King’s Speech

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Friday 19th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I add my voice of congratulation to my noble friend the Minister not only on her appointment but on the fact that she has made her maiden speech. I look forward to the punchy and forthright way in which policies that have been delivered and proposals that have been fleshed out in the King’s Speech turn themselves into pieces of law that will give us a different sense of direction, and possibly, when implemented, a sense of accomplishment too. So congratulations and thank you for that good start.

I refer to the mention in the King’s Speech of a general term, “raise educational standards”, and to “children’s wellbeing”, and I wish to focus my little intervention there. I look forward to seeing how those things spell out.

I have been reading the recent Better Schools—The Future of the Country report by an educationalist called Tim Clark, in which he focuses down on pupils with SEND—specialist educational needs and disabilities. He writes as follows:

“Particularly concerning is that pupils with SEND are disproportionately from disadvantaged backgrounds and ‘that the discrepancies between and advantaged backgrounds have increased 2010-2020’”.


A variant of that remark, regretting the gap between the haves and the have-nots, appears again and again in one report after another, and has indeed been part of a speech before mine in this debate. There is a bigger battle to be fought than we have time for here today about what to do about the social tendencies that are forcing people away from each other and dividing our communities, and causing those who are disadvantaged to suffer disproportionately. I thought that was worth mentioning, although it is a little tangential to the thrust of the debate.

This debate is taking place while the first report from the Covid inquiry is filling our newspapers. In that report, it is correctly pointed out that 235,000 people died from Covid. All of us regret the particularly high number of people whose deaths occurred in care homes and in the care sector, but we simply have to mention alongside that—as future reports certainly will—the effect of the pandemic on those who lost so much in our schools throughout that period.

I was involved for 20 years with two high schools in inner London, one in Islington and the other in Tower Hamlets, and I spent 12 years as chair of the trustees for those two schools. We noted with great regret how teachers left because Covid had so struck the atmosphere and the possibilities. Ever since, levels of truancy have risen, as the noble Lord on the Lib Dem Benches said, and we continue to witness higher levels of bad behaviour in our classrooms. My question simply has to be this: how do we keep that in focus and not simply think that that was then? There are young people who will be blighted by those years for the rest of their lives and who deserve our attention.

How is it that the charitable foundation that underwrites some of the costs of the schools with which I have been involved spends 12.5% of its distributable income on schools in the state sector, and 65% on the three prestigious public schools that are part of the same foundation? I think it proper to note the economic consequences of some of this Government’s proposals on those in the private sector, but we must not forget that there is tons of charitable money out there that is simply not getting to the poorest people, even when the charities were set up to focus on the poorest people in their own age.

So, with 14 seconds left and the good will of my Chief Whip, which it is very necessary for me to retain, I draw my remarks to a close. There were other things I wanted to say—there were rich things I wanted to say—but, at this stage, the smile on the Minister’s face suffices for my present needs.