Queen’s Speech

Lord Quirk Excerpts

Thursday 19th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Quirk (CB)]

My Lords, like others before me, including the noble Lords, Lord Fowler, Lord Foster and Lord Clement-Jones, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bonham-Carter, I shall largely address issues to do with broadcasting. As I worked my way through the White Paper on the future of the BBC, noting its attractive and helpful format, my first reaction was pleasurable relief that months of alarmist speculation seemed to have been unwarranted. The BBC’s mission will still be to inform, educate and entertain.

There is glowing recognition of the public regard in which the BBC is held and of the reputation for objectivity that it has earned over the best part of a century. It is probably the most trusted broadcaster anywhere in the world. As the White Paper notes, it is “hugely valued by audiences” worldwide, and,

“a vital part of the UK’s ability to lead the world in terms of soft power and influence”.

The White Paper has much less to say about independence, though it is surely on this widely perceived independence that the public trust is based, at home and abroad.

On the proposal for a governing board to replace the short-lived BBC Trust, I have nothing to say. Its membership and its powers seem to be still open for discussion. I hope that they are. But I have something to say on the direction of travel that the Government seem intent on following. In framing my reflections, I naturally resorted to the magisterial five-volume History of Broadcasting by Asa Briggs, whom this House sadly lost only a couple of months ago. Lord Briggs knew more about the BBC than anyone else in the world. So it was not only to his voluminous history that I turned, but also to shorter distillations of his thought and knowledge, such as his recent study, From Gutenberg to the Internet of 2002, his book Governing the BBC of 1979, and his contributions, along with those of Shirley Williams and others, to the 1982 volume, The Future of Broadcasting.

What, I asked myself, would Asa Briggs have made of this new White Paper? I think that, on the whole, he too would have been pleased and reassured, but I have no doubt that he would also have had serious concerns. After all, the fifth and final volume of his History, published in 1995, is entitled Competition, an activity he strongly favoured. He knew that in the fierce environment of television, competition was essential and he was in no doubt that, despite talk and very real fears about “dumbing down” and the “race to the bottom”, the very existence of the BBC, its strong ethos and the keen competition it presented, had already had a strong beneficial effect on the output quality of the proliferating commercial channels.

The White Paper insists on the need for the BBC to be distinctive—a much used word—and that it should stop watching the ratings as a guide to its success. Is there not in this, Briggs might wonder, a hint of the BBC abandoning its role as a mass provider? Would not this put at risk the licence fee model of financing, which has worked well for more than 90 years? It was always vulnerable and it could become critically so if the White Paper’s hints turned into outright discouragement of mass entertainment. Surely, we do not want the BBC to be relegated to niche programmes for niche audiences, whether these be regional, ethnic, social or culturally highbrow. Can the Minister reassure me?

After all, the BBC has been highly distinctive before. In the 1920s and 1930s, which most noble Lords do not remember but Asa Briggs did and so do I, the BBC had its own distinctive voice, its linguistic style, which was called BBC English. If the masses happened to switch their newly acquired “wireless sets” to a BBC programme, they would promptly, and in droves, switch over to a commercial station such as Radio Luxembourg. By 1940, of course, the exigencies of war were requiring the establishment to reach out to the masses. Then, 20 years later and under quite different pressures, Carleton Greene took the risk of reaching out further still. The moment was noted by an editorial in the BBC’s own newspaper, the Listener, on 22 March 1962:

“The BBC needs to be braver and sometimes is. So let there be a faint hurrah as Auntie goes over the top”.

It was only from about then that the BBC became genuinely popular.

The challenges facing all public service broadcasting are vastly more threatening today than they ever have been. Let us in this House ensure that the governance provided by the new BBC board will stoutly support and encourage the creative professionals as they compete to offer programmes of good music, good drama, good documentary and, yes, good sitcoms and quiz shows.

Higher Education: Part-time and Mature Students

Lord Quirk Excerpts

Tuesday 8th September 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

I agree that we are very keen to stimulate this sector and that is why we have introduced the loan scheme to which I referred. We had a very weak economy, which resulted in a number of employers not funding these schemes. We then had a dramatic turnaround and recovery in the economy, with the creation of 2.5 million new jobs in the private sector, which obviously has had an impact on people deciding what they want to do and what employers will fund. Of course, over 80% of students in part-time education are in work. We are very keen to stimulate demand in the sector. We have written to key players in the sector asking for their thoughts, and we are extremely open to ideas.

[Lord Quirk (CB)]

Is the Minister aware that the appalling drop in part-time studies affects seriously not only the major providers such as Birkbeck and the Open University but universities across the entire system, where part-time study has been held to be a little marginal and now risks being entirely junked, with the loss of a great deal of useful input into the higher education system? Is he further aware, as the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, has just said, that at a time when employers are crying out for a flexibly minded, flexibly trained workforce, this is an exact description of the output of part-time students, a third of whom are intent on changing their career as a result of such education?

[Lord Nash]

I have already made a similar point to the noble Baroness: we are aware of the decline. We are keen to stimulate further but it not just about university education; for instance, our higher and degree-level apprenticeships are the fastest-growing part of our apprenticeships programme. This is all about widening access and helping people to develop the skills they need so that British industry can be competitive internationally. More than half of the people on these courses are over 25.

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?

Schools: Careers Advice

Lord Quirk Excerpts

Monday 20th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

My noble friend has raised this before and I think it is an excellent idea. In fact all schools should have at least one person focused on the careers function. I know that a number of schools do this and we are considering encouraging more of them to do so.

[Lord Quirk (CB)]

With the school leaving age now raised to 18, is it not the case that all 16 to 19 year-old students are engaged in special 16 to 19 study programmes which are formally and specifically geared to career aspirations? How, then, can it be that Ofsted last week published a report complaining that there was very poor use of the extra time for 16 to 19 year-olds and, specifically, that careers guidance is poor “at all levels”?

[Lord Nash]

The noble Lord’s comment about 16 to 19 study programmes is quite right. I am aware of what Ofsted has said and we will be reflecting on what other guidance about this we can give to colleges.

Education: PISA Results

Lord Quirk Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

I agree entirely with my noble friend that we need to grow a new generation of head teachers. We are going to be short of head teachers because many of them are retiring. We will have to promote younger people, which is why it is so encouraging that so many more highly qualified people are motivated to become head teachers. Many of the academy chains have very sophisticated training programmes for their heads to ensure that we grow the next generation of head teachers.

[Lord Quirk (CB)]

My Lords, the Statement made no reference to one issue which must have caused a certain amount of buzzing in the DfE yesterday. His ministerial colleague, Liz Truss, addressed the Publishers Association and very largely deplored the disappearance —which may surprise many of us—of the textbook from the classrooms of both primary and secondary schools. I was astonished to learn from a Telegraph report today that, as compared with 10% use of textbooks in primary schools here, Germany and Poland have around 80% or 90%. Only 8% of pupils in English secondary schools have textbooks in their hands, whereas the figure for Finland is 80%. I compare the UK largely with other European countries because of the huge cultural differences which make comparison with Taiwan and Hong Kong a bit difficult. In view of what Liz Truss said yesterday, why does the Minister think that there is such a gap between our countries and other European countries in the simple use of textbooks in classes? Does he think that this gap between the two lots of teachers and the two lots of procedures may account for our disappointing performance and the much more hopeful performance that he has drawn attention to in Poland and Germany?

[Lord Nash]

I agree entirely with the noble Lord. I think that the answer to his questions in brief, although I will elaborate, is that this situation has been caused by a lack of rigour in the curriculum and in teaching methodology. I agree entirely that this lack of rigour and methodology, which is expressed in one way in textbooks, is one of the reasons why we have declined. One also needs to look at workbooks. In far too many state-maintained schools, there is a complete absence of workbooks. We are finding that some of the much more successful schools—not just academies but maintained schools—insist that all their pupils have a workbook. A workbook is something pupils can be proud of and it can be marked. Pupils do more homework and they get more feedback. In all senses, we need to instil more rigour in our school system.

Schools: Unqualified Staff

Lord Quirk Excerpts

Monday 4th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

My Lords, a number of studies, including a notable one in 2007 by McKinsey, have revealed that a more effective system of selecting teachers is based on things such as their level of literacy and numeracy, interpersonal skills, commitment, willingness to learn and passion for their subject. There is no evidence that teachers with QTS teach better than those without it.

[Lord Quirk (CB)]

My Lords, I am no great fan of the current teacher training in this country, but rather than go on allowing people to teach in the classroom with no such training at all—Mr Gove confessed last week that we still have 15,000 of them—why do the Government not insist on bringing our standards of teacher training up to those of the best high-performing jurisdictions in Europe and the world, which they rightly seek to emulate, thus giving those in our great teaching profession the qualifications which are truly worthy of them?

[Lord Nash]

My Lords, we are seeking to improve the quality of teacher training by bringing more of it into schools. We now have 357 teaching schools and more teachers being taught under SCITT programmes. Ofsted reports that 31% of SCITT courses are good or outstanding as opposed to only 13% for higher education establishments.

Schools: Curriculum

Lord Quirk Excerpts

Wednesday 30th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

My Lords, we looked at that recently during the PSHE review and concluded that the SOE curriculum provides a good foundation on which teachers can build. We trust teachers to deliver the education that pupils need and adjust it for the modern world. Technology is moving very fast, and we do not think that constant changes to the regulations and top-down diktats are the way to deal with this.

[Lord Quirk (CB)]

I wonder why Her Majesty's Government do not insist that those schools should teach the national curriculum, as all maintained schools have to; or, to put it the other way round, what parts of the national curriculum will the Government be happy to see ignored in schools that do not have to teach it?

[Lord Nash]

Schools must teach English, maths, science and religious education. It is absolutely clear that in order to pass exams in this country, all pupils must have a core body of knowledge as assessed by GCSEs.

Literacy

Lord Quirk Excerpts

Thursday 10th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

My Lords, Teachers’ Standards requires that all teachers have a clear understanding of the needs of all pupils, including those with SEN, and must be able to adapt their teaching to meet those needs. All teachers must also now receive IT in synthetic phonics, and Ofsted inspects against that. Also, the draft SEN code of practice that we published on 4 October requires that teachers’ ability to meet SEN is included in schools’ approach to professional development and their performance management arrangements. We have invested heavily in SEN training, educational psychologists and other programmes over the past few years, but I am sure there is more to be done.

[Lord Quirk (CB)]

The issues highlighted by the OECD of course go far beyond the SEN cases that this Question addresses. Why is it that almost 40 years after these grave problems in the English educational system were starkly identified by James Callaghan, successive Governments have failed to address the problems concerned?

[Lord Nash]

This Government’s approach is to focus on that core issue, to ensure that all our students leave school adequately qualified in literacy and numeracy. That is why we have a focus on much more rigorous exams. Our new national curriculum will promote high standards of language and literacy by equipping pupils with a strong command of spoken and written language. Our phonics programme is an integral part of that; it is showing good results, with the number of pupils reaching the expected standard in year 1 rising from 58% to 69%.

Schools: National Curriculum

Lord Quirk Excerpts

Tuesday 9th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Quirk]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for repeating the Statement that was made in the House of Commons yesterday. As one who studied the February draft in excruciating detail, I am happy to congratulate all concerned at the DfE on the quite striking improvements to be seen in this new version of the national curriculum, especially in the very lengthy English section. For example, in that section there is a far greater emphasis on spoken English and a far deeper recognition that continuous vocabulary development is central to the whole of education.

However, I have a couple of questions for the Minister. Can he assure us that teachers, confronted now with a good deal of extra excellent material and ideas to bring to life in the classroom, will, wherever necessary, be brought fully up to speed so that they can deliver on the new demands required of them? It is a big task and the curriculum will come to life only in the classroom.

Secondly, the importance of English and maths is obvious in their needing more space in the voluminous curriculum document than all the other 10 subjects put together—rightly so, since English and maths not only possess the precious content which is peculiar to them but also comprise the tools, as the Minister has just said, for shaping all else in education. Therefore, can the Minister assure us that English and maths will remain the sine qua non throughout school life from the ages of five to 18?

[Lord Nash]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for his comments, particularly about English. We are focusing heavily on ensuring that teachers have the resources to deliver this new curriculum, largely in the way that I outlined earlier. English and maths will be essential right the way through the curriculum until the age of 16, and grammar, punctuation and spelling will feature much more across the curriculum than they have done in the past. They will not be essential beyond the age of 18, although we have said that all pupils who have not achieved grade C in English or maths will go on studying English and maths until they are 18 and have reached that standard.

Education: Reform of GCSEs

Lord Quirk Excerpts

Tuesday 11th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Quirk]

My Lords, further to same point, if the new GCSEs are to have a fair chance, will the Government ensure that the timetable for their introduction fully respects the need for teachers right across the board—not just of foreign languages—to be brought up to speed wherever necessary? Is the Minister satisfied that the revised GCSEs respect the special importance of maths and English as underpinning all the other subjects in the examination system?

[Lord Nash]

The noble Lord makes a very good point. On the timetable, we are now consulting on the subject content and Ofqual is consulting on the regulations. The consultation on subject content ends on 20 August and Ofqual’s consultation ends two weeks later. We plan to publish final versions of both in September or October. The awarding organisations then have about six months to develop their detailed subject specifications and it will take approximately six months for those to be accredited by Ofqual. The full subject specifications should, therefore, be available in September 2014 for first teaching in September 2015 in all the subjects we have mentioned except languages, where first teaching will not be until September 2016. We believe that is ample time for teachers to prepare.

On the point about English and maths going through the curriculum, spelling, punctuation and grammar are worth 5% of marks in history, geography and English literature, and we have increased that to 20% in English language. In science, we are making sure that maths is much more prevalent.