Education: English Baccalaureate Certificate

Baroness Perry of Southwark Excerpts

Monday 14th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Perry of Southwark]

My Lords, I congratulate and thank the noble Earl for having inaugurated this debate with such a stimulating speech. I yield to no one in my love of the cultural subjects that he has described. I fear that we have here a degree of confusion between the EBacc and the English baccalaureate certificate. Partly due to confusion in the way in which the Government have put this issue out to consultation, it is very difficult to see the difference between the two. As I understand it, though, the English baccalaureate certificate will eventually spread across all subjects, while the EBacc will be a reward for students who perform at a particularly high level in the range of five subjects that the noble Earl has already described. The Government’s consultation says,

“to ensure the benefits of this more rigorous approach to the English Baccalaureate subjects are felt across the whole curriculum, we will ask Ofqual to consider how these new higher standards can be used … for judging and accrediting”,

subjects at age 16 beyond the EBacc to replace current GCSEs. I hope that I am right, and that the Minister will be able to reassure me, that the baccalaureate certificate will eventually spread, although I agree that it is a very slow programme, across all subjects.

I return to the purpose of the change in the examinations away from GCSEs towards the baccalaureate certificate, and I welcome the urge towards a new and more rigorous kind of examination. Examinations cast a very long shadow over the whole of secondary school education, and the way in which pupils are going to be examined at age 16 determines very much the pattern of education that they will receive in the years before that. Finding a new set of examinations that genuinely go for rigour and try to assess, as Anthony Seldon has put it, the ability of the pupils rather than that of the teachers is wholly to be welcomed. It is important that students have the opportunity to develop real scholarship and independent thought but too much about the GCSEs that we have had has not encouraged that. They have encouraged a simple regurgitating of factual material that pupils have been given. The development of scholarship, God-given curiosity and a real sense of independent thought—which these new examinations are designed to achieve—will be very important.

I commend the Government for having commissioned Darren Henley to write a report on what they have described as “cultural subjects”, because we know how very important those are. I make a final plea—that we should talk not only about the arts and cultural subjects but also about those young people with a passion for the technical and vocational curriculum as well.