Education for 11 to 16 Year-olds (Committee Report)

Lord Aberdare Excerpts

Friday 26th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, another Friday, another education debate. The more the merrier, in my view, although perhaps not always on Fridays. As a perennial tail-ender, coming so early in the batting order is a rather new experience for me, but one that I welcome.

It was a great privilege to serve on this committee last year under the excellent chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Johnson of Marylebone, and a great pleasure to work with colleagues who were both committed and knowledgeable. We were supported by a splendid staff team, led by our clerk, Eleanor Clements. We had less than a year for the task, so our remit, focusing on education for 11 to 16 year-olds, was designed to fit within this timescale. This was challenging, since policy for 11 to 16 year-olds cannot ignore what happens before the age of 11, nor indeed what happens post 16.

As your Lordships have heard, we focused on three principal areas: curriculum, assessment, and school accountability. However, this meant giving limited attention to other issues, such as teacher recruitment, training and retention; careers education; and the needs of pupils with special educational needs and disabilities—important as all these are and worthy of further consideration by this House.

Our report made some 20 recommendations, and the response of the previous Government roundly rejected 12, very partially accepted five, and somewhat grudgingly accepted three. So I welcome the fact that we are having this debate with a new Government in place. The Labour manifesto and last week’s King’s Speech indicate a much more encouraging response to our ideas. Indeed, the launch last week of the curriculum and assessment review marks a welcome step towards implementing some of our recommendations.

I was struck by the degree of consensus in the evidence given to the committee by teachers, school leaders, pupils and education experts about the challenges facing 11 to 16 education. Some aspects are indeed admirable, as evidenced by the UK’s performance in reading and maths in the PISA rankings. The system works well for students with strong academic leanings who can cope with studying for more than the minimum number of GCSEs and who are good at exams and keen to go to university. However, even for these students, the curriculum is not well balanced, placing too much emphasis on knowledge learning at the expense of acquiring essential skills such as listening, oracy—something that, regrettably, was not available at my school, as noble Lords may be discovering to their dismay—problem-solving, creativity and teamwork, let alone more practical skills such as digital literacy, financial literacy and language learning.

Even more concerning is the ever-growing gap between state and private schools in providing creative and cultural education, including in music, art, theatre, dance and, particular, design and technology, resulting largely from the omission of these subjects from the EBacc performance measure. So I hope that the Minister, whom I welcome to her post, will have something to say about restoring arts and creative subjects to their proper place in all schools.

For the 60%-plus of students who do not aspire to university but are more concerned about acquiring the knowledge and skills to enable them to discover and develop the talents and attributes that will enable them to fulfil their potential in the world of work, the picture is less rosy. For the 30% or so who fail to attain level 4 passes in GCSE English and maths—the so-called forgotten third—the prospects are even worse, as they find themselves branded failures. Even in their own eyes, they may see themselves as failures, and they are condemned to a sometimes recurring round of resits in order to make any further progress.

There are other ways of achieving functional proficiency in English and maths than through GCSEs, and I hope the Minister will assure us that this is one of our recommendations that the Government will pursue. I am encouraged by this statement in the manifesto that

“Labour will support children to study a creative or vocational subject until they are 16”.


I look forward to hearing from the Minister how all pupils will be enabled to study at least one technical or vocational subject.

Assessment for 11 to 16 year-olds rests mainly on GCSEs. These are claimed to have the advantage of being fair, since all children take the same exams at the same time and are marked in the same way by external assessors. The flaw in this idea is that not all children are the same. We received a mass of evidence that GCSEs are too content-heavy, too demanding—with up to 30 exams in a concentrated period—too stressful and too rigid. Teachers told us of having to “teach to the test” and being unable to explore issues that had sparked pupils’ interest and desire to learn more about them because of the need to get through the GCSE curriculum. Students told us of throwing away their textbooks after completing their GCSEs, because they knew they would never again need the information contained in them.

Schools may be good at preparing pupils for university, but they are much less good at preparing them for life or for work. Regular promises over many years to improve parity of esteem between academic and technical education have never succeeded. Yet the university technical colleges pioneered by the noble Lord, Lord Baker of Dorking—I am sure he will tell us more about them in a moment—have shown clearly how such a balance can be successfully achieved. We visited a very impressive UTC in east London. Not all schools can be UTCs, so the idea of a UTC sleeve, enabling existing secondary schools to extend their offerings to include technical learning, is hugely attractive, and I hope the Government will commit to piloting it with a wider rollout in mind. Other schools, mainly in the private sector, such as Bedales and Latymer Upper, have decided to abandon GCSEs altogether except for English and maths, and to develop their own curriculum offers and assessment methodologies. There is something to learn from that.

Skills-based and technical subjects are often seen as harder to assess than academic subjects. Our report emphasises the need for appropriate forms of non-exam assessment to meet this need. There are many options, including performance-based assessment in music or sport, for example. Other options include presentations, coursework, project outcomes—as part of the higher project qualification, for example—on-screen assessment, and the universal framework for assessing essential life skills, which was developed by the Skills Builder Partnership and is already used in almost 600 schools and colleges. All these forms of assessment are much closer to what students are likely to encounter in their working lives than our exams.

I will move on and not talk about accountability, because that was covered extremely well by the noble Lord, Lord Johnson. I very much look forward to the Minister’s response to this debate and trust that it will confirm the Government’s intention to act on rather more of the committee’s recommendations than their predecessor planned to do. Reforming the education system for 11 to 16 year-olds along the lines we advocate, although urgent, is no small task, so an evolutionary approach over a period possibly as long as 10 years will be needed, with an emphasis on getting students, teachers and parents on side.

The Government should set out a clear vision of how they seek to transform education, and a road map for getting there over the coming years. Perhaps they might launch a national campaign to raise the profile and status of education and teaching as a central element of their drive for growth, and again—as the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, might have said if she were here—to make education fun and exciting again.

There are many other issues relating to education for 11 to 16 year-olds, and of course to education and skills before and after that age bracket. I wish the Government well in pursuing the change that is so urgently needed and hope there will be many opportunities for this House to provide comment and scrutiny along the way.