor results at primary and secondary levels. There is profound alienation from the education system, leading to around 300,000 suspensions in any given school year. There are 250,000 persistent truants and thousands of teachers are abused and attacked every day. This all leads to an enormous waste of talent but that is not the only important thing. It also means that we are unable to compete with such countries as Singapore, South Korea or Germany, where the education systems tend to cater to a large body of people in a meaningful way.

It is also striking how poverty and disadvantage impact on our education system. There are 80,000 pupils who are eligible for free school meals every school year. They are the poorest achievers. They start performing badly in primary school and that continues from one stage of school to another, right up to university if they ever manage to get there. In this context I am particularly worried about some of our ethnic minority pupils. I am here thinking about Pakistanis and Afro-Caribbeans, who tend to achieve rather poorly. If we are to tackle this, we ought to think about providing extra funds for schools and areas where underachievement is rampant. It is a question not only of concentrating on schools and pupils but of attending to the larger question of economic and social disadvantage.

If we are going to attend to a large body of our schools where underachievement is a problem, we ought also to think of attracting high quality teachers. As has already been said, teaching staff these days are much better than they used to be, thanks to many of the efforts of the previous Government. Nevertheless, compared to what happens in Finland, Sweden and many other countries, we still have a long way to go. We must find ways not only of attracting highly qualified graduates but of providing better teacher training with a strong practical orientation. Here, again, I alert noble Lords to the virtual absence of ethnic minority teachers in many parts of our country. In all, 94 per cent of teachers come from the white community. In the north-east and south-west the figure goes up to 99.2 per cent. Ethnic minority teachers are important, partly because they provide inspiring role models for ethnic minority pupils, but also because they get white students used to the diversity of our multi-ethnic society.

Another point has to do with the obsession over the past few years with grading and exams. We ought to concentrate on the learning experience, on fostering the capacity, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London said, for analysis, imagination and interdependence and encouraging intellectual curiosity. That will require a fairly drastic reorientation in how our curriculum is structured and taught. I particularly emphasise a certain degree of parochialism in our education system. There is not as much openness to other civilisations and their achievements, or to other languages, as there ought to be. This partly explains why modern languages are largely neglected or marginalised in many of our schools. A language is a window to another civilisation. Unless one is interested in other civilisations there is no reason why one should be interested in those languages, except in functional terms, which is hardly the way to learn a language.

It is also important to bear in mind that much of our education tends, certainly at the school level, to be rather narrowly based. If you compare our A-levels to the international baccalaureate, you begin to see why it is important that we should encourage students to take a wider range of subjects. We ought to do something similar at an earlier stage and make sure that English, mathematics and science are not the only subjects that are required to be taken until the age of 14. Once we begin to do that, we will begin to provide a broader base and a more literate and civilised society.