Employment: Young People
Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts(10 years ago)
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Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)
My Lords, I warmly welcome the Statement and express the hope that the new company will transform careers advice in schools, which at the moment is inadequate, ill informed and in many cases deplorable. Youngsters at 14 should have all the opportunities made available to them: whether to stay on at school or go to a university technical college, a studio school, a career college or even an apprenticeship. I am glad that businesses will be involved in this, because that will open up other opportunities to them. I hope that it will lead to a substantial increase in skills training in all schools.
Schools: Classics
Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts(10 years ago)
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Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)
Is the Minister aware that Latin always has some friends and supporters, of which I am one? A little Latin in life gives a bit of intermittent pleasure from time to time. What is more to the point, I welcome what the Government have done in restoring modern foreign languages to the 16 year-old GCSE EBacc. That is a really significant move. I did it many years ago. It was dropped. I welcome its return.
Lord Nash
I am grateful for the noble Lord’s comments. It is true that under the previous Government the number of core academic subjects slumped, but they are now reviving. Spanish GCSE particularly is up by 50% and, of course, these subjects qualify for both EBacc and the Progress 8 measure, which is coming in in 2016.
Birmingham Schools
Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts(10 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Nash
My noble friend asked four questions. The answer to the first, on whether no-notice inspections can occur in outstanding schools, is yes, if it was thought appropriate. On local oversight, I already expressed my views on the failure of that in this case. Noble Lords will know that we have hired eight regional schools commissioners who will provide oversight on a regional basis using head teacher boards from top academies. We believe that this is a more effective way of dealing with these matters. “Yes” is the answer to Ofsted looking for a broad and balanced curriculum. We will now consult on the ability for all independent schools to ban governors with extremist links. They would then be banned from sitting on maintained schools’ boards.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
My Lords, let us hear from my noble friend Lord Baker, then, I suggest, the noble Lord, Lord Bew, and then the noble Baroness, Lady Morris. Then we will hear from other speakers.
Lord Baker of Dorking
Is the Minister aware that what was announced by Mr Gove today will be welcomed across the country, because he was preventing what had been set up as secular schools being transformed, very determinedly but quite slowly, into single-faith Muslim schools, and such a transformation is unacceptable in the English education system? It is a credit to Sir Michael Wilshire and his inspectors that they revealed what is happening.
This will be a difficult and long task, but I suggest to the Minister that it would be easier if he were to announce a moratorium on the approval of any new single-faith schools. The object we are trying to achieve is that students in British schools, irrespective of their race, colour, creed or faith, will sit next to each other, play with each other, eat with each other, go home in the buses with each other and respect each other. If we do not achieve that, our society will be divided by faith and that would be disastrous for our country.
Lord Nash
I welcome my noble friend’s extremely mature comments, with which I largely agree. So far as a moratorium on faith schools is concerned, there is a great place in our society for faith and church schools, which have been extremely successful. Church schools in fact promote community cohesion, it is acknowledged, better than other schools. We must make sure that all schools promote community cohesion and inclusiveness.
Education: Social Mobility
Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts(10 years, 9 months ago)
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Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Nash on initiating this important debate and I thank him for explaining to the House the various initiatives the Government have taken in order to achieve improvements in the education system. Social mobility has to start in our schools or it can start nowhere. If it does not start at school, there will be virtually no social mobility. In one striking area it has worked very well: namely, in the expansion of universities. Parties around the House have supported this expansion. When I was the Education Secretary, the percentage going on to university was 15%. Just before I left that job I forecast that it would rise to 30% by 2000, and that was slightly exceeded. Today it is close to 50%, and there is no doubt that many children from disadvantaged families now experience the huge richness of university life.
So, three A-levels and a university degree are one pathway to success. I suspect, however, that it will be a rather less crowded pathway in the immediate future because graduate unemployment has now become a common feature. One study examined students who graduated in 2010 to see what they were doing two years later. At that point, four out of 10 had got jobs at graduate level, two had jobs at below graduate level, usually in bars and cafés, one was unemployed, and the others were trying to recycle themselves back into the education process. Added to that is the fact that students will now leave university with debts approaching £40,000, so many young people who in the past would have thought about going to university will be looking for other things to do. I rather welcome that in several ways, because a university system that turns out people who are unemployable is not a very effective system.
The days have gone when large numbers of unskilled jobs were available. Very few unskilled jobs are available in our economy today. We therefore have to find other pathways to success beyond three A-levels and a university degree. That is the reason why, with Ron Dearing, I established five years ago what are now called university technical colleges. Seventeen are already open and a further 33 have been approved. They aim to give young people skills. The pupils are aged between 14 and 18. The UTCs operate on a normal working day, so pupils have to turn up between 8.30 in the morning and five in the afternoon. However, we see very high levels of attendance for those hours, at 95%. Students learn for two days of the week by making things with their hands or designing things. We are giving them the skills that will make them employable.
I think that the employability potential of education is one of the most important tests. Every school, whatever it is doing at secondary level, should report on the employability of its students when they leave. I am very glad to say that the employability of students from UTCs is really quite remarkable. Our target is that when youngsters leave at 16 and 18, none of them gets jobseeker’s allowance or joins the ranks of the unemployed, and I am glad to say that in the two that have had leavers at 16 and 18—the first being the JCB Academy in Staffordshire, which has had 300 leavers since it started—everybody got a job, an apprenticeship, a place at college or a place at university. Twenty-three went to university and 84 became apprentices, while others went on to study A-levels or went into work. That is a remarkable achievement for any school.
The one in Walsall, which has an average comprehensive intake, is in a much more challenging situation. It took over the remnants of a school that was closing, with very disgruntled students. It has had 107 leavers, and I am glad to say that none of them joined the ranks of the unemployed and there were no NEETs. Fourteen went to university, 30 or so to apprenticeships and some into work or other colleges. That should be the target for all schools—no NEETs. I think it is the intention later this year to judge schools on the destinations of their pupils. If a school, of whatever nature, manages to ensure that none of its pupils become NEETs—they all get a job or go on to further education—it cannot possibly be described in an Ofsted report as inadequate. That would be a contradiction in terms, as it is a major achievement.
The other thing that we have now developed, alongside UTCs for the STEM subjects, are career colleges for the other range of skills such as hospitality, catering, tourism, the creative arts and logistics. Two of these colleges, based on UTCs, are going to start this year in Oldham and in Bromley and 60 other schools are interested in becoming ones. We have established the success of specialist colleges for 14 year-olds in promoting social mobility. Many of these youngsters at 13 and 14 would be disengaged and would switch off from education, but we are engaging them and giving them a real opportunity which they would not otherwise have. I really believe that unless we increase the numbers of these colleges very considerably, we will rather stifle social mobility. These are alternative pathways of success, with pupils going to university, in some cases, or getting into very good jobs.
Finally, I remind your Lordships of the success of some of the old technical schools that existed in 1945. The committee established in 1941 said that the pattern of education after the war should involve selective grammar schools, selective technical schools and secondary moderns. There were 300 technical schools, which all closed in five or six years. They were closed by snobbery—everybody wanted to go to the school on the hill like the grammar school, not the one down in the town with the dirty jobs and greasy rags. It was a massive mistake, which Germany did not make in adopting its education system, which is one of the reasons why Angela is ruling the roost.
The success of those technical schools was really remarkable, and I will just leave noble Lords with the names of four people who went to them and are today very distinguished. The vice-chancellor of the University of Leeds, one of the biggest universities in our country, Sir Alan Langlands, who ran the health service for six years, went to a technical school in Glasgow that also received Charles Rennie Mackintosh through its doors—a very distinguished figure. Mike Turner, the chairman of Babcock and GKN, who ran BAE Systems very effectively for many years, went to a technical high school. Sir Mike Tomlinson, the former Chief Inspector of Schools, started his life at Oakwood Technical High School. Coming to your Lordships’ House, the noble Baroness, Lady Boothroyd—the dear, beloved Betty Boothroyd, former Speaker of the House of Commons—went to a technical school. Those technical schools were real agents of social mobility, as they can be again today.
Education: Vocational Education
Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts(10 years, 9 months ago)
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Lord Nash
The noble Baroness is quite right. The first thing we can do is to reform the standard of our previously existing vocational qualifications, which were nowhere near good enough, with far too many that were not doing our pupils any favours. However, for the first time we now have a high and equal status pathway for pupils through the tech bacc.
Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)
My Lords, is the Minister aware that in Germany 60% of school children enjoy some form of technical education? The figure in Britain is 15%, and that is one of the reasons why at the moment Angela is the rooster in the walk. Will he ensure that the expansion of UTCs continues? We have 50. There should really be 100 as these colleges are the only colleges that produce employable engineers and technicians and so far none of their students has joined the ranks of the unemployed.
Education: Contribution to Economic Growth
Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts(11 years ago)
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Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)
My Lords, I must first apologise for my husky voice. My advice to all your Lordships is: do not come near me, you might catch it.
I am very pleased to be speaking in this debate for two reasons: not only is it an important debate but I shall hear the maiden speech of my old friend Stephen Sherbourne—now my noble friend Lord Sherbourne. We go back 40 years, when I was the most junior Minister in Ted Heath’s Government and he was a political adviser. Stephen has spent his life trying to make Conservatives more intelligent, better read and perceptive. You might think that this is a hopeless task; it is certainly thankless, and I look forward to his maiden speech.
The reason why this debate is important is that there is total dysfunction between the needs of British industry and commerce and the educational system of our country at all levels. At university level, with the skills gap by 2020, British industry and commerce will need 850,000 STEM graduates, including in computing. It will be 300,000 short; 45,000 short each year for the next seven years. When it comes to levels 3 and 4, the advanced and foundation degrees, it will need more than half a million. The FE college system cannot possibly meet that need in that time. The reason why it cannot meet it is that if a student starts at FE college at 16, it takes him two years to get to GCSE in engineering, computing or the built industry. At 18, with that qualification, he goes off for a job. If you start at 14, by 16 you will have a BTEC or a good GCSE in a technical subject. You then go on to level 3 and level 4, but the conversion rate of FE colleges to levels 3 and 4 is the lowest in Europe, so that is a major problem.
Then we come to the school system. We have nearly 1 million unemployed youngsters today. That is a disgrace and a shame. All Secretaries of State, including me, have tried to do something about it. Michael Gove is trying to do it by increasing the quality of maths, English and science teaching. Good luck to him; I wish him well but actually, we have all failed and I must bear some responsibility for that. There are 1 million people today who, after 11 years of free education, cannot get a job in our country. We must do something about that, and that means a fundamental change to our education system.
We can see the demands of industry. Last week, we had a meeting with Allan Cook, the chairman of WS Atkins, one of the largest consultancy firms in Europe. He said that we are short of 4,000 railway engineers. Talk to anybody in Cisco or Microsoft and they will say that they are tens of thousands short of computer scientists for their own business and for their clients. Last week, I had a meeting with the food processing industry, which I do not know very well. It is today short of 100,000 technicians. This week, your Lordships probably saw our Prime Minister opening a college in China sponsored by Jaguar to train young engineers. He will have the chance to open a university technical college in Coventry next year, which Jaguar is supporting because the schools in Coventry just do not produce youngsters who want to work in Jaguar. It has put in for a second one in Solihull because the schools in Birmingham are simply not producing the youngsters who want to work in Jaguar, one of the most successful companies in our country.
We have to do something about this. Michael Wilshaw, the chief inspector, put his finger onto it earlier this year. He said that we need more specialist colleges for 14 year-olds. This is what university technical colleges are. I think many of your Lordships are aware that they are the new colleges, for students aged 14 to 18. They have a demanding day. They start at 8.30 am and go on till 5 pm. They have shorter holidays. For two days of the week the youngsters, the girls and the boys, are making things with their hands—designing things, working in teams and problem solving—and the rest of the week they are doing their GCSEs in English, maths, science, a foreign language and history or geography.
These colleges have proven to be very popular. We are very proud of them. Seventeen are open; 27 are waiting to open. We are assessing, together with my noble friend Lord Nash, 11 at the moment. This year there will be 3,000 students in the colleges; next year there will be 9,000; in 2015 there will be 15,000. When they are all fully operational, over four years, there will be more than 30,000 students. This is making a contribution. Indeed, the Prime Minister is a fan of these colleges, and said recently that every major town in the country should have one. The number depends on how you define “major town”, but it is somewhere between 200 and 300. We need that sort of number to create the sort of opportunities for young people for the jobs that they will have.
I would like to thank my noble friend Lord Nash personally. Having come from business, he understands the importance of good technical and practical training in any business. I also thank the Secretary of State, Michael Gove. Sometimes he is said to be not very keen on these colleges. On the contrary—I had a meeting with him last week, and he said that he is a fan of UTCs. In the House of Commons this week he said that they are an excellent innovation, and he wants more high-quality UTCs. This is an all-party programme. These colleges started under the previous Labour Government, when I won the support of the noble Lord, Lord Adonis. The Labour Party is still very committed to supporting this; the Liberal Democratic Party committee on this matter has also supported it. This is an initiative that will not change if there is a change of Government. It is very important that there should be some stability in this area.
One of the things we found is that when English and maths are taught under the same roof as a technical subject, there is a dramatic improvement in English and maths. At the JCB Academy, it was forecast that the youngsters would get to only 50% having Level C in maths. After two years, they got 85%. There are astonishing improvements of 30% to 40% in the basic subjects because the youngsters suddenly realise the basic subjects are not taught in a separate classroom; it is intrinsic to all their work, and it is leading to jobs.
One of the proudest things we have as a target is that, when we have leavers at 16 and 18, we will have no NEETs. So far, of the two colleges that have had leavers at 16 and 18 every youngster has got a job, got an advanced apprenticeship at 16, gone on to study A levels and BTECs, got a hired apprenticeship at 18 or gone to university. Very few schools in our country can say that they have achieved that, so we know that we have a successful model. We also know that we get attendance rates of 95% from an average comprehensive intake. We take children with special educational needs and those who have free school meals. Very few schools can say that they have a 95% attendance.
In conclusion, I will read a letter from a young student at Central Beds UTC. He was not asked to write this letter, but he wanted to encourage Ministers and the Government to be enthusiastic about this subject. He is called Morgan. I have not met him. He says this:
“After (underachieving) failing my first year at a standard sixth form, I made the best decision of my life and started fresh at UTC. My grades have rocketed from D’s and E’s to A’s and B’s (in mathematics and physics), and I’m currently achieving D*D*D* in the BTEC course which has set me well on my way to attending a top university such as Bath, Bristol or Loughborough to study an engineering design masters degree”.
He went on:
“It’s not like school, we don’t get spoon-fed information to pass our exams, we have to put the effort in to get something out. And I believe it is more than possible to pave your way to your dream career from this UTC, as we are given the opportunities needed to proceed to the next stage of life, be it an apprenticeship… an engineering firm or a degree at university, the college will help you get there”.
We need more Morgans. We need hundreds more Morgans. We need thousands more Morgans. We need tens of thousands more Morgans. It is up to us all to realise this, because, otherwise, we will let down British industry and the prosperity of our country will be weaker.
Education: Curriculum, Exam and Accountability Reform
Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts(11 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Nash
I have listened to the right reverend Prelate. I am delighted that his family enjoy teaching so much. In my view it is the noblest of professions. I take the point about the dangers of anecdote but I could give him many more and would be happy to do so on another occasion.
Lord Baker of Dorking
My Lords, I warmly welcome the Statement made by Michael Gove in the other House and repeated by my noble friend. When a politician changes his mind it should be an act of rejoicing. What Michael Gove has done in the House of Commons today can only be done by a big politician; little ones would not dare to do it. I very much welcome the fact that we are going back to eight GCSEs, with two more rigorous ones—that is Michael Gove’s initiative—in maths and English. There is a group that allows computer science, which I welcome, and another group that allows creative arts and performing arts and, as far as I am concerned, practical, technical and vocational education for university technical colleges. Therefore it is to be welcomed. We will wait to see where they will feature in the league tables.
Is the Minister aware that the broad and balanced curriculum we have heard about today is almost word for word what I announced in 1988 so there has been an erosion of time and good intention and he will have to screw his courage to the sticking place to ensure that this actually happens? Is he also aware that many schools, because of the more rigorous GCSEs, will find it much more demanding to meet these higher levels of requirement and I hope that will lead to them extending the school day so we do not see pupils leaving schools at 3 pm or 3.30 pm?
Education: Academies and Free Schools
Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts(11 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Baker of Dorking
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for introducing this debate. I also welcome my noble friend Lord Nash to the Front Bench. Although he has skirmished at Question Time, this is the first debate on which he has had to answer. This is an engagement and not a skirmish. I should like to make one major point. Michael Gove has imposed on the English education system an enormous revolution, which is irreversible, by expanding the academy programme very substantially and by introducing free schools. As far as I can see, it will not be reversed by any Government and will not be taken back under state control in the future.
That, of course, started with the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, who realised that some of the most successful schools, when he was responsible for this matter, were the original city technology colleges, which I established in the 1980s—16 of them. He used them as a model for the academies and persuaded Tony Blair to announce a target of 200. Now there are 600, so they are rolling on at a rapid pace. In fact, when Tony Blair becomes very eloquent about this, he not only speaks warmly of academies but rather implies that he was their creator. I am happy to share the parentage because it shows all-party support.
Why are these colleges so successful? They enflame and engage people at a local level—parents, teachers, local communities and businesses—to improve the basic schools in their community. That is an enormous release of energy, enthusiasm and commitment, which is quite striking across all the country in all communities and in all parties. That is to be immensely welcomed, and the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, is to be congratulated on initiating that.
The university technology colleges, which I have been promoting, are free schools or academies—a rose by any other name—and are proving to be very successful. We have five university technical colleges open at the moment; 12 will open this year; and 14 will open in 2014. We are looking at another 20 or so to be announced by Easter. We need another application round to be announced by December of this year to start some in 2015 after the next election.
These colleges are popular because they deal with children aged from 14 to 18. This is another revolution in English education. The rest of the world is moving slowly to a transfer age of 14, which I have just recorded in a book that was published last week. I draw it to your Lordships’ attention, and it should be available in the Library. In this book, I argue that the right age of transfer is 14, not 11, that the national curriculum, of which I was one of the authors, should stop at 14 and that at that point there should be four types of colleges: university technical colleges; liberal arts colleges, a vastly expanded grammar school sector for the academic, which would probably be non-selective; then something my noble friend Lord Moynihan would welcome, a series of at least 30 or 40 creative arts, performing arts and sports colleges throughout the United Kingdom; and then there should be career colleges, which come out of the FE movement, covering the other subjects. All this is releasing energy at the right point. This revolution would really be very significant for the English education system.
The other revolution that is going on at the moment is the extension of the school leaving age to 17 this year and to 18 in 2015. This will have a profound effect on the English education system. Education will be a continuum from five to 18. It is irreversible. It is going to happen, and whenever it has happened in the past, when the school leaving age was moved from 10 in 1880, to 12 in 1890, and to 14 in 1921, there was a huge increase in the number of new schools and reorganisation of schools. There is a unique opportunity in this large continuum to look at the shape of education. The instruments to do that are essentially academies and free schools.
As I said before, I am very glad that the Labour Party now supports this movement. It is very effective. One of the university technical colleges completed two years last summer, so we had 16 and 18 year-old students leaving. A totally comprehensive selection went in, with 20% special educational needs. In that school, there were no NEETs last summer: every student either got a job or an apprenticeship or went on to college or university. There are not many schools with that particular mix that can say that in our country. We know, therefore, that we have a successful formula, and I hope that that formula can be extended on a much wider scale. I applaud this great change that is now sweeping through the English education system, and I will now finish.
Education: Development of Excellence
Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts(12 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Baker of Dorking
My Lords, I declare an interest as the chairman of two educational charities and I draw no remuneration from them. I wish to speak only about technical education, an area in which all parties have failed over the past 150 years. The reason for that is that the classic curriculum written by Thomas Arnold in 1840 has dominated English education and has been reinforced by the EBacc. As a result, technical, hands-on and practical learning has been eliminated from English schools.
We had technical colleges in 1945, alongside grammar schools. They were in shabby buildings and were closed by snobbery because everyone wanted to be the school on the hill and not the school involved with dirty jobs and greasy rags. It was a huge mistake. Germany did not make that mistake. It still has a tripartite system, which is one of the reasons why Angela’s ruling the roost. It is not the only one, but one of them.
Four years ago, Ron Dearing and I said that we must recreate these technical colleges and make them better. The university technical colleges are for 14 to 18 year-olds. We believe strongly that 14 is the right age to transfer, not 11—11 is too soon, 16 is too late. We have already discovered that if you treat 14 year-olds as adults, they come to college in business dress. They are given a laptop or an iPad. They start working with their hands for 40% of the working week. They turn up, truancy disappears, bloody-mindedness disappears—referral pupils come to these colleges and they attend.
Each college is supported by a university, so university lecturers, undergraduates and postgraduates go in and talk to the youngsters as part of the university outreach programme, thus introducing them to the richness of university life. We get local employers to create the lessons. Rolls-Royce created eight weeks of lessons on making piston pumps and trained the school staff who had to deliver those lessons. Network Rail created eight weeks of lessons on engineering and level crossing gates. The colleges are filming them, they liked them so much. The National Grid has produced eight weeks of lessons on electrical transmission. More than 400 companies are supporting the 33 schools that have been approved. Thirty-three have been approved, five are open.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hill, and Michael Gove for their support for these university technical colleges. They are the most successful free schools that have been started so far. I invite my noble friend to up the game a bit and get more established as soon as possible. There are 3,200 secondary schools in this country. There is no reason why one in 10 should not be a university technical college, giving a total of 320. It may be thought that that is ambitious but that was the number of colleges we had in 1945, and our country needs them.
This week the Royal Academy of Engineering produced a report saying that we are short of 100,000 engineers and 1 million technicians. The university technical colleges are the only schools and colleges in our country that are producing these young men and women below the age of 18. Therefore, I strongly recommend them. I am glad that this initiative has all-party support. In fact, it started under the previous Labour Government with the noble Lord, Lord Adonis. Stephen Twigg supports it and I know that the Liberals support it as well.
As regards the EBacc, I have set up a committee to establish a TechBacc and we will publish our proposals before Christmas. Therefore, this initiative is no longer an experiment; it is a movement. It is encouraging to find youngsters with a very broad band of abilities coming to these colleges. We are agents of social mobility. In the college at Hackney that I visited which has been open for seven weeks, 54% of the students get free school meals—that is a very high proportion indeed—and 80% are black and Asian. I met two pupils who had been expelled from their previous schools and their records were three inches thick. One of the girls was already on the school council and has decided that she wants to go on to college. These bodies are engaging the disengaged but also responding to the needs of our economy.
I repeat that my noble friend Lord Hill is very supportive of these colleges. I say to him that I have some help for him from on high. The right reverend Prelate will remember that the psalm that was read last Sunday was Psalm 90, which ends:
“Prosper thou the work of our hands upon us, O prosper thou our handywork”.
Therefore, I say to Ministers, “Prosper thou our handiwork”.
Education Bill
Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts(13 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Sutherland of Houndwood
My Lords, I remind the Committee that the issue of parents who try to move into areas near schools is not confined to faith schools. I remember the distant days of people of the most surprising political background being able to afford houses near Holland Park because it was not a bog standard comprehensive. That has gone on for quite some time in a variety of communities; it is not confined to faith schools.
I support Amendment 138. The direction of travel is the right one, to open up the community, and it seems compatible that those liberal churchmen and women whom I know would want this. There may be a practical problem. If this is seen as a restriction in terms of faith background, I am not sure that Muslim schools would be able to fill all their places. We would have to be a bit careful about that formulation. On the second part of Amendment 138, if we have faith schools, that seems to me to be part of the deal. If my parents had decided to send me to a sports academy—God forbid—part of their understanding would have been that I would spend hours in the gym and on wet, cold, miserable sports fields. Although I might never have forgiven them, that would have been part of going to that kind of school. The same applies to technical schools and other sorts of schools. I think it not unreasonable that a faith school with a particular ethos and direction should say to parents, “You understand that this is how we do things here”. Then you inspect them independently and see whether they do it in a fair and reasonable way.
Lord Baker of Dorking
My Lords, I support what the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, has said, and I support Amendments 138 and 140. I think that the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, in her characteristically charming way, may have gone a little far in wanting to end all faith schools in our country. The view I have taken consistently in my political life is that one should live with the existing faith schools and make them more inclusive, but I have always resisted the creation of new faith schools. When I had responsibility for these matters, I did not approve an exclusive faith school, and I think it was a mistake on the part of the Labour Government in 1997 to open up that possibility again.
Why do I say that? During the war, I went to an Anglican primary school in Southport. I loved it. It was a Victorian building and I had, as the basis of such education as I have had, a Victorian education. The school was right next door to the church. However, religion was not thrust down our throats. We went to church twice a year, at Christmas and at Easter. Of course we started each day with a hymn and a prayer, but everyone did that in those days. It was really a community school and embodied for me the great attractions of Anglicanism. Belief was a comfort rather than a passion and there was a welcome absence of fervour. It was, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Lichfield said, a community school which included everybody. My closest friend was a Jewish boy who was the son of a refugee. When I went to see his family, his mother explained the Jewish faith to me. I believe strongly that in schools, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists should all sit alongside each other, play alongside each other, eat alongside each other and go home on the same bus together, because that way lies tolerance, understanding and forbearance. If one moves away from that, one creates intolerance and all the troubles of a divided society.
It was interesting to hear the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, speak, because he recalled the debates we had four years ago when the policy of the Labour party, I am glad to say, was that in all new faith schools, 25 per cent of the pupils should come from outside the faith. It was a view expounded by the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, in the House of Lords, and I shared it. It was not shared by the leaders of my party, but they were mistaken in that. They are not always mistaken, but they were mistaken then. I campaigned with the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, to support the view. Unfortunately, the Labour party was rattled by a quite unscrupulous campaign by the Catholic church—I see the noble Lord is nodding so he must have been part of it—in which it tried to pretend that this would undermine all Catholic schools in the country for ever. But it was only for new Catholic schools, and the Catholic church had founded only two new schools in England since the war. The Catholic church thought that with all these Poles coming into the country, there would be lots more Catholic children in future, although I think that that particular ambition has been dashed. It was a quite unscrupulous campaign and the Labour Party gave in and surrendered.
The amendments were drawn up. I had seen the amendments ready to be tabled saying that new faith schools should ensure that 25 per cent of their intake was from outside the faith. During those debates, the present Archbishop enunciated the policy of the Anglican church, which has been developed by the right reverend Prelate today, and said that for new Anglican church schools, 25 per cent of the intake should be from outside the faith or of no faith. That has now been extended to 50 per cent, and I do not disagree with that at all. It is the best way to go forward.
If, during the next five to 10 years, we see the establishment of faith schools, particularly of the new faiths in our country, we are going to have very exclusive schools that I think will create divisions in society, particularly in our towns and cities. I favour very much the idea of all new schools at least being inclusive and extending that slowly to all schools. In fact, that is the reality. Very few Catholic schools today have 100 per cent Catholic pupils, so they are part of the policy. Why do you not announce it? There must be a direction somewhere from on high that you do not. The Anglican community of faith schools is very inclusive today—by nature, it always is. As the right reverend Prelate said, some of these schools are 100 per cent Muslim but they still have the rigour of teaching that comes from a belief. That is very important.
I know that I am not going to persuade the Minister to agree with us because I think that they are going to approve some new faith schools. I must say that that would be a profound mistake.