Schools: Gardening

Baroness Fookes Excerpts

Monday 24th April 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

The noble Baroness is quite right about the therapeutic benefits of gardening for children. I know that the RHS—I pay tribute to the noble Baroness for her ambassadorship—has a great campaign in schools for this. That campaign now has more than 32,000 schools and organisations engaged, including 68% of primaries and 78% of secondaries, reaching 6 million children. As far as Ofsted is concerned, we do not want to load it up with too many specific, narrow requirements, but school inspectors consider the breadth and depth of the school curriculum and its impact on children. Inspectors will note where a school’s use of outdoor space has a positive impact. They also expect schools to provide rich and varied extra-curricular activities, which may well include gardening.

[Baroness Fookes (Con)]

My Lords, while warmly endorsing the RHS campaign, I would make another point to my noble friend. Could he encourage teachers, particularly career teachers, to look favourably upon the many interesting educational developments that come from studying horticulture at a much greater level? There are many of these amazing careers open, but very often we find that teachers downgrade them. That annoys me enormously.

[Lord Nash]

My noble friend is right that there are many good careers in horticulture, landscape gardening, gardening et cetera. We invested heavily in enhancing the careers provision in schools through our Careers & Enterprise Company. I know that this is something it has looked at, and that many schools take this quite seriously. Indeed, at Cambridge special school in Hammersmith pupils do a BTEC in land-based studies using city farm space attached to the school. This has been very beneficial to many graduates’ careers.