Covid-19: Children

Lord Winston Excerpts

Thursday 17th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as an adviser to Norton, the internet security company, on children’s security with software during the pandemic. My wife is involved with PaJeS, the association of Jewish schools, which has a very large number of pupils, particular in Liverpool, Manchester and London. I also work on outreach with Imperial College, where I champion visits to various schools. As I tried to tell the noble Baroness during the Queen’s Speech debate—I think she was not in the Chamber at the time—I have spoken to more than 50,000 schoolchildren over the year during my visits.

Unfortunately, I felt a mixture of sadness and almost anger when I heard the noble Lord, Lord Hannan. The schools I visit, in coastal districts and parts of Yorkshire, Derbyshire, the West Country, the north-east and the north-west of England do not have a cricket pitch and they certainly do not have a captain of cricket. What they have is something very much more valuable—they still have potential. It is not a question of ambition; it is a question of aspiration. They have ambition, but they do not have aspiration, because they do not see the aspiration possible. That has been a real problem during the pandemic.

The problems we face in schools include, first, the limitation of social interaction, which has been a really important issue. The loss of learning has led to teenagers worrying that they have fallen behind. That is particularly true, of course, before the teens, with very young children who have stopped managing to see their friends, perhaps for the first time. For some children, that has made a very big difference to their psychology. Of course, with teenagers, to come back to what my noble friend Lady Blower said, it is not a question of cricket; it is about not being able to purchase sanitary equipment for the beginning of their becoming women, when they are probably most embarrassed. There is clearly a significant increase in mental health problems during GCSE and at A-level at the moment in schools. Teachers are telling me that a great deal.

Secondly, the loss of learning has had a varied impact. It has not been at all consistent across the country, but what is a problem is how uncertainty has affected children’s aspiration. Little things such as wearing masks and washing hands before meals, and the need for teachers to organise that, has been a massive burden, which is often not recognised. The behaviour and attitude in schools is also therefore part of that and that has been reflected in the health concerns of staff and parents, and in what is happening at home and during travel.

I want to emphasise that perhaps not enough has been said about the well-being of teachers, particularly heads of schools. It is critical that something is done to recognise that this is an enormous issue. The UK has celebrated the dedication of NHS workers in an extraordinary way. We have poured money into the health service. But look at schools: they have been almost totally ignored and their leaders have been ignored. We have gone out in the streets to clap the NHS workers; we do not clap our teachers and it is something we need to think about. We need to value teachers above all. It is a very important profession. We risk the loss of staff and we know that many head teachers are beginning to give up that job.

I have a suggestion for the noble Baroness, for whom I have great respect. She has a serious concern for the difficult job she has to do and I really appreciate that. Everything I have seen of her ever since she entered this House, and now as a Minister, I find very impressive, so I hope she will understand that we need, much as the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, said, to find solutions together. First, we need to find additional funding. There is no alternative to that. It is needed to support the well-being of students and teachers and to help many schools. The greatest impact on learning would be to fund additional staff to enable smaller classes, especially in core subjects.

It has been suggested today that we should have longer school days, and perhaps even extended terms. That would be a disaster. It is not what teachers want. I have not found a single head teacher who agrees with that proposal. They do not see it as an advantage, because they think that schoolchildren are already exhausted and that is something they want to avoid. For secondary schools, a first good step by the Government would be to limit payments to the exam boards for assessments that the schools are now doing and ring-fence the money saved for additional support.

We need to think about examinations very carefully. Of course, we cannot do without A-levels in the present structure because of the need for further education and higher education. However, I do not see the value of GCSEs at the present time. Why do we need them at the moment, when schools are under massive pressure and are suddenly being asked to follow a curriculum that is constantly changing, as has already been mentioned? It is not reasonable.

Finally, I want quickly to ask some specific questions.

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

I am afraid that the noble Lord is over the time limit, which is five minutes for this debate.

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

I am about to come to my final sentence, if I may. Simply, what support is being given to improving virtual learning in schools? I have many questions about that. I have already sent the Minister my comments in a note, so I hope she can answer my questions. I will write to her again asking for the answers.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Winston Excerpts

Wednesday 12th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, I join my noble friend Lord Griffiths in his lovely remarks about the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Portsmouth and his wonderful work. We wish him all the very best for the future. I also welcome our two maiden speakers. I declare an interest as an employee of Imperial College, where I research aspects of human development. I also supervise PhD students who measure the impact that universities can have on encouraging the aspirations of school students. As the university president’s envoy for outreach, I visit and speak to school students all over the United Kingdom, wherever requested. This has, sadly, been mostly remotely this year.

The gracious Speech contains laudable hopes to improve education and we congratulate the Government on the emphasis on early years, but there are major gaps if we are to offer better opportunity. Each week, my own outreach includes visits to some of the most deprived parts of England, including the coastal towns, the south coast, the West Country, South Yorkshire and the edges of Derbyshire, the north-west and north-east. If you go to towns just 15 or 20 miles away from one of our greatest universities in the world, you see massive deprivation in East Anglia. There is no question that this hugely affects aspiration; there is no awareness at all of what children could achieve, and this applies to both further and higher education.

Many children in deprived Britain have no idea what their huge potential actually is. This is not because they have bad schools or teachers; on the contrary. Their background, environment and diet, their parents’ employment or lack of it, their housing—perhaps with a TV set but no books—and the squalor in which they often live lead to intellectual and social impoverishment which cannot be corrected by a few hours in schools, with teachers stretched beyond belief with administrative necessities, academic targets and assessments, and a national devotion to a prescribed curriculum. This may discourage attempts to enthuse children with a delight in learning. The best that some teachers can hope for is no disruption.

Achievement goes far beyond education but depends on the enrichment of society. If we want to change society and improve its health, behaviour and economy, we need to invest much more in primary education, when the brain is most plastic and ready to absorb all experience. If we do not inspire children to wonder and encourage joy at learning, we lose so many later. The Government have promised £4,000 per child in primary education and £5,000 per child in secondary. This is not merely inadequate for A-level courses; it is totally inadequate for the most important time of our lives—when we start formal education. It is all very well to commit to increase teachers’ starting salaries to £30,000 a year, but the rewards for undervalued teachers are insufficient to attract enough of even the most committed and able individuals. I know of many professionals who seriously consider dropping better paid jobs to teach, but retraining and inadequate financial rewards still prevent young families purchasing housing. We also need to attract far more male teachers into primary schools. Male role models are equally important as female ones.

The Government hope that the UK will become a science superpower and admit that too few women enter science. However, the great majority of those teaching science in primary schools have no science qualifications. Excellent teachers and role models though they are, most of them do not have a science degree and very few even have one A-level in science, so they are teaching in an unconfident way. This is particularly the case when it comes to one of the most important aspects of primary school, which is practical education, which attracts interest and has a lifelong effect on so many children.

In one primary school that I visited just before the pandemic, I did an experiment with 180 children, showing them how we could exhaust 20% of a gas from a glass bottle—the gas being oxygen—and create a partial vacuum. I will not go into the result of this experiment, but they loved it. When I asked those children what the commonest gas in the air around them was, most said “carbon dioxide”; some hesitantly said “hydrogen”—fortunately, that was not the case of course. Eventually a number said “oxygen” and, finally, one little boy put his hand up and rather tentatively said, “nitrogen?” Immediately, the science teacher shut him up and told him not to talk nonsense. Of course, the problem is, thereafter, what do you do in a school like that? I had a very gentle chat with that child before I left, but I could not say that the teacher was wrong.

We have gone through hard times and we must not leave the experience of education to a Gradgrind approach to facts. Education must engender a delight in learning, and it should not be a process but a journey to discover, to wonder and to delight.

International Women’s Day

Lord Winston Excerpts

Thursday 11th March 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Winston (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I do not deserve that very kind mention—even a remote mention—by either of the noble Baronesses, Lady Falkner or Lady Nicholson. In that debate last week I declared an interest in the Genesis Research Trust, which I am very fortunate to chair. It is a large research organisation that looks at the problems that women face related to reproduction.

I want to draw attention to women who miscarry. Some 880,000 babies are lost by miscarriage annually in the United Kingdom alone. This loss of life within has an impact that is much more serious than is generally understood. There is no funeral. Nobody refers to it or talks about it. Years ago, I remember just how frightened we were when my wife had a small bleed during pregnancy. Fortunately, the baby was safe. Often, women are admitted to hospital, where everybody is preoccupied with a more important medical condition. They are given an anaesthetic, the uterus is scraped out by a junior doctor and, because they are not “urgent” and are usually at the end of a long waiting list, they are alone and starved a long time. Then, sad and worried, they are released from hospital without explanation and told to try again, with no understanding of what has happened and no tests to see what is wrong. So often, I am afraid, general practitioners do not pay enough attention to this very common condition—some, of course, do, but many do not. This, of course, has been a problem during the pandemic, as some women who are greatly worried about their pregnancy get little information about the virus and whether it might affect their baby.

Furthermore, there is an issue with repeated miscarriage. This is more common when people are infertile. So often, little or no serious attempt at a diagnosis is made. Such women have a diagnosis attached to them of “unexplained infertility”, which, of course, is an excuse for no diagnosis at all. This leaves, at best, treatments such as IVF without a diagnosis. As good doctors affirm, treatment without a diagnosis, and no attempt to make one, is or leads to bad medicine. Because miscarriage is so common, pregnant women miscarrying are often treated with what seems like indifference.

All this increases the drive for them to seek private in vitro fertilisation. What women are never told is that even after six cycles of treatment by expensive IVF, the figures show that only 43% of women have a live baby—something never mentioned by the HFEA. That is after six cycles, and they may have had more than one miscarriage during that treatment.

Of course, the pandemic has had another effect. One in 10 couples suffer from infertility, and this is much more likely over the age of 38. Virtually all fertility treatment has been halted and IVF has been impossible in most cases. A crucial year has been lost. As they age, these women face a rapidly decreasing chance of having a baby.

I have great respect for the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, so it is a pleasure to pay her this tiny compliment. I think that the pandemic offers a real opportunity. When we revisit the structure of the NHS, as has been promised, may we learn from the pandemic and may the Government give much more consideration to the problems—these common, apparently trivial problems—that I emphasised. In view of the extra money that she announced for research, how much will be earmarked for diseases that women commonly experience during pregnancy?