Free Schools and Academies
Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts(1 week, 4 days ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)
My Lords, I declare an interest in that I am the life president of the Baker Dearing Educational Trust, which promotes university technical colleges.
The Minister will be glad to know that I support many things in the Bill: money for under-fives, breakfast clubs and special educational needs. I also support the registration of home education, which is a tautology—it is more “home” than “education”. But I am not so keen on the Government’s thinking about the new curriculum. There are glimpses of what they would like to do in Clauses 40, 41 and 45. They would like maintained schools to merge with free schools and academies in order to have a broad and balanced curriculum. That will not in itself produce economic growth. Over the past few years I have learned that if you are to have economic growth you need difference, variety, choice and competition, and those are not in the Bill.
What is needed most in education today is an injection into ordinary comprehensives of strong technical and practical education. If the new schools that Ministers want to create have just a broad and balanced curriculum, there will be no space at all in the teaching week for high-quality technical and practical education. You cannot do it; you have to spend much more time than that.
That is why, over 15 years ago, Ron Dearing and I devised a new type of technical school, a university technical college. It is different because it is for 14 to 18 year-olds and has a very practical curriculum determined by local employers. It is also so different because 14 year-olds in their first term will spend two days a week either in workshops, in computer or product design, visiting local companies or having work experience there. That cannot be fitted into an obligation to do a full national curriculum. We of course teach English, maths and science to a high level. We get very good marks in T-levels and A-levels, and we are very proud of that.
University technical colleges are never called free schools. We are specialist schools, and we have quite remarkable results. We are so popular that we had to turn away 5,000 children last September, and we will be turning away even more this year. In Ofsted we get over 82% good and outstanding. Every year, 23% of our students who leave at 18 become apprentices, compared with only 4% at an ordinary school; 50% go to university to do STEM subjects, which is 75% better than any other state school; and the rest get local jobs. We are actually promoting economic recovery by 96% of our students going into work or higher education. That is quite a unique contribution and one that should not be sacrificed.
When we started, we focused on engineering, advanced manufacturing and computing. Now it is much more sophisticated. We now have lessons in cybersecurity with GCHQ and lessons in virtual reality, run by games companies, which involve wearing helmets on your head. With automotive companies we have CADCAM, because children have to be able to design on a screen and operate 3D printers. Most children should leave school at 18 knowing how to work a 3D printer, an essential part of all activities in Britain today.
As a result, we help economic recovery more than any other educational institution in the country. We also have a very low unemployment rate of about 4%; the national average is 13.6%. The one thing that the Government are going to have to deal with over the next 14 years is the problem of rising youth unemployment.
If the measure goes through, I hope we recognise that specialist schools such as UTCs should be exempt from the obligations to provide a broad and balanced curriculum. We do English, maths and science, but we also need time for the practical and technical work that local employers lead.
Curriculum and Assessment Review
Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts(2 months, 2 weeks ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
I can, I hope, reassure the noble Baroness that this Government are absolutely committed to ensuring higher standards in our schools—particularly with respect to English and maths, for example, which are fundamental and important skills—and that we do more to close the attainment gap in both English and maths. In recent years, this has grown between those who achieve the highest levels and those who do not achieve so well, and between those who are advantaged and those who are disadvantaged. Everybody in our schools needs access to the most rigorous and effective curriculum and teaching, which is what this Government are committed to delivering.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
I am sorry, but I am tempted by murmurs opposite to remind noble Lords that we have inherited a considerable fiscal challenge—in fact, a £22 billion black hole that we have had to close. Notwithstanding that, the noble Lord makes an important point about the importance of continued funding and particularly capital funding, where we have already made some progress in the most recent spending review, and where this Government will continue to prioritise the needs of our children—both the teachers and the equipment they need to learn.
Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)
Is the Minister aware that, of the students this year taking GCSE, fewer than 20% took computer science? That is appalling. At the same time, a report from 6,000 companies up and down the land, big and small, showed that the biggest thing restricting their growth in profit was their inability to appoint data analysts. Does she not accept that she has responsibility in this matter, and that children leaving school at 18 should be trained in artificial intelligence, data analysis, virtual reality and cyber security? If she does not introduce these changes next year, the Government she supports will not reach the economic growth that they hope for.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
I am sure the noble Lord will know that, in its first report, Skills England identified a lack of digital skills as one of the key areas holding back productivity, and where we need to make progress. I assure him that, whether in schools or later on in life, we will put a priority on the skills that are so important to ensure growth in our economy—and, therefore, future investment in further skills development.
King’s Speech
Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts(6 months, 2 weeks ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
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.