Educational Opportunities: Working Classes

Lord Judd Excerpts

Thursday 5th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Judd (Lab)]

Like others, I want to say how much I appreciate my noble and good friend having introduced this incredibly important debate.

I have certain contextual concerns about the whole education debate. We have to remember that education should be an emancipator and enabler, letting people discover who they are and what their potential and contribution can be. There is far too much talk about the earning capacity and measuring this from an early age. Children need to reach the point at which they know who they are and what they want to do, and then we can talk about earning capacity and where we are going with it.

I also believe that we talk an awful lot of nonsense. If we are going to tackle this issue seriously—and it is a grave issue—the resources have to be in place. We have to make sure that the resources are going to the places of deprivation and disadvantage, the places where the issue of social integration of different ethnic groups is a bigger challenge than in other places. It is no good not doing this and then trying to sort the thing out with first aid measures.

It is also important to look at our language around how we inspect schools these days. I used to hold up the inspectorate in my younger days as one of the great British institutions. I do not do that any longer. Just think what it does to teachers, children, their families and the whole community if a school is told it has failed or is failing. The language is preposterous. It should be saying: how do we help this school to increase its capacity and its ability to do the job it wants to do, and how do we make sure that the resources are there?

There is another thing that concerns me in the debate about education. We may inadvertently—I think it probably is inadvertent to a large extent—be slipping into a situation in which we institutionalise social disadvantage still further. Why? Why do we assume that music, the arts and literature should be the preserve of certain children, whereas other children are more practically orientated and therefore should not need these things so much? It is terribly important that a mechanic or a window cleaner is able to hum or sing the music of Mozart or Beethoven or his pop music that he likes, certainly by choice, but that he or she has every opportunity to do that. Instead of doing this, we are concentrating those qualitative dimensions of education with the already-privileged.

If I was asked what I was looking for from the outcome of education, it is that children should certainly be prepared for citizenship and the heavy responsibilities of citizenship but also that they have really had the opportunity to discover what it is to live and to realise that whoever they are, wherever they are, their contribution matters, and in that sense the comprehensive approach is indispensable, because either we are one community or we are not.