King’s Speech

Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts

Friday 19th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

My Lords, I want to say how sorry I was to hear the valedictory address of the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly. She is a very familiar face in this House. I know she attends a lot, because I have watched her for years and listened to her speeches, which are always interesting. On behalf of the whole House, I wish her a happy, relaxed, peaceful and lengthy retirement. I say “lengthy” because, in my 90th year, valedictory addresses will be rather more regular events.

I also welcome back to office the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Malvern. I gather from what she said that her parents were teachers, which is a very good start for an Education Minister. I may surprise her by saying that I entirely welcome all the proposals she put today to the House; I hope it is the beginning of a great reform in government. Endorsements by me of statements from the Department for Education over the past 14 years have been rather rare events, but I hope this is a very good start.

Labour’s manifesto said there is going to be an “expert-led” review of the curriculum and assessment. Well done, congratulations; I urged the last Government to do that again and again. Seven committees were set up that all urged that and said the Gove curriculum of EBacc and Progress 8 should be scrapped, along with GCSEs, which I introduced but which I think are now outmoded. I hope the Minister will be able to come back in September and tell us the membership of the committee. I am not applying, but I will give all the support of my charity to the setting up of successful technical schools, because we have a great deal of expertise and I will support that.

It is very important that we do this because, if you are going to achieve economic growth, you have to have students leaving at 18 with employability skills and there is a huge mismatch now between what industry and commerce want from the education system and what they are getting. By “employability skills” I mean things the Government already recognise, such as oracy and collective problem-solving. That is done when you work in teams. There is no teamwork at all in our existing schools today, but much of our lives when we leave school is about collaborative problem-solving. The Government have already said they are going to do that, so they are inevitably going to be a very reforming Government.

We are the only country in Europe that does not provide technical, cultural and vocational education below 16. All of them—Germany, France, the Netherlands, Austria and Switzerland—do that, but Michael Gove did not support technical education. It is very important that that is done. We have to create a curriculum suitable for this century.

Over the last 15 years I have been developing university technical colleges and there are now 44 of them. They are for 14 to 18 year-olds, they are quite unique and they are very successful. As a matter of interest, 39 of the 44 are now in Labour-held seats, so on the whole we do not do schools for the leafy suburbs; we do them for towns and cities where unemployment is very high. Unemployment in our colleges is now 3%. Nationally it is 12%, while in the West Midlands and Newcastle it is as high as 20%, so we have to inject education and cultural studies into our schools as quickly as possible. I see the bishops nodding at that, and lots of other people are nodding as well.

Could I just say one thing? The last of those seven reports was a report by the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, on 11 to 16 education. We recommended fundamental change and I am glad to see that it had all-party support, particularly as one of the members of that committee had been the head of a teachers’ union. I welcome that—the noble Baroness is nodding. She is a good egg. It really is very welcome that she was on the committee.

What we need are employability skills. We have 44 UTCs and two have been added. To build a new UTC is £20 million, like the cost of any school. Frankly, very few schools are going to be built in the next 10 years because we have student decline and the money that the Government have will need to be spent on repairing the actual schools, many in appalling conditions. We have produced an idea—which the previous Government were about to approve, I hope—of introducing into an ordinary 11 to 18 school a UTC sleeve from 14 to 18. There would be separate classrooms, workshops and specialist teachers, with a separate board for them of the local employers. They would do the curriculum of the UTC. It would mean that a 14 year-old starting it, for example, spends two days a week in a workshop or a computer room learning with his hands, or working on a project with a local company that is brought in.

This is all the expertise we have and I want to make all that available to the Government and to help them in what they are going to do. This is something the Government have to do to be successful. They will not win the next election if they do not get economic growth—they really will not; I can see they are nodding—so they have to change education effectively and make it suitable for this day and age.