Schools: Well-being and Personal and Social Needs

Baroness Jones of Whitchurch Excerpts

Thursday 14th June 2012 Lords Chamber

Moved By

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch]

That this House takes note of the contribution of schools to the well-being and personal and social needs of children and young people.

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch]

My Lords, I am very pleased to have the opportunity today to introduce this important debate, and I do so in the knowledge that there are a number of noble Lords on all sides of the House with very impressive records of campaigning on these issues. A number of them are here today and I look forward to learning from their contributions in due course.

I also approach this debate with a sense of sadness, because I genuinely feel that the Government opposite have lost their way on this agenda. Their concentration on education structures and exam results has overshadowed the wider contribution that schools make to producing well rounded, confident and thoughtful young people. As a result, the post-war consensus about the wider purpose of education is unravelling.

The White Paper that preceded the Education Act 1944 stated:

“The government’s purpose is to ensure for children a happier childhood and a better start in life and to provide means for all of developing the various talents with which they are endowed”.

Over the decades, through many iterations, these same principles have underpinned the provision of education in this country. However, if we judge the current Government by what they do rather than by what they say, the wider social, personal and health issues of children are no longer a priority. I would go so far as to say that, rather than our education policy being determined by the ideology of one man, there needs to be a national debate about the purpose of education to allow parents, teachers and young people themselves to raise their concerns and to seek to develop a 21st century consensus about the role of education.

While I would be the first to acknowledge that the previous Government did not get everything right, I am proud of our educational achievements. There was a sustained period of improvement in education outcomes in the UK from 1997 to 2010. At the same time, we recognised that pupils’ low achievement was only partly determined by their education. Factors such as levels of poverty, parental support, a stable home life and a lack of community aspiration all played their part. That is why we developed the Every Child Matters strategy. This sought to integrate children’s services so that every child had the right to be happy, safe, achieve economic well-being, enjoy life and make a positive contribution. This vision achieved impressive outcomes in tackling poverty, providing early intervention for Sure Start, improving nutrition and exercise in schools, providing programmes to tackle bullying and low self-esteem and providing improved sex education, to give just a few examples.

We took the view then, as now, that you cannot expect schools to do everything. To be successful there needs to be a comprehensive approach to children with schools and communities working together. Unfortunately this is not a philosophy that is shared by the current Government. As a result, many of the successful initiatives have now been undermined. In his speeches and his policy initiatives, Michael Gove has made it clear that the No.1 and only purpose of schools is to drive up performance in exam results. In fact he has gone as far as to admit that he can be criticised for having too strong a focus on testing. His view is that asking schools to play their part in addressing the wider social problems of their pupils gets in the way of rigorous educational achievement. As a result, policies that were proven to be working and have a positive effect on the well-being and learning capacity of young people have been dismantled, or become optional extras to be implemented when money and time allows. The starkest example of this is the Government’s decision to remove the ring-fenced funding for Sure Start centres, which has resulted in hundreds up and down the country being closed or merged.

However, the changes to the curriculum and school environment are equally far reaching. Let me give an example. Yesterday I tabled an Oral Question on nutritional standards in school food. Following the turkey twizzler scandal and Jamie Oliver’s excellent exposé of the poor quality of school food, the School Food Trust was set up to prepare nutritional standards that would underpin provision in all schools. The outcome was a great success. School food was transformed. There was increasing evidence that it was improving concentration and behaviour, and uptake increased. This Government, in their wisdom, decided that academies and free schools would not be obliged to adopt the nutritional standards. Now, not surprisingly, there is evidence that these schools are selling chocolates, crisps and snacks rather than healthy food; so all the health benefits of eating quality food will be undermined as more and more schools opt to become academies.

What about another example? The previous Government sought to tackle the growing rise of obesity and lack of exercise by setting up a comprehensive network of school sports partnerships, with a requirement for young people to have two, rising to five, hours of exercise a week. All the reports were that the partnerships were a great success, and that a generation of young people were now being given the opportunity to have regular exercise. The first thing this Government did was cut the funding for the sports partnerships, and although some funding has now been returned after a national outcry the current provision is a shadow of its former self, with many posts lost and many of the initiatives gone.

We believe that schools have an important role to play in tackling poor physical health and in supporting those with behavioural difficulties or mental health problems in school. We believe that by addressing these issues we will improve the capacity of children to study and learn. It is not either/or; the two things must go together. Similarly, there is a growing weight of evidence that many young children start school without the basic skills to learn. Poor parenting means that they do not have the vocabulary to take part in lessons and they do not know how to dress themselves or to hold a pencil. Schools have no choice but to deal with these issues before they can progress with the formal stages of learning. Assuming, for example, that every child is sufficiently school-ready that they can start to learn a poem by heart at age five just adds to the list of impossible demands with which teachers struggle daily.

Incidentally, do I detect something of a schism between David Cameron and his Education Ministers? The Prime Minister has been very vocal in identifying that children’s well-being is a key priority. It is a commitment shared by the World Health Organisation and the United Nations Children’s Fund. Since we are languishing somewhere near the bottom of UNICEF’s list of 21 developed countries with regard to children’s well-being, he seems to be on the right track. Yet Ofsted is no longer required to measure it, and both Michael Gove and Nick Gibb have described it as peripheral or a distraction from the core purpose of academic education, rather than recognising it as a foundation on which to build achievement. I look forward to hearing from the Minister whether he shares the views of his colleagues in the department or whether he agrees with the Prime Minister that schools should play an important role in contributing to children’s well-being.

I also want to say something about the fate of the specific PSHE courses which my noble friend Lady Massey has championed for so long. There are key elements of PSHE which it is vital for young people to learn about and discuss to prepare themselves for adult life. Learning about issues such as relationships, self-esteem, how to counteract bullying, personal health and finance, parenting skills and sex education should not be optional add-ons to the curriculum; they are essential life skills. I know that these have also been pursued by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, on the Lib Dem Benches, which is why we were so disappointed that she felt unable to support my noble friend Lady Massey’s amendment to make PSHE compulsory during the passage of the Academies Bill.

Since that time, my noble friend Lady Massey and the Minister have had a well rehearsed stand-off on the lack of progress in the review of PSHE education. I have to say to the noble Lord that this is not good enough. Most parents expect and want these sensitive issues to be covered in a systematic way within the school curriculum, so perhaps he will be able to give us some good news on this score if nothing else when he responds to the debate today.

We all want young people to achieve their maximum academic potential, and in the future a Labour Government will create an office of educational achievement that will provide a genuinely independent clearing house for research to learn from international comparisons and share best practice among teachers. We also believe that there are wider and softer social skills which young people should learn in school that do not have to be measured by exam results. It is a view shared in a recent Work Foundation report, which identified that the number of young people not in employment, education or training continues to rise with 954,000, or one in six now falling into this category. Its report identifies a lack of soft skills such as communication or customer service being increasingly quoted as a reason why these young people are unable to find work. These views are also echoed by employers who despair that young people are so ill prepared for the world of work. John Cridland, the CBI director-general, has criticised the Government’s obsession with GCSE grades, arguing that it encourages short-term cramming and frustrates teachers because it stops them delivering an inspirational classroom experience.

We share the view that good teaching by enthusiastic, motivated teachers lies at the heart of effective learning. In the end it is the teachers not the lessons that people remember most about their schooldays. That is why it is important to value the workforce in a way that is often overlooked by this Government and to empower it to be more creative in the way lessons are taught. Creativity should be at the centre of school life for teachers and young people, but increasingly schools are failing to nurture the creative talents of young people and we are losing global market share in the crucial creative industry sector as a result. As Steve Jobs of Apple said so eloquently:

“The Macintosh turned out so well because the people working on it were musicians, artists, poets and historians who also happened to be excellent computer scientists”.

Not all creativity can be measured by exams and not every child wants to sit an exam in a creative subject that they enjoy. There has to be space within the school timetable for children to pursue wider interests such as music, drama and art. However, the reality is that these subjects are being squeezed from the curriculum. We believe that our approach to joined-up children’s services, including schools, was the right approach in the past and our childcare commission, bringing together shadow Cabinet members from across the departments, will explore how we can learn from the past and provide even more effective integrated children’s services for the future.

In this context, we will continue to make the case for a wider role for education in contributing to the well-being, personal and social needs of young people, and for nurturing their creativity, confidence and life skills. We believe that this is what parents, children and employers want, and it is what educationists tell us is the bedrock of effective learning. If Michael Gove would join us in a national debate about the purpose of education, perhaps in time we would persuade him, too.

In the mean time, I am pleased to have had the opportunity to share our concerns and to give the Minister the opportunity to distance himself from the hard line of some of his departmental colleagues and to endorse our perspective of the importance of a wider well-being, social and personal role for schools. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch]

My Lords, I do not intend to detain the House much further. As has been said, we have had excellent contributions from around the Chamber, although I am sorry that the Minister was so unsupported by contributions from his own Back Benches.

As expected, the Minister has made a sterling effort to defend the Government’s record and intent. However, I fundamentally agree with my noble friend Lady Morris, who argued very wisely that it is easy to make reassuring noises about the Government’s intent but the lack of structure on which to hang the policies, and the lack of Ministers vocally championing some of these issues, is sending signals to schools that some of these issues are not really valued. Perhaps the Minister could take that message back.

Ultimately, we are arguing about the balance between well-being and educational attainment. We have a slightly different sense of that balance from the Government; we disagree on it and over the months to come we will continue to try to persuade the Government that they have got that wrong.

In a more positive spirit of cross-party co-operation, I will very happily volunteer to join forces with the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, to campaign for free school meals for all primary schoolchildren, and I can see a campaign developing from that.

I thank all noble Lords for their contributions from around the Chamber. This debate will be ongoing.

Motion agreed.