Education (Amendment of the Curriculum Requirements for Fourth Key Stage) (England) Order 2012

Lord Hill of Oareford Excerpts

Monday 23rd July 2012 Grand Committee

Moved by

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

That the Grand Committee do report to the House that is has considered the Education (Amendment of the Curriculum Requirements for Fourth Key Stage) (England) Order 2012.

Relevant document: 3rd Report from the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Hill of Oareford)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the legislation committee for its consideration of this order on 2 July. Noble Lords will be aware that the necessary statutory consultation has been undertaken and that the order has already been debated in the other place.

I shall start by setting out the background to the order and why the Government are seeking to remove the duty on schools to teach work-related learning at key stage 4. Noble Lords will remember that last year Professor Alison Wolf was asked to carry out a review of vocational education and make recommendations about how it should be strengthened. Her report was, I think, broadly welcomed on all sides of the House. One of her key findings was that the quality of work experience post-16 needed to be improved, a conclusion with which I think all noble Lords would agree.

I do not think that there will be any difference between us about the importance of good work experience and the contribution that it can make, particularly for those from poorer backgrounds who do not have the same networks and contacts that others from more affluent backgrounds tend to have. It has an important part to play not just in helping to prepare young people for the world of work but in raising aspirations and broadening horizons.

Professor Wolf pointed out in her report that with the raising of the participation age to 17 by 2013 and 18 by 2015, it made more sense for work experience to be carried out at a later age, not least because almost no young people go into full-time paid employment at 16. She also found that employers, for a variety of reasons, were less keen to have young people aged 14 or 15 on their premises than older ones. She concluded that in many cases work experience provision for 14 to 16 year-olds was expensive, poor quality and not a good use of time for the pupil, school or business involved.

Ofsted has also found that the provision of work-related learning by schools is variable in quality. Professor Wolf recommended that the work-related learning duty at key stage 4 should be removed from the national curriculum, a recommendation that noble Lords will know is consistent with the Government’s general desire to remove prescription from the national curriculum, and from schools in general, wherever possible.

So for these reasons—a desire to give schools more freedom to exercise their professional judgment about how best to deliver work-related learning; concerns about the quality of work-related learning at key stage 4; and a desire to concentrate on raising the quality of work experience post-16—we accepted her recommendations.

I shall briefly explain the detail of what the draft order will achieve. Section 85 of the Education Act 2002 makes provision for the curriculum requirements for the fourth key stage. The national curriculum comprises the core subjects of mathematics; English and science; other foundation subjects of information and communication technology, physical education and citizenship; and four entitlement areas of arts, design and technology, humanities and modern foreign languages. Section 85 also includes the duty to provide work-related learning under subsection (5)(a). Work-related learning is defined in Section 85(10) of the 2002 Act as,

“planned activity designed to use the context of work to develop knowledge, skills and understanding useful in work, including learning through the experience of work, learning about work and working practices and learning skills for work”.

This order amends Section 85 to remove subsection (5)(a) in relation to work-related learning in line with Professor Wolf’s recommendation.

We announced in our response to Professor Wolf’s review that we would accept this recommendation and consulted on it between September 2011 and January 2012. We published that consultation on 5 July. I recognise that the timing of this order does not give schools a full term’s notice because we are proposing to remove the duty from this September. However, since the order has the effect of removing a duty on schools rather than imposing one, our view was that it was preferable for this duty to be removed as soon as possible. Removing the duty will enable schools to be flexible in their provision for students who would genuinely benefit from work-related learning, rather than trying to shoe-horn in curricular activities simply to meet a legal duty.

--- Later in debate ---

I am grateful to the Minister for talking about studio schools, but of course they help only a very small number of students. What is even more important is the business about funding individual students rather than individual courses. That is particularly important in relation to pre-qualification courses that organisations like ASDAN provide to schools to improve the employability of their young people, as well as their ability to learn and to gain further qualifications. These are the sorts of things that I hope the new funding system will enable schools and colleges to provide, because they are very relevant to the plans of young people, and to helping them become employable.

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

My Lords, we have had a fairly brief discussion. It is a shame that there are not more of us here because the order gives rise to important issues. I agree with both the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes of Stretford, and with my noble friend about the importance of good work experience and work-related learning. The noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, rightly made the point that employers often say to us that employability skills such as teamworking, turning up on time and being able to take instruction from managers, are extremely important, and that not enough of our young people are equipped with them when they leave school.

I very much agree with her that it is important that we do what we can to help young people learn those skills. As my noble friend Lady Walmsley said, there are a number of ways of doing that. I agree with her about what young people can learn in PHSE about working together, and what they can learn in maths and English about being numerate and being able to write clearly—and about the importance of speaking clearly, which is also something that needs to be taught. There are a number of ways of taking that forward.

I take the point of my noble friend Lady Walmsley about studio schools being small. However, the previous Government were right to try the experiment. In May 2010 there were two, and now I have nearly 30 going. This is a start, but, and I think this is the point that the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, was making, they show the enthusiasm of employers to be involved if we can find ways of harnessing that. I hope that the studio schools will demonstrate that they are scalable. There is a variety of ways of showing how it is possible to get decent work experience—in this case, paid work experience—at 16 so that those young people can see the benefits of it. I am excited, particularly about the way that the young people themselves, their parents and the employers are enthusiastic about the opportunities that it provides.

My noble friend is also right about the significance, I believe and hope, of our funding reforms post-16, having a simple, single funding rate per learner, to use the jargon, rather than per qualification, which will, particularly for those taking vocational qualifications, be funded at a higher rate overall than previously, giving a lump sum to schools and colleges to work out how they want to spend it, particularly for those having decent qualifications and thus space for more work expense. In particular, I believe that those who are less academically able will emerge from that system as it starts to work through.

I hope that we can learn from the pilots to which I referred, which will look at new ways of rolling out work experience, and share that across the system. The noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, asked me whether, when we get the lessons from those pilots, we will share them. Yes, absolutely. I hope that they will give us some practical case studies with things that work. We are trying five different ways across the country in 25 FE colleges, and our goal will be to share those widely.

The noble Baroness asked me whether Ofsted will report. There is no specific mention of work-related learning in the new Ofsted framework coming in this September, but inspectors are guided to investigate the extent to which pupils gain a well formed understanding of the options and challenges facing them as they move through the school and on to the next stage of education and training. Inspectors will take into account the destination of pupils when they leave school and increasingly, as we publish more information on destination measures, that will help schools, parents and others to see more clearly how well those schools are doing on a range of measures, including things like work experience and work-related learning, because those will contribute to the progression that those children make. Ofsted is also able to undertake survey inspections to investigate particular aspects of provision in greater detail, and this is the kind of area where it may well choose to carry out such a survey.

On the noble Baroness’s question about why we are abolishing the duty, if we argue that work experience and work-related activity are important, which I do, she knows that we contend that not everything that is important needs to be in the national curriculum. The more that we are able to take things out of the national curriculum, which I am keen to do, the less strong the argument that taking out a specific thing by exemption will highlight that we do not attribute importance to it. Taking some of these issues out and giving schools more space to make those decisions is the answer to her question.

My noble friend Lady Walmsley’s core point, with which I obviously agree, was about timing. It is sensible to do this later, when the children are older and the connection between the two is more immediate. That is one consequence of raising the participation age. When everyone left school at 16 and went to work, having work experience closer to that age was more sensible. However, experience also suggests that, notwithstanding the enthusiasm of employers for participating, having young people in the workplace is clearly proving a problem. As my noble friend said, schools struggle but employers are also struggling with it. That is partly why there has been a growing emphasis on work-related learning, rather than work experience. Schools were finding it hard to find employers who would participate. It is our belief that that will prove more straightforward with older children and young people.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hughes of Stretford, referred to the consultation response, which was clearly as she said it was. However, at bottom and for the reasons that I have set out, the Government’s view—accepting the arguments put forward by Professor Wolf—was that moving work experience to a later stage recognised the difficulty that schools and employers have had. I am grateful that the noble Baroness recognised that the blanket duty has, perhaps, served its time. The Government’s view was that the simple and sensible thing to do was to remove it and shift the focus to later; to make sure that there is good-quality work experience in a number of ways; and to reform the funding for it, which will be the main driver of change post-16. For all those reasons, the Government have brought forward the order and I commend it to the Committee.

Motion agreed.