Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Grocott Excerpts

Committee stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Monday 20th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Durham]

My Lords, having said to the Minister that I would be quiet today, I had forgotten that this group did not get debated last week when I was away. I support all these amendments. It is a privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts. He and I do not always agree, but on this occasion I want first to thank him for his incredibly helpful contribution on primary and secondary legislation. It was astoundingly clear and helpful. I thank him very much and hope it will be heeded by Her Majesty’s Government. Secondly, I agree with him on Amendment 168, but I will come back to that in a moment.

I support Amendment 91 on primary careers guidance because it would help to break down false dreams, as well as raise aspirations. I hear too many false dreams arise from children in primary schools when I visit them, which is a regular feature of my work and that of all my right reverend friends. We visit primary and secondary schools and listen to children there. We absolutely want to raise aspirations but we do not want to give false hopes either. Well thought-through careers education at the primary level helps this.

It also helps children in primary schools develop the sense of work as vocation and calling rather than simply a job that you do to earn money. We need to recover a much deeper sense that work is part and parcel of being a human and that it is not simply what you get paid for but what you contribute to the life of society as a whole and what helps you flourish as a person. If we do not inculcate that thinking during the primary years, we only ever go down the more and more utilitarian road that work is about what you get paid for so that you can enjoy yourself in the rest of life, rather than enjoying work and being fulfilled in it.

Such careers education also helps the sense of why it is important to have literacy and numeracy. The reason why I regularly struggle with the emphasis on literacy and numeracy as if they were utterly distinct subjects, rather than part of education for the fullness and wholeness of life, is that literacy and numeracy are there for a purpose, not simply for their own sake. They enable people to fulfil their calling and their task, and lots of children struggle with literacy and numeracy because they do not see any purpose in it. However, if you get a vision of what work and career might look like—I pick up the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Knight—it must be about the potential numbers of careers that you might hold in the future. Very few people now end up with simply one career, and certainly will not in the future. Therefore I strongly support Amendment 91.

On Amendment 168, I thank the noble and right reverend Lord who used to sit on these Benches for his proposal. I am utterly behind it. However, there are two things that I wish were there but which are not at the moment. I would have liked to have seen something on the social responsibility that flows from the five areas outlined. Freedom, respect for persons and care for the environment require social responsibility. This is where I agree again with the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, that we need something around the fact that rights and responsibilities go together. I hope that the Government will pick up this proposal, and that would be one of the possible tweaks that I would look at.

On Amendments 158 and 171I, I say “Absolutely” but—I am never sure whether I am allowed to do this—I have a question for the opposition leadership, who proposed this rather than for the Minister. Amendment 171I says “All schools”. Does this therefore mean that we are introducing work experience at primary level and if so, what does that look like, or is secondary level meant? If it is the former, it ties in with primary careers stuff and so on; I am just teasing out how that would look.

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, for spotting an obvious flaw that needs to be dealt with. She explained it so clearly, and I hope that it is accepted and moved forward.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

My Lords, there are some splendid amendments in this group. I very much liked what the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, had to say. I will speak briefly to the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, and to that of my noble friend Lady Morris. The former is an extremely important amendment on the broad principle that it is never too early to widen the horizons of children at school as to what may be possible and the options that may be there. We all know that there is a tendency for the career horizons of students to get narrower rather than broader, and if it is not there at a very early age then certainly is by the time they are in secondary school. They are affected by their peer group very strongly, and I hope that it is not too old-fashioned a phrase to say that it is a matter not just of gender stereotypes but of class stereotypes.

People are often restricted in their view of what is possible by the careers of people they know, such as their parents. These may be very good choices, but people need the whole bandwidth, as it were. I hope it is not seen as too facetious a comment—I know we are not talking about private schools—but if you attended Eton College and said that your career ambition was to be Prime Minister, that would be a reasonable and statistically likely objective, given that, I think, 20 Prime Ministers went to Eton. If that was your objective in life, the strong recommendation would be to go to Eton, assuming, of course, your parents could afford to send you there. If, however, you had been to the schools that most of us have been to and had said in your teenage years that your ambition was to be Prime Minister, you would have been told to sit down, have a drink of water and be more realistic in your expectations. I really think that before children start commenting, essentially in the same language as their peer group or their social background, the broader the options made plain to them the better—and, of course, the ways of achieving those options.

The other amendment I want to speak to is the one from my noble friend Lady Morris. I emphasise that, for me, the issue is not so much about parental examination, if you like, of life sciences, life relationship skills and the like; it is about the principle of accountability that could apply to any area of school activity. I must admit that it was news to me—I am nothing like the professional that she is—that schools could contract out pretty well anything they liked. To take an absurd example, it is possible that parents would not be able to discover what was in the English curriculum at school because it was commercially sensitive. Quite apart from that being unacceptable, it seems pretty impractical. Given that these subjects are being taught in schools to teenagers and the details of the curriculum are being withheld from parents because they are commercially sensitive, you would simply have a situation in the family where a teenager came home from school, their parents asked what they had been doing that day and the teenager responded by saying, “I’m afraid I can’t discuss it—it’s commercially sensitive.” On a practical level, even if the principle is right, which I do not think it is, my noble friend’s amendment should be supported.

[Lord Triesman (Lab)]

My Lords, I support pretty much all the amendments in the group. The one tabled by the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, is particularly helpful and casts a glow over most of the others. That is why I plead it in aid when talking about Amendment 171F, spoken to by my noble friend Lady Morris of Yardley and so strongly supported by both the noble Lords, Lord Sandhurst and Lord Macdonald of River Glaven, with both of whom I align myself.

I should like to make three points. First, almost all of us in ordinary conversation talk about the importance of the relationship and the fact that education is a team sport—schools, kids and parents are all involved. We take it as a truth and do not question it any further. But the other thing about this team sport is that none of the bits is sealed off from another. All of us who have brought up children must have had the experience of them coming home and wanting to talk about something that has arisen in the curriculum they are being taught. If we do not have the smallest idea of what that might be, it will be a much less fruitful conversation than any parent, or the child who introduced the subject, would want to have. These points have to be fundamental and this amendment goes to the heart of the issue. If we mean that it is a team—something shared and collaborative—it must mean that we are all in the position where we can talk about what the other experiences and what the other knows. If not, it does not really mean anything. I hope that point will be taken very strongly.