Schools

Lord Bishop of Lincoln Excerpts

Thursday 16th November 2017 Grand Committee

[The Lord Bishop of Ely]

Follow that! My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for having made this debate possible and for providing the opportunity for us to focus not only on a fair distribution of funding for our schools and the children in their care but on fair access to good teaching in good and imaginative schools.

The Church has, down the centuries, provided a constant yet adaptable force in education. The Church of England recently produced a new vision for education, two pillars of which are dignity and hope. As the ultimate aim of our schools is to promote human flourishing, we are particularly concerned—particularly in our emphasis on supporting schools in areas of disadvantage—to enable every child to fulfil his or her aspirations, and indeed to be given the opportunity to have any aspirations in the first place.

While a “good school” can be defined to a certain extent by its Ofsted results, schools must remember to embrace excellence and academic rigour within a wider framework. A good school must educate the whole person so that one day our school pupils will become successful members of our society as adults in their roles as citizens, neighbours, parents and people committed to the public good, as well as those who are called to be economically productive. One way in which this access to equal education is to be served better than it is at the moment is by thinking about how we allow children and young people to access technical education alongside academic prowess. In the diocese of Ely, we have won a new secondary school where academic and technical education will be provided in parallel on the same campus alongside a special school.

Fundamentally, however, we must seek out areas where there is particular disadvantage and strive to bring children living in these places on to an equal footing with their more advantaged counterparts. The Secretary of State has effectively identified parts of the country where we need focus and change through the means of education. One of these “opportunity areas” happens to be Fenland in east Cambridgeshire in my diocese of Ely. Along with our local MPs, the Church is keen to engage further with the initiative to support local communities and as a means of improving attainment and aspiration in the area. I look forward to seeing how all the elements, such as the life skills programme and work experience opportunities, tie together to ensure that every child receives the best education possible. As these new resources and strategies continue to be developed, we must also ensure that education is funded with future economic and industrial needs in mind, as the noble Lord, Lord Bird, has already said.

In the same vein, I hope that the national funding formula, announced in September, will go some way to ensuring that schools receive what they need in order to cater for the local demographic. Indeed, the formula has resulted in more funding for each of the schools in the diocese of Ely, although there is a slight concern that, due to the increase in pension payments for teaching and non-teaching staff, over 40% of the extra proceeds will go towards addressing funding concerns in the pension schemes as opposed to flowing through to the front line. As such, I emphasise the importance of resources and strategies that allow funding to go directly to solving the issues which the Secretary of State herself has identified.

In the light of what the noble Lord, Lord Bird, said about pedagogy, it is very important that we train our teachers to prepare their pupils for a very different future, and this requires both rigour and imagination. However, I would still like to stick up for our teaching profession and for the imagination and commitment they apply to their vocation. I particularly pay tribute to teachers who commit themselves to working in very difficult schools where there is acute disadvantage and problems with discipline and even violence. These teachers persist in their vocation for the sake of the children and with a vision for the future which those children might have.

To go back to 1811, which is even further back than 1972, this ties in with Joshua Watson, who founded the national society which I now chair. The aim, long before state education was conceived, was to give the poorest children access to education to enable them to flourish, and ultimately to give them worth as citizens.

New resources, strategies and fair funding for school education are components of a much larger drive to improve social mobility. One of the most important things about social mobility is that it is not conceived simply as moving to London. We need to equip and empower young people, through a variety of points of access to education, to be contributors with vigour and energy in the places where they already live, so that those places are also regenerated. By supporting the most disadvantaged children at the earliest stages, we can help to build character and in turn produce generous and adaptable contributors to their communities and to wider society, whatever economic and industrial developments the future may bring.