Education: Development of Excellence

Lord Sutherland of Houndwood Excerpts

Thursday 18th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood]

My Lords, I also congratulate my noble friend Lady Perry, not least on an excellent and insightful opening speech, in which she laid out the whole agenda for us. Her reward is already with her—she has had a rich cornucopia of responses and I am sure that that will continue throughout the debate.

In his inspiring, if at times fanciful, play about Thomas More, “A Man for All Seasons”, Robert Bolt inserts the following exchange between More and his ambitious young supporter and—dare I say?—almost political adviser, Rich. More has just become Lord Chancellor, with all the power, pomp and patronage that that implied. Rich effectively fronts up and says, “Well, what’s in it for me?”. More looks at him carefully and says, “I think you should become a teacher”. Rich does not think that that is much of an answer for a bright young man like him with a big future ahead of him and a patron like the Lord Chancellor. He says, “Why, why, why?”. More’s response in the play—fanciful, I agree—is, “If you do that and if you do it well, you will know it, your pupils will know it and God will know it”.

You do not have to be a member of the Bishops’ Benches or even a twice-on-Sunday, card-carrying Christian believer to get the point. Teaching is a profession and a calling. This is something we have lost in our community. Whatever the reasons—and there are many—we have lost the sense of the noble calling of being a teacher and the instantiation into our education system of that delicate relationship between teacher and pupil. Standards in education will improve only as teachers are given the status and support that they appropriately should have.

Of course it is fanciful what More says—it is not always quite like that. As a supply teacher I once went to a school and was instructed, “Keep them quiet for six weeks”—not much of a vision of teaching. I have to say, however, that I did teach them some mathematics which would have been helpful in the Department for Transport recently. I used to say, “Show all your workings and make sure that your addition is correct”, and they got the message.

I turn to the role of the teacher and the way in which it has been interfered with. Most of us interfere. I own up to doing so as a former chief inspector of schools. There is a risk that we will all interfere. So let us have a division of labour: the teachers teach and the politicians, advisers, specialists, theorists and academics—and I am one—should facilitate that role. We need to ensure that that division remains in place.

I am encouraged by the policies of the previous Government. The noble Baroness, Lady Perry, paid tribute to the quality of the intake to the profession. We are in a position of facilitating, at least at that level. However, the facilitation should go well beyond that. It includes support in terms of freeing-up the teacher from an overintrusive national curriculum. I worry about religious education and sport education. There are ways of dealing with that, but that is for another occasion. An overintrusive national curriculum is a great danger and a constraint on this delicate relationship. However, we are moving in the right direction and there are good signs that the review of the national curriculum will produce helpful results. We have been here before, however, and everyone with a lobby interest queues up at the door of the office of the national curriculum and says, “Insert this”.

Ministers must resist that. There are temptations, as you grow in influence and power, to continue meddling and to think that you know best. Ministers: do not do this. There is good progress so far, but we will be watching. Make sure that the teachers have the facility and support to do what they do best.