Vocational Education and Training

Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts

Monday 28th October 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Bridgeman on initiating this debate. I have been in the House for 23 years and I can barely remember any debate on technical and vocational education. It is important, because the skills gap is large and growing. It is so large that the Government have stopped publishing it—and they have abolished the body that published it. It is very difficult to find out what the skills gap is so, as the chairman of Edge, I set up a group of 20 people to assess the skills gap in various industries. My noble friend Lord Bridgeman referred to this. The gap in engineering is 203,000; there was no A-level in engineering this year. In digital technology it is 600,000; there were just 10,000 A-levels in computing, compared to 120,000 in maths. There should be as many computing A-levels as maths ones. In hospitality, there are 100,000 vacancies; there were only five A-levels in travel and tourism.

The reason for this is that the Gove curriculum, imposed 10 years ago, is wrecking the British education system and does not respond to the needs of the British economy. EBacc is a total and utter disaster. Mr Gove’s successors never tried to challenge it; they could not say “boo” to a goose. I do not understand why the Labour and Liberal parties do not put this in their manifestos. Put some lead in your pencil and say you will abolish EBacc, for heaven’s sake, because it will absolutely destroy technical education below 16. If you do that, you will not get apprentices at 16. Who is going to employ apprentices who have only done academic subjects? No one.

When it comes to apprentices, the Government will run out of money at Christmas. All the levy has been spent and apprenticeships are falling, so they are going to have to make some difficult decisions. Perhaps I may recommend one or two. They should stop offering apprenticeships to men and women who are 40, 50 and 60 years old: 60 year-olds apply for and get apprenticeships. Apprentice grandmas and grandpas —what are they learning, how to die gracefully? For heaven’s sake, do something about that. Concentrate the apprenticeship movement on those aged 14 to 24. Bring back young apprentices at 14. All the great geniuses of the Industrial Revolution started as young apprentices at 14. We should bring back young apprenticeships and also abolish EBacc. I am glad to say that the colleges I have been working on now for 10 years—the university technical colleges—number 48, with 14,500 students.

What we are most proud about with these colleges is that they are quite different. They work from 9 to 5, the working day. I say to the youngsters when they join, “This is the beginning of your working life”. For two days a week, from 14 to 16, they are making things with their hands, and they do academic subjects for the rest. The thing we are most proud about is that they have the best destinations of school leavers of any school in the country. In July this year, 42% of our leavers went to university, but 85% of them did STEM subjects—double the national average—and 31% became apprentices. The average for a normal school is 6%.

Why do Ministers not explain to people how much more apprentices can earn at 18? If you are accepted as a higher apprentice at Rolls-Royce, BMW or Network Rail, and all the qualifications you have are one A-level and one BTEC, you can earn up to £20,000. If you want to go to the Navy, it will pay £32,500—much more than a graduate will get after three or four years as an undergraduate. We must sell this positively if we are to get more people wanting to be apprentices.

We have 24% getting jobs. Why do they get jobs? Because our youngsters have the skills that employers want. They have all worked in teams. That no longer happens in schools. They make things with their hands. That no longer happens in schools. The only lessons I remember from the grammar school I went to in 1945 was two hours of carpentry, making dovetail and tenon joints, which I can just about still do. All that has gone—disappeared totally. Our students can also deal with problem solving, which is no longer done in normal schools. A complete revolution is needed, and UTCs should expand.

The good news I have for noble Lords tonight is that three changes are now being made to UTCs which will mean that they will grow. The first of these is that we are now allowed to recruit at 11. Three years ago, we set up a sort of preparatory school at Leigh in Dartford, alongside the UTC, recruiting youngsters at 11 to 14. It was remarkable to go and see them. One of the first things we discovered was that we get many more girls than boys at that stage, which is good. I saw girls doing GCSE computing at the age of 11. I also saw girls doing basic engineering at 11. This is now considered to be such a success, even by the Government, that they are encouraging other UTCs to start at 11, and any new ones that come along will go from 11 to 18.

The second thing is that the present Secretary of State is the first Secretary of State who likes technical education. He has made it his principal responsibility, which he has done because he came from a manufacturing background and worked with businesspeople in factories. He went to visit the UTC in Plymouth about 10 days ago and was very impressed. The Navy supports the Plymouth one very strongly, so he saw naval ratings helping with the teaching in the college. Again, it produces higher apprentices at 18. When he left the college he said:

“We should never underestimate the importance and the power that technical, vocational qualifications have in terms of driving our economic performance. And UTCs like the one I visited at Plymouth today are a perfect exemplar of what more we need to be doing in the future”.


He is the first Secretary of State for 10 years who has said anything nice about UTCs.

Michael Gove was totally opposed to them; he did not believe in technical education below 16; the other three flitted over technical education. So that is very good and, as a result, we are going to be allowed to make applications for new UTCs. We have three going in next month, and one is opening in Doncaster this year. So the tide is behind me, the sun is actually not blinding my eyes, and I feel some sense of motion. I cannot say that it has happened entirely with the help of the department—but even it is now being helpful, because it realises that we have to do something quite dramatic in order to catch up with the rest of Europe and the rest of the world in technical education.

Apprenticeships

Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts

Monday 13th May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

As the noble Lord is aware, we have listened consistently to feedback from employers since the scheme began two years ago, which is why we extended the time employers could use their levy from 18 to 24 months. We have also increased the amount of money they can pass down their supply chain. We continue to engage regularly with all employer groups.

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his personal support of university technical colleges. Some 30% of students from these 48 colleges become apprentices each year. The one at Sellafield had 80% apprentices last year, which compares with an average of only 6% from ordinary comprehensives in England. All technical education is being squeezed out of pre-16 education, because it is being asked to follow EBacc. EBacc should be scrapped if you want more apprenticeships.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

I disagree with my noble friend on EBacc, but applaud all the work he has done on UTCs and their role in the apprenticeship programme.

School Exclusion: Timpson Review

Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts

Tuesday 7th May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

My Lords, I warmly welcome the Timpson report and the reaction to it that we have heard from the Minister tonight. I hope that it will lead to a significant reduction in the number of pupils who are excluded—or off-rolled or home educated or sent to PRUs—which has grown far too much in the past few years.

It is very welcome to see that the consultation process that the Minister announced is so wide, and I am glad that he is in charge—he is the Minister in the department who is driving this policy, and we should be grateful for that. In the consultation process, I hope that he will ask the head teacher who excludes to meet with the local authority and the parents to determine a plan for the education of the student who is being excluded, and to review that plan, and for Ofsted to examine it in its inspections.

The Minister should also not exclude the possibility of some financial support for parents when they have to take on the responsibility of educating their children. One cost that should certainly be paid for by the school is for the examinations that the student takes. Those cost about £300 to £400 per set of examinations and, as those now have to be announced, that is the very least that should be provided for them.

In general, I warmly support the report. This is a major step forward in the education system.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

I thank my noble friend Lord Baker for his supportive comments, and I agree with everything that he said. There are 30 recommendations in the Timpson report, and we are broadly supportive of all of them. However, Timpson stresses that we need to be careful about how we implement any of his recommendations and that we should have careful consultation with key stakeholders, parents in particular, on how we take matters forward. For example, by making permanent exclusions more difficult, we do not want to push the problem into another bucket such as off-rolling or misuse of the different attendance codes. But we all share the objective that we want to reduce the problem in the system.

Education: Art and Design

Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts

Thursday 17th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, we clearly need to prioritise our bursaries budget so that we can incentivise applications in subjects where it is hardest to attract applicants. The vacancy rate, though, for art and design teachers as a percentage of teachers in post is lower than for music; indeed, over the last two years we have seen an increase in the number of applicants for both art and design and drama.

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

My Lords, is the Minister aware that GCSEs in design and technology have fallen by 30%, which is disastrous? I therefore welcome the support for university technical colleges because our 14,000 students do technical subjects at 16 to 18. Does he welcome the new Ofsted policy from Amanda Spielman, under which in the future Ofsted will concentrate less on exam results and more on a broad and balanced curriculum? This is good for art, music and design and technology.

Free Schools: Educational Standards

Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts

Thursday 10th January 2019 Grand Committee

[Lord Nash (Con)]

My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to open this debate on free schools and the programme of this Government and the previous coalition Government, which I think I can safely say has been an unqualified success. It has been a success on many fronts: on quality and on bringing capacity, choice, innovation and competition to the system.

I will deal firstly with quality. Some 32% of free schools inspected have been judged outstanding by Ofsted, compared with 21% of all other schools, and 86% have been judged good or outstanding. This is truly remarkable, considering how early in their life free schools are inspected, when they have little if any test data to show and Ofsted inspectors generally are not rushing to award outstanding ratings to schools with few or no results. It shows that the pupils in these schools must be making good progress and that the schools must be demonstrating this to Ofsted.

It really is striking that free schools are 50% more likely to be rated outstanding than other schools. Last year, for the fourth year running, primary free schools were among the top-performing schools in the year 1 phonics screening check and key stage 1 SATs tests. Last year, for the second year running, secondary free schools were the highest performers at Progress 8, with an average score of +0.24. Indeed, four out of the top 10 performers at Progress 8 last year were free schools: Dixons Trinity Bradford, Eden Girls, William Perkin Church of England and Tauheedul Boys. At key stage 5 we have the London Academy of Excellence in Newham sending many of its pupils to Russell group universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, clearly raising the game of other sixth forms in Newham. At King’s maths school last year, 99% of students achieved an A or A* in maths A-level.

On capacity, 442 free schools have been opened, providing nearly 300,000 new school places. Adding those approved and in the pipeline but not yet open brings the total to more than 700. Half have been opened in the 30% most deprived areas of the country, and 83% address a need for places.

I must pay tribute to the free schools team at the Department for Education, headed by Mela Watts. You do not normally become a civil servant expecting to find yourself as a kind of venture capitalist opining on the merits of new organisations, but the people in the free schools team have adapted brilliantly to that challenge. I must also recognise the very significant role now played by regional schools commissioners in assessing free schools proposals.

On costs, free schools have been brought in at a cost one-third lower than under the preceding Labour Government’s BSF programme. Finding sites for these schools obviously is not easy, particularly in inner cities. I must also pay tribute in this regard to the Department for Education’s property arm, LocatED, very ably run by Lara Newman, which has been particularly effective and imaginative in this regard. Free schools have been opened not just in former offices and factories but in former police stations, a church, on top of a supermarket and in one case in a former fire station. I remember visiting that school. The planners had insisted for some reason that the pole that the firemen used to slide down had to be kept in place. I was particularly upset that, for health and safety reasons, I was not allowed to slide down it. I am delighted that 34 specialist free schools have been opened and 41 AP free schools, with more to come.

On innovation, the Sutton Trust has found that one-third of free schools have been shown to demonstrate a genuinely innovative approach to ethos and curriculum. Unfortunately, a limited number of schools have engaged with the knowledge-rich curriculum and teacher-led instructional approach now shown to be the most successful compared with the now debunked more progressive approach followed in this country for the past 30 years. As that approach is favoured by the Government, with hindsight it might have been better if the Government had been more prescriptive in this regard and aligned their policies more. I exhort them to do that in future.

However, there has been innovation in other areas. Dixons Trinity Academy, Bradford, follows Carol Dweck’s “growth mindset” approach. There is innovation at the four maths schools at King’s College London, in Exeter, in Cambridge and at the University of Liverpool—the latter two are in pre-opening—at Saracens High School, Barnet, which is supported by Saracens rugby club, and at Bolder Academy in Hounslow, which has teamed up with Sky—to name but a few.

Of course, the free schools programme has provided much-needed competition for the state school sector, as has the academy programme. All monopolies suffer from a lack of competition, which breeds inefficiency and complacency—a point that Marxists always seem to miss when they are keen to create yet more monopolies. The free schools programme has been particularly effective at providing competition and creating an environment in which a rising tide lifts all boats.

In conclusion, I pay tribute to my right honourable friend Michael Gove, my noble friend Lord Hill—I see that he is in his place—who started the programme, my noble friend the Minister, who continues it so well, and my noble friend Lord Baker, who has been involved in it so much. I also pay tribute to my noble friend Lord O’Shaughnessy—I see that he is also in his place—who invented the programme with his 2005 paper, More Good School Places. I particularly want to mention the teachers, school leaders, MATs and sponsors who have supported the programme since its early days, when it often faced significant opposition. In this regard, I will mention in particular Katharine Birbalsingh at Michaela Community School, Ed Vainker at Reach Academy, Feltham, Hamid Patel at Tauheedul and Luke Sparkes at Dixons Trinity, Bradford—but there are many more. Those of us who have been involved in starting new ventures, organisations and schools know how challenging it is; we should be extremely grateful to these social entrepreneurs and pioneers.

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

My Lords, I cannot speak in the debate, unfortunately, as I must be in the Chamber because I will be the last speaker on Monday night. I want to place on record the educational world’s thanks to my noble friend Lord Nash for his enthusiasm in creating the free schools movement. Without him and my noble friend Lord Hill, we would not be where we are.

I was a bit disappointed that my noble friend Lord Nash did not mention UTCs, which are a form of free school too. They are funded in the same way, are independent of local authorities and have some of the best results in the country, which we are proud of. We produce 30% of apprentices compared with 7% from other sectors, and 47% of our students go to university, three-quarters of whom do so to study STEM subjects. My noble friend supported us strongly in that, for which I thank him. Indeed, the UTC in Pimlico will join my noble friend’s MAT in Westminster later this year.

[Lord Nash]

I am flattered by my noble friend’s remarks. I am sure that other noble Lords will mention UTCs, which are of course an important part of the programme.

Children: Welfare, Life Chances and Social Mobility

Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts

Thursday 1st November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

I congratulate the noble Baroness on initiating this debate on the impact of education on social mobility. She is quite right to emphasise that if we are to improve social mobility it must start in nursery schools and primary schools. They do a good job of it, but it runs into the sand at later stages, particularly when youngsters transfer from primary to secondary at age 11. The 11 to 14 age range in schools is known as key stage 3. Quite frankly, it is a mess and recognised as one. We have a lot of enthusiastic primary school children at the age of 11; by 13 or 14 a lot are disenchanted, disengaged and fed up. They are not learning anything that will help them get a job. What do they do? They have high absentee rates and unruly behaviour. Some get expelled by their heads. The capacity of heads to expel has now grown out of all proportion. There will be a report on this to the Government, who will have to restrain the capacity of heads to expel children because an expelled child is on the road to a culture of gangland. There is no question about that at all.

There is a very real problem with what to do with this key stage from age 11 to 14. This is one of the reasons why, for the past 10 years, I have been pioneering UTCs. These children are disengaged because they are following the Gove curriculum—a highly concentrated academic curriculum called Progress 8 and EBacc, which is a disaster. It is word for word the exact curriculum announced by the Secretary of State for Education in 1904, except he had one technical subject: drawing. Technical work is being extruded. If you visit your secondary schools you will find that they are not learning any technical skills at all. That is down by 57%. If you stay longer you will find that dance is down by 45%, drama down 29%, media and film studies down 34%, music down 23% and performing or expressive arts by 63%.

The well-rounded curriculum which I tried to devise in the late 1980s is now disappearing from our schools. It is one of the reasons why the young are so disenchanted and disengaged. The curriculum in the UTCs is quite different. For two days of the week, a student at a UTC will make things with their hands and design things on computers. Local businesspeople come in and teach, and bring in projects for the students to work on in teams. Students will get work experience and visit other companies. It is one reason why, although we have a very difficult intake, we have little disruption and, as I will show in a moment, the best destination data of any schools in the country.

As we have 50 such schools and 14,000 students, we are now producing a lot of data. Last year, we looked at what 4,000 students did before they joined us at 14. It is a shocking record. We found that 6% had been expelled by their previous school—in a normal school, the figure is 0.1% for such children. Another 6% had had long, fixed-term exclusions. We found that 3.5% had come from home education. When home education is good, it is good; when it is bad, it is horrid, and we get quite a lot of the horrid cases. In all, if we include those on pupil premium, our proportion of challenging students is 30% to 40%. No other secondary schools have that level of challenge. We face up to that challenge; we are very reluctant to expel. We immediately start teaching those children by giving them practical skills. We find that, half way through the first term, they suddenly realise that they are at an entirely different college. What is more, we treat those youngsters at 14 as adults, which they recognise: there is mutual respect.

We are therefore major agents of social mobility. I am proud that our destination data—what happens to the children when they leave—is the best in the country. Last July, we had 2,000 leavers. The head of each school has to identify what has happened to each child who has left. We have shown that that very few are unemployed—between 1% and 3%. A normal school would have 8% to 11% unemployed. We have 30% who become apprentices; in a normal school, the figure is only 7%. We find that 43% go to university, which is a bit lower than for a normal school, but of those, three-quarters do STEM subjects. They do not do the S and M of STEM but the T and E—technology and engineering, which has disappeared from ordinary schools. Can you believe this? I hope that you do, because it is true. That is extraordinary. When an ordinary secondary school says, “We do a lot of STEM subjects”, they are teaching science and maths; they are not teaching technology and engineering.

Every year, we produce employable engineers at 16 and 18. We are also proud that we get some into Russell group universities. We now recruit at 14 and 16. As an experiment, we have a feeder school of 11 to 14 in Dartford, where we teach a different curriculum from that taught by schoolteachers at 11 to 14. It is heavily oversubscribed, and those students will go straight into the UTC beside it.

We have to recognise that the fourth industrial revolution in which we are living will destroy a massive number of unskilled jobs: driverless cars, driverless lorries, warehouses and all the rest of it—if you get anything from Amazon any time, your hand first touches it when someone knocks on your door. All that is going to happen in spades. It will also cut swathes through middle management because of artificial intelligence. The career of a bank manager has disappeared. My local bank has two girls at a desk instead of 10 clerks and two or three people in the background as managers. That has all gone, but we do not quite know what jobs will emerge. It is therefore the duty of our education system to provide skills for youngsters which are very adaptable. The skill that our youngsters have when they leave at 18 is that they have made things with their hands; they have fixed things. Neither of those happens in schools today. Our students have designed things—again, that hardly happens in other schools; and they have done problem solving and worked in teams, which does not happen in our schools at all today. We are trying to equip our youngsters with skills which will improve their choices in life.

I know my time is almost up but I want to end with one statistic. Toxteth had race riots in 1981. I was the Minister; I had to go and help and I established technology centres. If you are a student in Toxteth today you have an 11% chance of going to university. We have a UTC at the edge of Toxteth which took 30 students from Toxteth last year—11%? 20%? 40%? 50%? 60%? No, 86% of those students have gone to university. Among their brothers down the road it is 11%; in our college it is 86%. That is what social mobility is all about.

Education and Training

Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts

Monday 15th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, there are a lot of questions in that question but I can pick out some of the strands. I mentioned the national retraining scheme, which we have announced, which is investing £100 million in retraining. It will include a phased series of impactful interventions, and initial interventions will be in digital and construction. I mentioned national colleges, which are specialist colleges for technical areas. We have started with two for the nuclear industry and high-speed rail. We are also tendering for the institutes of technology at the moment. I assure the noble Lord that we are very focused on this important area.

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

My Lords, is the Minister aware that the 2,000 leavers from university technical colleges since July included virtually no NEETs and that 30% of them became apprentices, which compares to the national average of 7%? Of the 47% who went to universities, three-quarters studied STEM subjects, which is double the national average. As he is the only Minister who has visited UTCs in this or the previous Government and I know he likes them, could he spread his enthusiasm among the Government, because these are outstanding schools—some of the most successful in the country—and we need many more of them, because they produce the skilled engineers at 16 and 18 which the economy needs?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, I am sure the whole House will recognise the enormous effort that my noble friend Lord Baker has put into the UTC movement. He is right: I have put a lot of my own time into it, because I think UTCs are a vital part of the skills network. We are doing as much as we can; the system still needs to improve. I am encouraging the Baker Dearing Educational Trust to allow more UTCs to join multi-academy trusts so that their resources can be pooled. I am also trying to encourage my noble friend to adjust the entry age of UTCs so that they are not in conflict with surrounding schools. Then, local areas can work in harmony.

Education and Society

Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts

Friday 8th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

We are all very grateful to the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury for initiating this debate. I add my personal vote of thanks to him for what the Anglican Church has done for me. We were evacuated during the war to Southport, where I went to a Church of England primary school, Holy Trinity, next to Holy Trinity church at the end of Lord Street. It was a wonderful education. It was a red brick Victorian school with a red brick yard and a large red brick wall all around it with concrete on the top and glass stuck in it to stop people coming over—that was our security. The more challenging students, on Friday afternoon, would climb up and chip the bits of glass away. That was not why I liked it; it gave me a very good, basic education—learning tables by heart, learning poetry by heart and tests every term. They say that tests are oppressive; I had tests every term at this Church of England primary school and it was really the basis of my education, so I thank the most reverend Primate very much for that.

When it comes to education, I am no longer in favour of single-faith schools. The Labour Government and the coalition Government provided those and I think it was a big mistake. Children of all creeds, races and nations should work beside each other, play beside each other, eat beside each other and go home on the coach beside each other. However, I shall not speak any more about religious schools. The education system of our country is on the cusp and will be changed fundamentally by the digital revolution to which the most reverend Primate referred. It will reduce, first, unskilled jobs on a massive and unprecedented scale. The only thing that has maintained the English education system since 1870 has been the large reservoir of unskilled jobs at the bottom, which the 30% of the students who do not do well at school always filled—the drivers’ jobs, the messengers’ jobs and the warehouse jobs. You know that when you buy anything from Amazon today the only time a hand has touched it is when someone knocks on your door. Mercedes is now perfecting the driverless lorry, which will decimate the 3 million truck drivers in America and the 8 million people who run stopovers and sandwich bars. It will happen in this country on a massive scale.

It affects not only unskilled jobs: middle management will be decimated by it. When RBS says it is to close 279 banks, it is not bank clerks who will lose their jobs; it is all middle managers—people who have taken humanities degrees and have a job in a big company, expecting to live the rest of their lives very comfortably. Artificial intelligence and big data will largely destroy those jobs.

I come to the conclusion that we need a fundamental change to increase the technical education of our country. I know that the most reverend Primate is very keen on this, but we are not doing it on a big enough scale. As the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, said, EBacc and Progress 8 are squeezing all technical education out of schools for those below the age of 16. We are the only large country following this policy. The numbers taking the design and technology GCSE, which I introduced in the 1980s, have fallen for the last seven years. That means that fewer and fewer people at 16 have any experience of technical education. By the age of 18, 70% of German students will have had some technical education; in Britain, only 30% will.

Something has to be done about this, which is why, for the last seven years, I have promoted university technical colleges. These are 14-to-18 colleges where we operate from 9 am or 9.30 am to 5 pm every day. I tell the youngsters when they join that this is the beginning of their working life and for two days a week they will be making and designing things with their hands. The great virtue of these colleges—we have 49 of them but should have many more—is that we have the best employment rate of any schools in the country. We have 13,000 students at the moment and will probably have 20,000 by the beginning of next year. Last July, we had 2,000 leavers of whom only 26 were NEETs. Only 26 needed jobseeker’s allowance; that is an unemployment rate of 1%. The unemployment rate for 18 year-olds—a government figure the Government do not talk much about—is 12.2%. Our 1% is a clear demonstration of how successful these colleges are. I am very glad that the new Minister, my noble friend Lord Agnew, knows a great deal about schools and appreciates how important these colleges are. He wants the ones we have to do well and get better. The economy of our country needs many more UTCs. In 1945, we had 300 technical schools, all killed by snobbery. That was a massive mistake. We have to reinvent a large number of technical schools in our country.

I want to say something about computing. As several speakers have said, computing will fundamentally change education—there is no doubt about that. The Government moved one small step forward by saying last year that primary schools should teach coding. I warmly welcomed that. The most successful digital country in Europe is Estonia, whose biggest export is computer scientists. The former President of Estonia has now been employed by the European Commission to determine the digital policy for Europe. I think Estonia has taught coding in its schools for two decades. That whole country is a digitalised advanced economy, and that starts in its primary schools.

Some people ask, “Is it too early to start teaching computing in primary schools?”. After Christmas, I am meeting the headmaster of a school in Telford who has got his students aged 11—in an ordinary primary school, in an area that has 66% disadvantaged pupils—to get through GCSE computing level 2. If he can do that, any primary school should do it. Once I have met him, the Government should find out exactly how he has done it and make sure it can be spread throughout the primary areas. Primary schools should also have 3D printers; those who have seen them realise how important they are for inventiveness and creativity.

In secondary education, the Government are not really doing enough to expand computer studies in schools. Last July 60,000 students took GCSE computing at 16, which sounds a lot, but that compares with the 300,000 who took a foreign language. The Government say that a foreign language should be compulsory at 16 but I do not believe that is necessary. It should be voluntary, but a computer language should be compulsory. It is more important for youngsters today to understand a computer language than to pick up smatterings of a foreign language. That is one change that should be made.

The Government are moving, but at too slow a pace, and this has to be taken in hand. Without it, I am quite sure that youth unemployment at 18, which went up this year by 0.5 percentage points to 12.2%, will increase in the years to come. Brexit will make it even more difficult for us to do this. We have an enormous skills gap: we are 750,000 digital technicians short and 45,000 STEM graduates a year short. This requires fundamental change and a whole new vigour in increasing technical education.

Home Education (Duty of Local Authorities) Bill [HL]

Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 24th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

My Lords, I warmly congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Soley, on devising the Bill and on securing a Second Reading and debate. Home education is an unknown part of the education system. A debate such as this allows a searchlight to be directed to what is a very clouded, obscure and unknown part of the education system. Very little is known about home education.

It is rather different from Victorian times, when home education was very strong indeed. The only schools that taught beyond the age of 11 in those days were the grammar schools, so, as noble Lords will know from Victorian biographies and memoirs, many middle-class families educated their children at home with the advice of a tutor. A tutor was often employed by them and often lived in the home. It was a career for many thousands of people in Victorian England.

Home education is not like that today at all. In my time it was very small. The only cases that ever came my way concerned special educational needs, where parents felt their children were not getting the proper attention in an ordinary school and they could not get into a specialist school, so they asked what they could do. There were also complaints about the curriculum. In those days there was no national curriculum. Every school could devise its own curriculum. If you had a good school you had a good curriculum, a mediocre school a mediocre curriculum and a poor school a poor curriculum. Some of the curriculums were so poor that parents decided they would do better if they educated their children privately. They were very small in number.

I quite agree that there should be a right for parents to withdraw their children. There might be cases where the children have been bullied at school and it has not been properly dealt with. Parents might be deeply offended by the teaching on a very sensitive matter and withdraw their children. I can understand such cases. Parents have rights, but children also have rights. Children have the right to a well-informed education that goes well beyond reading, writing and arithmetic. That is the first right. Their second right is that they can study in a community, however small or large, that is secure and safe, with safeguarding of their interests.

Safeguarding is critical in education. If a school is found in an inspection not to have done the safeguarding of its pupils, it goes straight to special measures—it is as important as that. I am not at all satisfied that there is proper safeguarding in the present arrangements for home-educated children. Home education is awfully difficult for a family. In every family there has to be a breadwinner, so the breadwinner does not see the child for eight or nine hours a day and it is left to the other parent. It does not matter whether the breadwinner is male or female, the husband or the wife. So it is very challenging, particularly for secondary age children, to secure a really good education.

What stage have we got to at the moment? There was an improvement in the Education (Pupil Registration) (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2016, which ensured that schools have a duty to report to the local authority the names of pupils who are withdrawn. That is quite a big step forward; at least we have the basis of a database, but that is about as far as it goes. There have been two reports recently on this problem—the Casey report and the Wood report. The Wood report made some very interesting recommendations on home education that have not really ever been mentioned by the Government. It said:

“They point to the fact that public agencies do not have the right to gather information on the children in such settings and have no way of assessing the level of risk children face. This issue is not covered in multi-agency arrangements”—


this is not only on the education side but on the side of the social services, the police and others—

“and it needs to be”.

It acknowledged that some parents co-operate very closely with the local authority while some do not. However, the report said:

“In both of these cases the local authority is not able to assess either the quality of education being received by the child or whether there are any safeguarding issues that require attention. This needs to be addressed urgently”.


There has been no comment from the Government on those recommendations in the Wood report, which is very disappointing.

As the noble Lord, Lord Soley, said, there is no real number of those who are in home education. The Guardian did a survey of local authorities and came up with a figure of about 30,000—17,000 of secondary school age and 13,000 primary. These are infinitely higher than any of the figures in the past—there is absolutely no doubt about that. It has become a really big issue and I do think that the Government can remain so ignorant about it as they are at the moment. The Minister who is about to reply answered a Written Question as to how much the Government know about this and the answer was that they do not keep any record at all of home education. That is simply unacceptable.

However, the most devastating evidence of what is wrong comes from the letter that Sir Michael Wilshaw wrote to Nicky Morgan a little over a year ago, in 2016. He was looking to the unregulated schools that suddenly emerge in the background in large conurbations particularly. He said:

“In January, I recruited a team of seven experienced inspectors to work exclusively on this critical area of child safety. Since then, these inspectors, working closely with Department for Education (DfE) officials, have identified more than 100 suspected unregistered schools across the country”.


He goes on to say that the inspectors have already asked for seven to be closed, and I expect that he will ask for more. He said:

“The evidence that they have gathered so far during this short period firmly reinforces my belief that there are many more children hidden away from the view of the authorities in unregistered schools across the country than previously thought”.


Many of the parents of children in home education cannot cope, so they send them to the little school around the corner, which is unregistered. In the work that Sir Michael Wilshaw did examining these schools, he said that the accommodation and the buildings were usually totally inadequate and that staff and volunteers who were working in these schools,

“have not been properly checked or cleared to work with children”.

That is a fundamental need for every school. Every teacher and anybody who comes to work there, even on a temporary basis, has to be cleared. The non-teaching staff have to be cleared but nothing of that happened at all. He went on to say:

“Evidence inspectors have gathered over recent weeks has also reaffirmed my belief that there is a clear link between the growth of unregistered schools and the steep rise in the number of children recorded as being home educated in England over the past few years”.


We could put an equal sign between home education and unregistered schools, as most of them will be in those sorts of schools—and they are pretty grim. I had to close some and I am sure that the present Secretary of State will be closing some.

Sir Michael went on to say this, which is very important:

“I have previously voiced concern that many of those operating unregistered schools are unscrupulously using the freedoms that parents have to home educate their children as a cover for their activities. They are exploiting weaknesses in the current legislation to operate on the cusp of the law”—


a nice phrase, that. He continued:

“Many are charging parents thousands of pounds to send their children to these unregistered schools. In doing so, many are providing a sub-standard education, placing children at risk and undermining the government’s efforts to ensure that all schools are promoting British values, including tolerance and respect for others”.


That series of inspections was very much done in the wake of the Trojan schools issue in Birmingham, where the governing bodies of certain comprehensive schools were trying to turn them into Muslim faith schools. Sir Michael said that that was also happening in home education, so something has to be done.

The Bill will set up greater surveillance, which I think would work without eroding a parent’s right to remove. As the noble Lord, Lord Soley, has said, the Bill is capable of being amended but the principle is there. I do not expect the Minister to say that he will accept the Bill willy-nilly. But I hope he will not say that nothing should be done, because if we go on as we are, and if one or two really serious cases of sexual abuse of children who are at home occur, that will blow up under the department—and, I may say, under the Minister as well. The line the Government are taking is, “We will wash our hands of it. It is not really part of our job or responsibilities”. That is totally unacceptable, so I hope that the Minister will be able to say that his department will do more work on this. There are three things that we should ask him to consider.

First, he should consider whether to give local authorities the power to see the children and check on them. That is key to safeguarding, probably including talking to the children in the absence of their parents. Secondly, he should give local authorities power to enter homes and assess the standards of education. That would be entirely reasonable. Thirdly, he should ensure that some form of inspection is available.

The noble Lord, Lord Soley, has devoted a lot of his active political life to this issue, apart from being the chairman of the Labour Party in the House of Commons, and I wish him well. He has done good service by presenting the Bill and I hope that it will lead to significant changes.

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

My Lords—

[Lord Baker of Dorking]

Before the Minister gets up to say that my speech should have been seven minutes, I remind her—she is a new Minister—that on Second Reading, people can speak for as long as they want. It is not a matter for the conduct of this House or a Minister to intervene at this stage, so I have protected your Lordships’ rights to speak for as long as you wish.

English Baccalaureate: Creative and Technical Subjects

Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts

Thursday 14th September 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

My Lords, when I was helping to fashion the national curriculum in the 1980s, I selected 10 subjects. The basic subjects were English, maths and science and seven more to ensure a rounded education, with art and other creative subjects among them. The idea was to prepare GCSEs for the 10 subjects and hope that 70% of schools could reach the standard. In fact it proved to be too ambitious. You do not have to worry too much about bright children because they will survive any education system, and that is true right across the world—if they are not neglected they will do very well. I was more concerned about the long tail of underachievers who were not coping with such a demanding curriculum. So I very much welcomed the Dearing report in 2003 which recommended a simplification of the curriculum. Certain subjects like history, geography and a foreign language were made voluntary, as it were, at GCSE. The world did not fall apart because of that. There was a much greater variety of GCSEs; indeed too many were rather light and careless ones which were quite properly excluded in 2010. On the whole, however, pupils got a much more rounded education as a result.

In 2010, Michael Gove decided to impose the EBacc on the education system. It covers just five subjects: English, maths, science, history or geography and a foreign language. Everyone is expected to take it. The EBacc is the policy of an American educationist called E D Hirsch. There are very few examples around the world where it has worked, but none the less it is what we have got, and of course it has had very serious consequences. As all the speakers in the debate have said, a whole range of subjects have been dropped. From 2010 until now, art, music, drama and dance have all declined at GCSE; that is irrefutable. I am very concerned about design and technology, a subject that I introduced in 1988, where the take-up has fallen by 30%.

By the age of 16, many youngsters will not have had any experience of a technical education at all. It is not surprising that that is in huge contrast to Germany where by the age of 18, some 70% of young people have had experience of a technical education, while in Britain it is 30%. The policy of the Government is to expand technical education, so what proposals does the Minister have to arrest the decline in design and technology? For example, could a bursary be given to teachers of design and technology similar to those which are available to the teachers of maths and physics? There should be a policy to reverse this decline.

The other subject that worries me considerably is the status of computing. At GCSE there are two exams—computer science, which is a tough exam, and a less tough one in IT. This year the take-up of the tough exam rose by 4,000 but the easier one fell by 11,000. This July, 7,000 fewer students took an exam in computing. This is the digital revolution and the Government have a digital strategy, so where do those figures fit into the strategy? I am very concerned about that. The charity I chair wants a fundamental change, but I do not think that this Government are going to bring one in. Perhaps we could settle for something that would move towards it.

At this point I want to put a positive proposal to the Minister. It is not a wrecking proposal, but a positive and helpful one. The concept of a choice between subjects in the EBacc is already in place because students must choose whether to study history or geography. Why can there not be a choice between a foreign language and computing? Some 300,000 students study a foreign language while only 65,000 take computing. It is more important that the students of today should have an understanding of a computer language than a smattering of a foreign language, particularly when we are on the edge of having instantaneous translation. It will soon be possible to speak in your own language and have it translated into the language of the person you are talking to, and his response translated into your own language. Given that, I do not believe that the importance of learning a foreign language is anything like as great as it was. This is a positive proposal and I hope that one day I might get a response to it.

The real problem with the Department for Education is that it is rather bifurcated. There is the side where my noble friend Lord Nash is—I should like to thank him for the very considerable support he has given to UTCs; he understands what we are trying to do—while the other side of the department is concerned with FE colleges and so on. At the moment they seem to be on different tracks. The FE side wants more apprentices, but if a student has studied only academic subjects up to the age of 16, it is very difficult for that student to be employed by someone as an apprentice. They have not had any practical experience. This is the great advantage of university technical colleges. By the age of 16, our students will have worked in teams on projects, something you do not get in normal schools. They will have worked on problem solving, something else you do not get in normal schools. They will have made things with their hands and designed things on a computer, which you do not get in normal schools any longer. These students are highly employable as apprentices.

By far the most remote UTC in the country is up on the energy coast near Sellafield. It is 100 miles away from the next UTC. In July this year, the school placed 59 apprentices, 30 of whom were 16 years old. No other school in the country will place anywhere near even 10 apprentices, let alone 59. If those young people had gone to normal schools in Cumbria, they would not be apprentices at 16. Employers want them because they have handled metal, they have designed things, they have solved problems, and they have experience of all those things which no longer happen in normal schools. This particular UTC also achieves a 96% pass rate in engineering and 80% in English and maths. Some sixth-formers took the triple A in engineering and they all got A*s. This simply would not have happened if they had been studying for the EBacc.

On most days the Minister likes UTCs and he knows what we are trying to do. There has to be a greater variety. We have to train youngsters today for the jobs of tomorrow, and not with the sort of curriculum that I studied years ago, which is what the EBacc is. In fact, it goes back even further. Its progenitor was the curriculum announced by a Minister at the board of education in 1904. It is word for word the same curriculum. Those who support the EBacc so strongly should perhaps ask why it has not worked well for 120 years and why are we still committed to it.

I hope that my proposal to offer a choice at the age of 16 between foreign languages and computing will be considered seriously by the Government.