Schools: Data, Digital and Financial Literacy

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Tuesday 14th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I am very sympathetic to the issues that my noble friend raises, but our approach to these issues has been to weave them through multiple aspects of the curriculum. My noble friend will be aware that, for example in relation to maths and computing, this is something that Ofsted will regularly be doing deep dives into when it is inspecting individual schools.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, while I agree very much with what my noble friends Lord Holmes and Lord Baker said, I ask my noble friend to look very carefully at the history curriculum. It really is shameful that young people do not have history as a compulsory subject after the age of 14. It is also shameful that most of them leave school knowing very little about the history of their own country, of Europe or of any part of the world. They have certain samples, such as the Nazis and the Tudors, but there is no chronology. Can we look at that?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I am very happy to take my noble friend’s suggestion back to the department.