Education: 11 to 16 Year-olds

Baroness Garden of Frognal Excerpts

Thursday 8th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, our committee proved that the curriculum is vastly overloaded with knowledge-based things, does not include enough digital or computing, and in a lot of schools the arts are completely neglected. Nor does it include life skills, so our young people are coming out without the skills they need for the future. So what urgent action will the Government take so that our children have a more enjoyable and much more useful school experience than they are currently having?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I appreciate how alluring it is to talk about some of the wider subjects the noble Baroness mentioned. As she knows, we are developing a cultural education plan that will be launched later this year, and I accept that things such as the IT curriculum maybe do not age as well as some other elements of the curriculum. But, in terms of the way in which we all learn, and children learn, the importance of putting down in our long-term memory a really rich knowledge base from which to apply those skills is critical, and we lose that at our peril.