GCSE and A-level Results: Attainment Gap

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 8th September 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, when I looked at this debate, I looked at the statistics and said, “Yes, there’s a problem”. I then looked at it again and said, “It ain’t the only place there’s a problem”. Then you look at it again and discover there are pockets of deprivation—let us face it, how many of us have read reports or sat through discussions in this place about deprivation in, for instance, rural towns and seaside towns? Wherever you have areas with lower economic expectation and financial support, you get worse educational results.

When you decide to invest in education as a parent or a child, you are putting huge effort in for something in the future. If there is nothing in the future that you feel that you can realistically attain, you are not going to do it. Also, with the best will in the world, you do not have the opportunity to support that person. The pandemic has proved this clearly. If you happened to be at home with your own computer in your own quiet room or space, you did fairly well; if you had one mobile phone between a family of four—we have all heard the horror stories—you did not do very well. Then you go back to an environment where you are behind and not achieving very well. So why would anybody sensible, who does not have any examples around them, invest time, effort and sacrifice to achieve? That child will not and, if their parents have had a bad experience, they probably will not push them either. We are in a cycle here and the Government have to intervene to change it, either through the school or by getting hold of parents—this is not easy; it takes time and is not just the responsibility of the Department for Education—to make sure that they value what they are going through and the sacrifice.

I remind the House of my interests in special educational needs and technical support. My pet subject is a classic example of this. If you have, say, a moderate dyslexic—that is the area I know most about—who is going through and is failing but is from a middle-class family, they find out why. The exam-passing classes make sure that they find out how you succeed, because they know you can. They know that it is not a big deal. They make sure that you can get through and get the support. They have the few hundred pounds, maybe few thousand pounds, to take on the system and push through.

If you come from an environment where nobody has passed any exams or maybe has passed just one, “What are you worrying about? You don’t need that for the jobs you’re going to do; you’ll do a job like me”. You can break that cultural link by making sure that teachers and the careers service start earlier and by making sure that people appreciate what is available to them by simply passing a few exams—you clearly do not have to be a genius to do that, because lots of people do it. All of us who have been to university know that, wherever it was, it was not manned by thousands of geniuses—there were some who had passed their exams who had trouble breathing without help, in my opinion.

If we go through this, it is the idea of reaching further in and making sure that people invest in it. That will make your job infinitely easier. We need support to get children through; many things have been talked about here that we could do, so I will not waste time by repeating them. Unless you get the intervention right to enable people to feel that the investment is not only beneficial but possible for the person doing it, they will not take it on. Your environment is a magnifying glass to your own personal cocktail of opportunity.

Unless we can make sure people understand that there is a possibility and a benefit from taking on these difficult choices, we will not do it. The levelling-up agenda should be something that addresses this. When the Minister replies—and I am, once again, reassured that she is still here; at least we have somebody who understands what is going on at the moment—will she give us some idea of how it ties in with the education agenda and how the departments are working together to achieve this? If there is a silver bullet, I very much doubt it is in the gun that the Department for Education by itself has at the moment.