Education for 11 to 16 Year-olds (Committee Report)

Lord Holmes of Richmond Excerpts

Friday 26th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Knight, who not only was an excellent Schools Minister but has also continued his passion in the education field for the benefit and the betterment of us all. I declare my interests as an adviser to BPP University, and I also congratulate my noble friend Lord Johnson and all members of the committee on an excellent report.

It is neither my role nor my function to sum up the debate at this point, but if I were to do so, I would do it in two words: I agree. All speakers have got behind the ideas, issues and recommendations so well explored and set out in the committee’s report. I think we will get the best results for our 11 to 16 education system—as with every element of our society—if we fully deploy those golden threads of inclusion and innovation, if we see and conceive of education as experiential rather than transactional, and if we have far more application and perhaps far less abstraction.

To the inclusion point, what is the experience for disabled learners aged 11 to 16? I fully endorse all the comments around the need to review and reform—and potentially close down—GCSEs. But as they are the only currency we have at the moment, I ask the Minister: what is the current disability education attainment gap at GCSE and what is the Government’s approach to closing it? Similarly, what is the Government’s view on current provision of SENCOs and support for those with special educational needs and disabilities, and what are their plans to improve that so every learner has the support they need to succeed?

In 2022 I published a report on the disabled students’ allowance. It is for learners beyond the age of 16, but there are a number of relevant points for the 11 to 16 experience, not least the sense of having a passport of needs and provisions that disabled learners require. Would it not make sense to have that passport from the first moment a disabled learner steps into the classroom? That would run through wherever their education journey goes, from further education to higher education and indeed into the workplace. I would welcome the Minister’s thoughts on that point.

On the impact of technologies, as rightly mentioned by so many other noble Lords, it is clear that the education system has a critical role to play, but it should not be doing anything that technology already does better. AI has burst on to the scene for many people and does facts in fractions of a second. We need to consider not only what skills young people need to have to benefit from all these new technologies—not least artificial intelligence—but what impact artificial intelligence will have on skills themselves. Threading technology through every element of the curriculum will give students, teachers and everybody involved in the education experience the best opportunities to succeed.

I appreciate that it is early days with the curriculum review, but is there a sense that principles will be set at the outset to consider human-led technologies? How will we thread the golden threads of talent, technology, inclusion and innovation through every aspect of the curriculum, not in verticals, in certain subjects or in silos?

In computer science, noble Lords may be delighted to know that young people still consider floppy disks and their role in the development of information technology. Can we have a complete change to a largely abstracted curriculum, to a computer science that is applied and ruthlessly up to date? This would enable young people to have the skills they need, rather than—as my noble friend Lord Baker rightly said—overly learning coding. It is good to have an understanding of coding and to be able to code, but only to an extent. It is how the skills go broader than that, to enable our young people to have the comfort and the confidence to work with these new technologies in every element of their education.

While being focused on the importance of these technologies and specific skills for the workplace, I believe it is critical that we do not just push the “relevant education” argument and all the attendant shortcomings. As noble Lords have rightly said, it is much more about character education, resilience, growth mindset and mental well-being. These should all be threaded through every element of our education system. Will the review consider all these factors and more? As well as specific skills that are obviously required, I believe that what will enable our young people is more the sense of the real Promethean flames of curiosity and creativity being allowed to run through all their educational experience, rather than just the transaction of facts. As philosophers have said right from the beginning of time, education should be the sense of the flowering of possibility and potential.

I was in the first cohort of students to do the GCSE; I can thank Ken for that—my noble friend Lord Baker. It was a change and, as has rightly been identified, one that was required at that time. However, now it is time to change and move beyond that, to inclusion and innovation, the experiential rather than the transactional, and application rather than abstraction. Curiosity, creativity, critical thinking, communication, data and digital literacy, and social media literacy are critically important. For me, what will be as good a measure of success as any is that every young person will be able to cry out collectively and connectively, with clarity and confidence. It is our data, our decisions, our human-led talent and technologies, for all our futures.