Education: English Baccalaureate

Baroness Garden of Frognal Excerpts

Monday 21st January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, there has indeed been a decline in the proportion of pupils studying design and technology, but great changes have been made to the subject. As I mentioned in response to a Question last week, we have created a different and additional subject called food preparation and nutrition, which has attracted 46,000 entries. It was part of the old design and technology course. We have worked with the James Dyson Foundation, the Design and Technology Association and the Royal Academy of Engineering on the content of the design and technology curriculum. However, in the spirit of collaboration with the noble Lord, I shall quote an eminent left-wing academic on the sociology of education, Professor Michael Young of UCL, who says that social justice demands that children from low-income backgrounds have as much access to knowledge as their advantaged peers.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, I will follow on from the question put by the noble Lord, Lord Black. Schools are currently rated and funded largely on academic criteria; that is, EBacc, GCSE, A-level and university entrance. However, the country is facing an acute shortage of people with creative and technical skills. What are the Government doing to incentivise schools to encourage not just their EBacc pupils but those who are technically and creatively skilled, to ensure that they fulfil their potential?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, we have put great emphasis on the technical aspects of education through apprenticeships and T-levels. We have also carried out substantial reforms to technical education and the qualifications that go with it. In the past two years we have introduced technical award entries, which are designed to be more practical in their teaching, while in 2017-18 some 194,000 pupils entered for these vocational subjects. They include practical studies such as business, which had 29,000 applicants, while information communication technology had 51,000.