Education: Development of Excellence

Lord Bates Excerpts

Thursday 18th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates]

My Lords, it is an honour to take part in this debate. As it has gone on, I have felt less like taking part and more like taking notes, because the quality of the discussion has been so tremendous. We have had the privilege of hearing from former Secretaries of State for Education and former Chief Inspectors of Schools, and I applaud the marvellous way in which the debate was secured and introduced by my noble friend Lady Perry.

Where can I make a contribution here? I speak from personal experience of having been educated in what would today be categorised as a failing inner-city comprehensive, and I will focus on that aspect. We know that there is a great difference in performance and outcomes between the most materially poor parts of society and the most materially affluent parts. According to the Sutton Trust, 18% of free-school-meal pupils achieve five GCSEs, including English and maths, compared to 61% of those who do not qualify for free school meals.

My right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Education is fond of making the analogy that there are more pupils graduating with three straight As at A-level from Eton College than from a cohort of 80,000 free-school-meal pupils each year. These statistics tell us to focus on a core problem. Yes, we need to continue to push the boundaries of excellence at the top but we need to raise the bar at the bottom, and we have done. I share my noble friend Lord Lucas’s critique that we have gone through 25 years of progressively improving educational standards in this country. My noble friend Lord Baker deserves a great deal of credit for initiating that period of change. During that time, there have been huge changes in teacher training, the quality of teaching and the fabric of the school environment. Having been involved in setting up one of the flagship city technology colleges 20 years ago in Gateshead, I know what a difference having an excellent fabric makes.

We have focused on tackling the problem in many ways, but going back to my experience of a failing inner-city comprehensive, the dimension that we still wrestle with in inner cities to this day is the level of expectations. The one difference between the top public school and the inner-city comprehensive is still the level of expectations—not so much of the teachers, although that is a factor, but of the parents and the pupils—as to how they are going to achieve and excel in life. There is still a deeply grained mentality that academia is “not for the likes of us”, and if we are going to bring about lasting change in this country, that needs to be tackled head-on.

At my school, you would think that what we were in business for was to produce professional footballers, and we did phenomenally well at that. But if that same expectation was put into the maths classroom or the chemistry lab, we would deliver outstanding scientists, mathematicians and business leaders. I urge my noble friend to think about the role of great expectations in education.