Queen’s Speech

Lord Quirk Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Quirk (CB)]

My Lords, we all know that government faces massive tasks in education. Demographic changes demand a great deal of school building as well as a big expansion in the number of teachers trained to fill existing and projected shortages. In April this year, Tessa Jowell estimated a shortfall by 2020 of 40,000 secondary and primary places in London, with more than 3,500 of them in Lambeth alone.

Then there is the gross unevenness of provision across the country. In the north of England, only a quarter of pupils sit for high-value GCSEs as compared with the south-east. No wonder Sir Peter Lampl is so horrified. Nor must we forget our need for a dramatic expansion and improvement of vocational education, an area in which the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, noted:

“England has had a historic weakness and where we continue to lag behind the performance of other developed countries”.

She doubtless had in mind Germany and its famed Berufsschulen.

But there is more. In the New Statesman last month, the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, recalled that, in his first Administration, Mr Blair set up a “standards and effectiveness unit” whose,

“main responsibility was the implementation of national literacy and numeracy strategies, intended to ensure that all 11-year-olds demonstrated the competence expected of their age in reading, writing and maths”.

It is deeply frustrating that today, nearly 20 years on, we still cannot achieve even these modest aims. The despairing complaints of employers are as loud as ever. International comparisons are as gloomy as ever as they chart this country’s humble progress. The latest example is the lengthy OECD report Universal Basic Skills, published last month. Our distance behind Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea and Taipei is, of course, familiar and not particularly dismaying. Education is deeply embedded in, and inseparable from, the whole social, familial, behavioural and political nexus. We could not, nor would we want to, buy into the co-occurring value systems of China or Korea. What is far more serious and relevant is that we also lag behind our European neighbours whose social and political liberalism we share, and whose education systems we could and should regard as models. The OECD report shows us behind no fewer than 11 countries of the European Union, including big ones such as Germany and Poland. The lag includes mother-tongue literacy, where we are no match for our neighbours in, for example, the field of lexicology, which plays a prominent role in schools from Calais to Moscow but which is largely ignored in this country, with dire consequences such as the communicational poverty with which we are all too familiar among British school-leavers.

During the recent consultation on the national curriculum, the Department for Education was sent copies of the mother-tongue curricula operating in the biggest of the German Länder. These insist on vocabulary study being at the heart of linguistic communication for the understanding of all school subjects. Lexical systems are taught in carefully planned stages, together with the essential understanding of semantic structures such as polarities and hierarchies. Yet when the new curriculum was published recently, almost nothing had happened, and it seems that at the highest level in the DfE it is believed that vocabulary is something that can be picked up randomly. This was of course precisely the case with spelling and grammar in the bad old days of “anything goes”. Welcome action was taken and the Government now issue pages and pages of detailed spelling rules and a modern exposition of grammar—but not so with vocabulary.

Earlier this year I put several Written Questions to the noble Lord, Lord Nash, asking him to explain why the extensive curriculum framework document had a lengthy section entitled—note the order—“Vocabulary, grammar and punctuation” but with literally nothing in it on vocabulary despite it being the first named. In response, the noble Lord, Lord Nash, confessed that there was no separate programme of study for vocabulary but that there was “a clear expectation” that teachers were required to develop students’ vocabulary “actively” and “systematically”. Despite further Questions during the last days of the coalition, I have still not been informed on what this “clear expectation” is based or where teachers can learn of the systems on which they are expected to be building. Will the new Government now address these issues seriously and urgently? After all, English and maths are rightly identified as the core subjects and we must have curricula in both that are fit for purpose.

Finally, I will say a brief word on higher education. Will Ministers address the steep decline in part-time student numbers? Are they fully alive to the vital needs of our foremost research universities, such as UCL and Imperial? Will the ring-fenced science and research budget continue to be protected? What is going to happen to the resource and capital budgets of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills? Will the Government pay heed to the role of the EU research funding into which our universities have been tapping so successfully? Lastly, may I remind Ministers that every pound of public money spent on research attracts the generous support of foundations such as Wellcome and Wolfson?