Education: Development of Excellence

Earl of Clancarty Excerpts

Thursday 18th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Clancarty]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, for giving us the opportunity to participate in this important debate. Excellence in schools should mean excellence for all students, from kindergarten through to when the child leaves school and even beyond. It should not be about the excellence of a small group, but about recognising and developing each individual student’s potential, of stimulating their interest in the world and teaching them the benefits and joy of learning to learn.

We should be developing an educational system to fulfil that goal of good education for all children. However, this Government’s new education policy needs to be understood within the context of not only the recently announced changes or the budgetary cuts that are affecting resources and putting a strain on teaching, particularly outside the core subjects, but the austerity programme as a whole. For example, cuts to libraries and cuts to the arts mean a reduction in museum visits and outreach programmes and, not least, the level of hardship that many parents now face means that they often do not have the time to support at home their children’s education. It is disgraceful that the increasingly necessary breakfast clubs should be so reliant on the private company Kellogg’s, FareShare and other food charities.

With my interest in the arts, I am worried about their fragile position within secondary education. Huge concern has been expressed by the arts community over the arts not being a core subject within the proposed English baccalaureate certificate, as Darren Henley’s report, Cultural Education in England, recommended earlier this year. However, this is predictable for a system that is not designed to be inclusive in the first place. The EBC will favour those who are good at exams at the expense, once again, of everyone else. This is potentially a return to the bad old days of an educational system almost entirely geared to that one exam in each subject. The new system could be even worse because it does not allow for resits. I am worried about the proposed loss of the modular structure which suits many students, including children with dyslexia and others who are not good at exams, but allows for the in-depth pursuit of individual projects.

The Government are doing one good thing, stating that only one exam board should be responsible for a subject. But what is the thinking behind the new EBC? This brings us back to excellence but excellence in the very narrow sense. The EBC is designed surely to provide an exclusive pool of talent of perceived excellence required by future employers. Chris Keates of the NASUWT gets it right when she says that this new system is,

“entirely driven by political ideology rather than a genuine desire on the part of the Coalition Government to reform the examination system in the best interests of children and young people”.

We should not be educating our children for their future employers’ sake, but for their own sake. The two things are not identical.

I would like to see these proposals scrapped before their intended introduction in 2017, but if that is not to be the case, I hope very much that Labour will make a firm commitment to reverse these measures when they come to power and pledge to improve our secondary education system in a better direction.