Education Bill

Baroness Howe of Idlicote Excerpts

Wednesday 13th July 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote]

My Lords, I am also one of those who think it pretty important that the curriculum is seen to be independent of Government. I am thinking about the future of what is planned. It is said that the QCDA may well not have been the most successful of bodies, but it did a pretty adequate job nevertheless. We do not have any clear idea where it is going, but one is told and one hopes that some of the bodies will be transferred to other organisations. If the advisory body that will be giving advice to the Government as and when required—this is important—it should be much more available on an independent basis to the emerging range of academies. There will be a need for good independent advice. I am inclined to support all these amendments, but will bear in mind what the Minister says in his reply about plans that will be seen to be more satisfactory to the Committee.

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood]

My Lords, I am happy to reassure my noble friend Lord Peston that philosophy occasionally plays a part in schools. I could take him to a couple of primary schools not six miles from here where it is argued by the head teachers that it improves behaviour in the playground. However, that is a separate matter.

On the amendments before us, it is important that we get this matter right one way or the other. I do not accept the connection to 1935, and nor does my noble colleague who proposed the amendment, but if you look at the argument and the tussle going on in Scotland at the moment over the history curriculum then you will pause and have thoughts about where decisions are finally made and on what basis. There is an issue here.

Two things are clear. First, in the end the Secretary of State has the responsibility to make the decision. That is the current decision and I rest content with that. Secondly, though, the Secretary of State, however clever, will need advice. That advice is of great interest to Members here and elsewhere. I would not propose going backwards and effectively reconstituting the QCDA. We have been there and done that, and there were problems; let us think new thoughts. My own inclination as a time-served academic is that when the Secretary of State publishes changes to the curriculum, he or she publishes, as a good academic would, a series of footnotes and references to the advice sought, who gave it, to whom it was given, what the advice was and whether it was well evidenced. That would give me much greater confidence than setting up a board.

There is no final expert opinion on what should be in a curriculum. The risk for the QCDA and any successor would be an assumption that there was a right answer. There is not; there are nuances and leanings in different directions. In the end, that should be a matter for the Secretary of State to take a view on, but we need to know what the advice was so that we can protest if necessary.

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[Lord Hill of Oareford]

The point on the funding agreement is the one that I mentioned to my noble friend Lord Willis, which is that the agreement specifies that academies will provide a broad and balanced curriculum that includes English, maths and science. I will need to follow up on the point about creationism and write to the noble Baroness explaining what the mechanism is to prevent that happening. It is prevented and I will make that clear in a letter.

On that point, I would now ask the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, to withdraw the amendment.

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote]

Could we all have a copy of the letter explaining how creationism is prevented being taught?

[Baroness Hughes of Stretford]

I thank the Minister for his response and all noble Lords for their contributions to this important issue. The point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Willis, is extremely important and reflects one of the constant challenges in the Bill. We are debating proposals for change, many of which will not apply if the brave new world in which every school is an academy comes into being. It is an issue that I want to raise later in relation to admissions. In response to the Minister’s offer to provide a letter specifically in relation to creationism, perhaps it could be sent to all noble Lords so as to address the broader question raised by my noble friend Lady Morris of Yardley. Precisely what control does the Secretary of State or anyone else have over other potentially unwanted developments in the curriculum at an academy? It might be some other obscure and unusual development, so it would be good to know what controls are in place.

The Minister acknowledged the point that decision and accountability rests with the Secretary of State, and I perfectly accept that. The point at issue here is the process that leads up to that. The Minister has said that the Secretary of State, not the QCDA or some replacement for it—none of us is defending any particular body; we are talking about the process in principle—would have responsibility not only for the final decision but for the process of consultation. While the Minister has given some assurances that the Secretary of State will consult with the three groups that the QCDA now has to consult—the local authorities, governing bodies and teachers—beyond that, the parameters of the review will be determined by the Secretary of State and not by an independent body. Therefore, any academics which the Secretary of State chooses to include in the process of review beyond those three groups can simply be those academics which support the view that the Secretary of State starts off with. While it may be of some assurance that the written submissions may be published at the end of the process, it will be too late for someone with alternative views to be consulted.

Officials sent round a note on how the new process would work. I do not know if every Member received it, but my noble friend and I did. It states that beyond those three groups which have to be consulted on a statutory basis, the Secretary of State will,

“need to give notice of the proposal to any other persons with whom he thinks it would be desirable to consult”.

The difference that we can all recognise is that at the moment the range of additional people is decided by an independent body, not the Secretary of State who has to make the final decision. That is a crucial difference.

There is another crucial difference at the end of that process. Whereas the QCDA at present must arrange for a full report to be published, the advice that we are given by officials is that,

“After the consultation has ended, the Secretary of State will consider the responses and publish a summary of the views expressed and a draft of the regulations”

that he wants to bring forward. In other words, it is again in the gift of the Secretary of State to decide what to publish and what to reveal about what was said during the consultation process. That is not an acceptable process in this day and age, and there needs to be some division in terms of the independence of the consultation, the analysis, the recommendations and the final decision of the Secretary of State. We may return to this matter on Report but, for now, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

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[Lord Peston]

In supporting my noble friend, I start by placing this whole problem in a proper context. A five year-old going for the first time to school this autumn has a life expectancy of 85 or maybe 95 years. The thought that you can really tell them about the world in which they will pursue their working lives is rather difficult. In my younger days as an economist in the economics of education, I wrote a number of papers about relating education and what should be in education to the needs of the economy. I did not realise that they were rubbish at the time that I published them but it was obvious that they were rubbish not many years afterwards. Those days have somewhat gone, although they did not hold me back in my career.

The central point about what careers advice will have to focus on is this long period—most of which, from the point of view of the economy, is difficult or even impossible to forecast. The advice given must really concentrate on that aspect of the matter. That means that it must overwhelmingly be professional.

If I may move into anecdote mode, after I had left the LSE as a lecturer to become a professor, one of my old friends who was still a lecturer said to me, “One of the students has just been to see me. He is thinking of dropping out of his degree because he has a pop group. What advice would you have given him?”. I said, “Get your degree first and then possibly think about the pop group”. He said, “I gave him the same advice and he more or less told me to drop dead”. The student's name was Mick Jagger. That is a very good example of why giving casual, off-the-cuff careers advice to people is not the path to go down. That does not mean that the professionals can get it exactly right, but I am certain that my noble friend is right to emphasise that careers advice requires a very subtle expertise, because it is not easy to get over to people how complicated their whole lives and choice of careers will be.

Another aspect of this has always troubled me. Our young people are marvellous and lots of them are incredibly talented— particularly in the arts. We produce marvellous young actors, musicians, and so on. Our problem is that the demand for such people is—and, I guess, always will be—less than the available supply. One reason why we require not merely experts in our careers service but people with a human touch is that they must explain to people, “If you insist on going down that path—and I do not want to stop you—I ought to tell you that you will be competing against other people with enormous talent. Are you sure that that is the risky option that you want to take”. That only reinforces my noble friend's view that we cannot let amateurs take over the service. Among amateurs, we must include teachers. That includes university teachers, although we are not talking about them at the moment. Essentially, my noble friend is pressing the Minister on the point that we need a commitment to a fully professional careers advice service covering a great range of areas. We must find funds to support that service; we cannot leave it to the school itself.

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote]

I am certainly in sympathy with everything that has been said on this subject. It takes me back quite a long way to the Sex Discrimination and Equal Pay Acts, in which education was one of the areas covered. We spent quite a lot of time encouraging teachers in girls’ schools to take a more proactive role in opening up ideas of different careers for the girls than was the tradition. I am sad to say that there is still quite a gap there. On the comment made about teachers not being adequate to do that job, it would not be a bad idea as part of their training if, periodically, they had to take a job for a while in the real world to see what are the practices here and now.

In engineering, all these years later, there is a dearth of girls prepared to take on that career. It depends to some extent on the people they see out there in the real world. If not many have made it to the top of their career, are running things and are looked up to by the rest of the engineering world, they are not as likely to go down that route. I hope that we will address that aspect.

I hope that my noble friend Lord Low will soon speak to his amendment. On the responsibility for special educational needs, I entirely agree with him that there is an enormous need to start that process early—incidentally, that is true for practically all girls. It is interesting to note that the Equality and Human Rights Commission makes the point by stating that a quarter of children in primary school want to go on to higher education. Among girls, more than 80 per cent have that aspiration. If they have it already, at least it should be kept going by giving them examples of the many areas where their skills would be needed. There is clearly a role for governors here. They have a role to play in this already, so this is not providing a new one because it is all part of what needs to be made available to pupils. I am certain that parents in the local area would take that view.

One other area I want to stress is that of the role of the universities themselves. Many of them already send their students, voluntarily of course, particularly into schools where the aspiration among pupils to go on to higher education is not high. I am sure that the Government will be pleased to know that that sort of advice does not cost very much, but it is very good practice for the students themselves and helpful to the aspirations of the pupils.

[Baroness Wall of New Barnet]

I support most of the amendments in the group and I want to focus in particular on careers advice, on which many other noble Lords have already led. I agree totally with everyone who has spoken that unless careers advice is independent, it is very worrying. I hope that the Minister will consider whether Ofsted should include as part of its assessment of the effectiveness of a school how well it provides careers advice. It would not be an unusual process for Ofsted to get involved in. Although I agree with my noble friend Lord Peston that at the age of five you do not know what you are going to do, in this day and age people start taking an interest at a much younger age.

An area of concern has been raised by a number of employers who I have been talking to, along with a number of colleges. Recently I visited Newcastle College and North Lindsey College in Scunthorpe for Training 2000. What those colleges said was music to my ears. Although some careers advice is okay, a lot is obviously inadequate. But the principal at Newcastle College said that when she was a young girl—it was probably a while ago—no one had ever talked to her at school what it would mean if she went down a certain career path: how much would she earn and what would be her prospects going forward? Perhaps we have stayed away from those questions as well. For me, she made a telling point because, whether we like it or not, they are keen to know if they will have money to spend.

Through Semta I have been working with a careers adviser at BAE Systems, which has a programme in place in which representatives talk to young people about what it means to be an engineer and explain that it is not the dirty job that everyone thinks it is. There is a slide presentation to describe the earning potential at each stage of someone’s career progression. Some people might flinch at that, but in the real world of 2011-12, it is absolutely where young people are. It is the kind of information that is not always readily available. You can follow a pathway through looking at sector skills councils, but what is not often linked to it is the thought that, “If I work really hard and progress from this level to that level, what will that mean for me going forward in the sense of my future career?”.

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[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I entirely agree what with the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, just said. I would have said it myself if I could have said it as well. It is crucial that children learn these things at school. It is daffy to prescribe that individual items should be learnt. One should look at the outcome. The only sensible way of looking at the outcome is inspection. This Bill is setting out to destroy that aspect of inspection rather than building on it, so I am entirely with the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, in my concerns. The only other thing I would like to say is that this is a great subject to be debating in this room, under a picture of a PSHE lesson.

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote]

This whole business of PSHE is almost written on one’s brain because the argument for it has come up again and again in all the education Bills. Relationships are so crucial in everything that we do. I am very much of the view that it certainly does not need to be prescribed and in the Bill. I go along with the approach of my noble friend Lord Sutherland on this. Nevertheless, the whole area is crucially important.

I wish the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, was here because when the previous Government introduced citizenship lessons, there was at last great hope that children would be introduced to the business of parenting—not just getting on and understanding their difficult relationships with their parents but actually what a child needs: love, support and caring. That never happened; it got shunted around to different lessons, if it ever took place at all. I would not at all mind having an inspection with that written into it: how is it doing and is it increasing the happiness and the general well-being of our children?

Returning briefly to the business of teaching religion, and what was said just now, it is crucial for all of us to know about the different religions in the world—and none. It is essential that we accept and know and are tolerant about this. One of the horrors in the rest of the world is that that form of tolerance does not exist. So we must do whatever we can in that direction. However, I hope that in the process we are not going to end up with ways that actually restrict the excellent work that many of our religious schools are doing. I am not thinking of these amendments but perhaps some that will come subsequently.

[Baroness Perry of Southwark]

My Lords, in response to the query raised by the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, about inspections, as I understand it, Ofsted will continue to conduct inspections in academies and other schools as part of national surveys of particular aspects of education. I rise simply to say to our two Ministers that surely the issue of PSHE would be top of the list of priorities for Ofsted in terms of a national survey of what is actually happening. Its report would tell us what is really going on in our schools across the country.