Education Bill

Debate between Lord Quirk and Lord McAvoy

Wednesday 20th July 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord McAvoy]

I rise very briefly, just for a few minutes, to speak on Amendment 116. When the noble Baroness, Lady Flather, was moving the amendment, I felt I reached a new understanding with her, seeing as we have previously disagreed. I was even starting to think that I had a soul mate—I will withdraw the word “soul” in case that offends her. She said so much in the first part of her speech, but I will deal with that secondly. She rather spoilt it in the second part of her speech by homing in on faith schools. Although she made it clear, as usual, that she was not talking about Church of England schools, I had a bit of bother trying to fathom out which particular faith school she was on about. I am sure I will figure it out at some point. It would be totally invidious if separate criteria applied to faith schools, and I am afraid it shows deep paranoia and suspicion about Catholic schools that I just do not get.

Being positive and concentrating on the first half of her speech, it was brilliant in trying to get across how much all schools can contribute to community cohesion. I see schools I am most aware of—outside England’s jurisdiction, but nevertheless, I have knowledge of schools in England as well—and all schools getting involved in fair trade and fund raising for Africa and going out to Africa as part of various voluntary organisations. There are parent-teacher organisations that dig deep into the community because they get the parents involved. All of this goes back to the school and feeds back to the community. If there is any discrimination or any lack of importance given by the Government to community cohesion, the noble Baroness has highlighted that that is a weakness. Where it is going well, it is going very well. I also notice a bit of local rivalry which helps because if one school sees that another school has raised £2,000 or £3,000 for aid to Africa, that is its target. That is friendly rivalry, not contentious rivalry. Anything that brings back into consideration by the Government the contribution of all schools to community cohesion, the sooner the better.

[Lord Quirk]

My Lords, in a spirit of attempting to clarify rather than add to the duties of Ofsted, the proposers of Amendment 117 hope that it will find favour with the Committee and with the Minister. Indeed, we can see no reason why it should not, for this minimalist, one-word addition to the Bill very much runs with the grain of the clause in which we propose to embed it.

For those who may say, not unreasonably, why not add also other terse desiderata, such as mathematical, musical or physical, we say, no, linguistic is in a class of its own. The social and cultural development of pupils depends critically on their command of language and the interpersonal relations that promote such development proceed above all else on successful and confident facility with language. In other words, the social and cultural development already in the clause actually entails linguistic development. So manifestly true is this that it might well be felt that adding “linguistic” is superfluous, but it is not. Rather, its omission from the clause should be viewed as a glaring oversight, so much do the other two—social and cultural—depend on it. Language is what supremely distinguishes the human species, giving us uniquely the facility to talk about the past, speculate about the future and analyse the present.

This is why Ofsted's attention needs to be specifically drawn to the monitoring of linguistic development, not only for the sake of the unfortunate minority of youngsters with pathological problems in speech and language, nor for the sake of the much bigger minorities who come from non-English speaking homes or from homes which are non-speaking, and in which conversation in any language is in short supply. Our amendment has all these in mind but we propose it for the sake of the school community as a whole, for whom rich, rapid and early language development is the key to their whole education and subsequent careers. Moreover, the richer their English, the likelier it is that their interest—social and cultural—will reach out beyond English to the social, cultural and, indeed, vocational opportunities to be found in the realm of foreign language learning.