Education: Pupils and Young People

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Thursday 28th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, it is as much a privilege as a pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London, whose leadership within his great diocese is, appositely to this debate, a lesson for us all. I offer a warm word of thanks to my noble friend Lady Perry. We first met within the old DES under the late, great Sir Keith Joseph, later Lord Joseph. She has always been a champion—nay, a heroine—on the issues underlying this debate. So she has been today.

The virtue of a debate of short speeches is to concentrate the mind. I have only one subject to raise with my noble friend the Minister: the supply of male teachers in primary schools. I had a great friend from Oxford who won the top history scholarship of his year, then got a first. He played cricket, hockey and squash for the college, secured a short-service commission as a captain in the Royal Army Education Corps and spent the rest of his career as a teacher in primary schools—not even, to the best of my knowledge, becoming a head teacher. Finally, in retirement—or possibly earlier—he was a schools examination marker at a much higher level. We shared many interests, sometimes of an old fogeyish kind, and we corresponded regularly until his sad death early last year. He was much preoccupied with the subject I am raising.

I yield to no one in my admiration for the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, who was an outstanding Minister for both education and transport. He was so in charge of all his briefs that he almost invited supplementary oral questions by making his answers so precise, comprehensive and short that there was always time for more questions. Not all Ministers have that polymath confidence and fluency. When I asked the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, an Oral Question about the state of play on my subject today, he was more reassuring than I expected. Perhaps the numbers were simply, if modestly, moving in the right direction. The fact remains that in 2009-10 male teachers made up just 12 per cent of registered primary school teachers and 28 per cent of primary schools in England had no registered male teachers at all.

Why do I worry about it? My noble friend Lord Baker of Dorking and I are of the same age, give or take three months. We therefore entered the primary stage at around the same time and during the war. He has always been a constructive martinet on grammar, spelling and punctuation. I share that enthusiasm. We jointly suppose it is because, during the war, the absence of so many at the war meant that we were taught by teachers of an earlier generation, who may well have themselves been educated in the Victorian and Edwardian eras.

I do not know where my noble friend Lord Baker was at school in the war, although I believe it was in the north-west. I was at a rural preparatory school in Buckinghamshire where, even during the war, the majority of the staff were still male. I pay tribute to the excellence of the teaching we received. I do not want to make too much of this but the same male majority was true of the prep schools attended by my three sons on the Isle of Purbeck, 30 or more years ago. Their great school rival was the similar school down the road, attended by the late, great Michael Foot. I do wonder, however, if there is not a monograph to be written on the scale of the effect of this male majority of teachers at that age on the comparative overall performance of the independent sector.

I raise one other consideration. During the 1998 defence review under the previous Government, when I was still in the other place, my own defence of the two TA units in my inner city constituency included in my armoury the fact that 43 per cent of their cadet force recruits were from ethnic minorities and 53 per cent were from single-parent families. There is no doubt that a male-oriented environment in those TA units went some way to providing structure in what were sometimes fairly broken lives. Both my TA units survived the cull.

I end with a debt of honour to one of my own teachers from the war, not least because at 93 he is still alive and can read it. When we look back on those who had formative effects on us up to the age of 25 but outside our own families—I reiterate the significance of this in depleted families—they are sometimes clergy, sometimes sports coaches, sometimes contemporary friends but predominantly from the ranks of our teachers. Freddie Madden was a history postgraduate student at Christ Church College, Oxford, when war broke out. He could not serve because of health problems. He was planning an academic career, which he resumed at Oxford in the winter of 1946-47. He deliberately declined to teach history so that he would not gain any academic advantage over his contemporaries who were away fighting. He taught English grammar and literature brilliantly, and beyond that introduced us to a wider culture. This is at the margins of the issue I am raising because of the special wartime circumstances, but the impact of his teaching was not and is not.