Times Education Commission Report

Lord Aberdare Excerpts

Thursday 13th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, it is an unexpected pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Brixton, as I have been promoted one place up the batting order. Much of what I want to say has already been powerfully covered by other noble Lords, but I am afraid not yet by me. I will try not to be unnecessarily repetitive.

Education is a fundamental building block of our national infrastructure. To support and enhance our productivity, competitiveness and growth, we need people with the right skills, knowledge and aspirations to drive our economy and nurture our society. Only education can meet those needs, so it is disappointing that, as the noble Lord, Lord Baker, pointed out, education so often seems to take something of a back seat in relation to other policy areas, despite being so crucial to all of them.

The Times Education Commission, with its aim

“to examine Britain’s whole education system and consider its future in the light of the Covid-19 crisis, declining social mobility, new technology and the changing nature of work”,

is therefore greatly to be applauded, as is the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, in obtaining this debate. The report contains numerous ideas and recommendations which deserve serious consideration. I welcome its focus on the content of education—what the curriculum needs to deliver and how it should be assessed—more than on its structure and funding. I will focus on just a few of the commission’s specific recommendations which seem to me to be particularly important.

I will first consider the idea of a curriculum built around a new British baccalaureate, modelled on the highly regarded international baccalaureate. The commission suggests that this could encompass both a diploma programme with a greater emphasis on academic subjects and a career-related programme with a stronger vocational and technical focus, combining learning with work experience. Students could mix and match elements of both programmes and all of them would undertake an extended project and some community service. Importantly, digital skills would be embedded throughout their learning and all pupils should have access to a laptop or tablet.

This approach, which the commission states would be designed to be

“at least as demanding as A-levels”,

would offer major advantages. It should give extra impetus to the long-overdue elimination of the gap in parity of esteem between academic and vocational education—between knowledge and skills, if you like—by ensuring that all students have the option to pursue elements of both according to their own interests and talents.

I strongly welcome the suggestion that

“All secondary pupils should have the chance of work experience”—


but would leave out “the chance of”. All students, including primary students, should have work experience, full stop. It must be of high quality, with the quantity specified by the Baker clause seen as an absolute minimum.

My own former small training business used to run what we called “alternative work experience” programmes for groups of London students for whom their schools had been unable to find suitable work experience placements at the end of the summer term—often students whom they regarded as least likely to do well, or at risk of becoming NEET. One of the most rewarding aspects of these programmes was seeing how the aspirations, interests and enthusiasms of the students often blossomed when they were introduced to a range of very varied working environments of which they had previously had little or no conception: from office jobs in business and accountancy, to hotels and restaurants, car showrooms, city farms, construction sites, leisure attractions, fire stations, film and TV studios, tourism companies—I could go on. For many of them this was a truly eye-opening experience, and another of the rewards for us was seeing the astonished reactions of some of the teachers when they returned to their schools and gave enthusiastic presentations about what they had seen and done during the programme, what they had learned, and how it had affected their career aspirations. How can young people be expected to make sensible career choices if they have had no experience at all of the range of different routes and working environments available to them?

Another important recommendation of the commission is that

“Sport, music, drama, art, debating and dance should be an integral part of the timetable for all children, not an optional ‘extracurricular’ add on”.


This could go a long way to reversing the crowding out of education in music and other creative subjects by the EBacc, which has resulted in an alarming decline in GCSE and A-level take-up in these subjects, and an ever-widening gap between fee-paying schools, which recognise their value and importance, and many state schools, which lack the funding, resources and incentives, if not the will, to give them their proper place in the curriculum.

The “electives premium” for secondary schools proposed by the commission is an imaginative approach to tackling this and I hope the Minister will indicate how the Government might respond to it—perhaps the idea would lend itself to a pilot scheme to assess its benefits. This is also an area where greater collaboration between state and independent schools, as called for by the commission, could play an important part. Perhaps I should declare my interest as chair of a charity promoting classical music teaching in schools.

The final recommendation of the commission’s 12-point plan for education is that there should be:

“A 15-year strategy for education, drawn up in consultation with business leaders, scientists, local mayors, civic leaders and cultural figures, putting education above short-term party politics and bringing out the best in our schools, colleges and universities”


—amen to that. Adapting and enhancing our education system so that it better meets the needs of the world we now find ourselves in, the needs of our young people—not forgetting us older people—and the needs of the nation and the Government in pursuit of prosperity, well-being and growth will never be a short-term challenge, or straightforward politically. It needs time and commitment, beyond the span of a single Government, with a clear idea of where we want to go and how we plan to get there. It needs widespread consensus, buy-in and support across parties, business sectors and regions. It needs to complement and reinforce other strategic goals and policy priorities, notably in relation to meeting recognised skills needs and our net-zero commitments in the green agenda.

The commission has performed a valuable service in proposing ideas that could feature in such a strategy. So I find it disappointing that the Government’s response—and even the response of the Minister, who we know is so strongly committed to ambitious educational reform—has been so dismissive of ideas such as a British baccalaureate, and has said that they have no plans to respond to the commission’s report.

There are a number of questions that I hope the Minister will address in her response to this debate. First, will she look again at the case for some sort of government response to, or at least commentary on, the report? It seeks to generate a debate on a wide range of fundamental issues concerning the future of education policy, and the Government surely need to encourage and contribute to that debate.

Secondly, are there specific elements of the commission’s 12-point plan which the Government might consider implementing or at least exploring further, such as the electives premium? Will the Minister look at how the commission’s findings might be relevant to proposals in the current Schools Bill, with a view to amending the Bill to address them, or even replacing it with a more ambitious Bill tackling issues concerning curriculum and assessment in addition to structure, along the lines proposed by the commission? More broadly, how will the Government seek to ensure that the central importance of education to our national infrastructure and well-being is better reflected across the policy spectrum?

My hope is that the Minister’s answers to this debate will make it clear that this excellent piece of work by the Times Education Commission will not become just another ambitious, comprehensive, broadly based, well-researched exercise destined to languish on numerous bookshelves as a sad reminder of what might be achieved if the challenges facing education were given the priority and emphasis they deserve. It would redound to the Government’s credit if, instead, they seized the opportunity to use this report as a basis for starting a genuine national debate on a longer-term, sustainable approach to meeting our future educational needs, ideally with a 15-year strategy at its heart.