King’s Speech

Lord Hampton Excerpts

Tuesday 14th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to take part in a debate like this, following the noble Baroness, Lady Featherstone. I add my congratulations to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Newcastle, the noble Baroness, Lady Owen of Alderley Edge and the noble Lord, Lord Ranger of Northwood, on their excellent maiden speeches. They were extremely thoughtful, and I look forward to hearing more from them in the future.

As the noble Viscount said, we are justly proud of the thriving creative sector in this country and how many billion pounds it adds to the UK economy. We have world leaders in architecture, music, film, arts, advertising, design, fashion and photography, among many others. No one is born with creative ability. The skills are learned in the same way that any other skill is learned, in the same way that one will learn to kick a football or a rugby ball or program a computer. A child who is encouraged to make marks will continue to make better marks; someone who is told that their drawing of an elephant looks like a blob will give up, convinced that they cannot draw. Skills that are given the oxygen of encouragement will grow; talents that are ignored will wither and eventually die. It seems more and more that we are producing world-beating creatives despite the curriculum.

As ever, I must declare an interest as a teacher and ex-head of department of design and technology at a state school in Hackney; I thank the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, for his bigging-up of design technology. How are we teaching the young designers of tomorrow? Are we giving them the confidence to thrive and the tools to do it with? We are trying, but it is not easy. The EBacc and “BritBacc” are a flat back four ranged against the creative subjects. The current curriculum is outdated with its obsession with facts that our students replicate for two days in the summer, and that is what they and their schools are judged on. Although I accept that we need a foundation of basic knowledge before we can build learning, I think that we have gone too far. As Sherlock Holmes said:

“I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out … so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it”.


I know what he means. I can recite Archimedes’s principle, something that I learned when I was 15 but have never used, yet I cannot remember my wife’s mobile number—maybe we all think that. I wonder whether the change of Schools Minister will mean a change of thinking; I hope so.

Despite the Minister’s praise of the creative media, it was not really mentioned in the gracious Speech, apart from a certain amount of talk of broadcast. It also mentioned secondary education only with the introduction of the advanced British standard. This has the laudable aim of broadening post-16 education, but seemingly by adding maths and English to the mix, rather than giving students a liberal arts-style offering, for instance. Better, more relevant maths is what we need, not more maths.

We need to change our mindset so that creativity and culture play a much stronger role in our education. I was reminded of this last Friday at school. It was PHSCE day— Personal Health Social and Citizenship Education Day—when the timetable is collapsed, and the students study a separate agenda for the day concentrating on topics outside the normal curriculum. While other students were practising putting condoms on plastic phalluses, or learning to write CVs, I was helping a form of year 10s from a mixed religious, ethnic and socioeconomic background discuss the subject of extremism; a topical subject indeed. Much of the teaching was a fairly passive affair and it was only when we allowed the students to debate the subject of free speech that they became truly animated. What developed was a fascinating debate with many good points made. It occurred to me that the confidence and presentation skills that they learned in that debate was a much better preparation for life than much of the passive educating that had gone before. If we could provide a more engaging, more relevant, more creative curriculum, surely that would help to retain teachers and tempt some of the 1.8 million children who regularly miss education, according to the Children’s Commissioner attendance figures, back into school. It is from these diverse, questioning and engaged students that we must grow our creative sector.

The Creative Majority report published by the APPG on Creative Diversity said that:

“Straight, able-bodied, white men living in London are only 3.5 per cent of the UK population ... Nevertheless, this small minority still dominates the creative sector, and in particular occupy a vast number of the most senior creative roles”.


As you can see, I did not exactly buck the trend during my 25 years as a professional photographer.

The report continues:

“men from privileged backgrounds are five times more likely to work in a creative occupation than working-class women. Someone with a disability from a working-class background is three times less likely to work in a creative occupation than someone who is privileged and able-bodied”.

All we have to do to grow the creative sector in this country is completely change the mindset to attract a diverse workforce in all aspects and restructure our education system to put creative skills at the heart of the curriculum. It is that simple; that should keep us busy until the next general election.