Education: Pupils and Young People

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Thursday 28th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

My Lords, I refer to my entry in the register of interests in respect of my consultancy work in education. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, on instigating what has been—my comments aside—a very fine debate, showing off the House at its best. I very much look forward to the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Hill, winding up in his usual skilful way.

I think that there is a danger in looking to the past when we look to fixing the problems of the present going into the future. I was certainly mindful of that when listening to the noble Lord, Lord Blackwell. However, I want to dwell a little on the past and express my pride in our record in office over the past 13 years. I am grateful for some of the comments that noble Lords have made regarding aspects such as Teach First. We increased by 50 per cent in real terms the amount of revenue funding. As a result, many more teachers—30,000 or 40,000—were employed, together with about 120,000 more teaching assistants. Many noble Lords have said that we have the best generation of teachers that we have ever had, so it should be no surprise that results have improved. They were also operating in much improved buildings. We fixed the roof while the sun was shining. We have seen, for example, the results for five A* to C grade GCSEs, including English and maths, go from 38 per cent in 1997 to more than 50 per cent now. We saw a fantastic investment in early years teaching and we are yet to be able to judge how that will benefit the country and benefit social mobility, to which I shall turn in a moment. We also saw a rapid expansion of the numbers qualifying to go into higher education, as they certainly have done.

On the basis on which our school system was set up, we drove it hard and we achieved good results, but the system was not designed to tackle social mobility. On that we did not do well enough. Although many children from poorer backgrounds did much better, thanks to the extra investment and the work of the teaching workforce, it is important to note that the gap between free-school-meal pupils and non-free-school-meal pupils narrowed only marginally, apart from those with special educational needs.

It is worth saying that at school level and local authority level, the gap narrowed. If we were listening to the Secretary of State, who I think is asking the right question about social mobility, the answer would not be about school-level reform. I am very proud of the academies which we set up, and for which I was responsible during my time in office, but the analysis done academically shows that they are making a difference at the margins. In essence, if we are to foster the talents of our children, and of every child, as this excellent Motion says that we should, we need a 21st-century system which properly reflects the needs of the labour market and properly engages every single child in their education.

I do not think that we should try to reinvent a free market school system, as that has been tried in Chile, the United States and Sweden and there is no evidence whatever that it works. I shall not dwell on the questions in today's Guardian about how the free school network, which is trying to promote that free market system, was funded and why it was selected. If the Minister wants to answer that question, I am sure that the nation will be grateful.

If we are to design a school system that is to tackle social mobility, we have to focus on what goes on in the classroom and in the home. We have had some excellent contributions. The statistics from the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, for example, were notable and showed that a lot of the difference is defined before children get into school, so expecting us in our school system to fix those problems is, in many ways, missing the point. I refer noble Lords to the excellent report from the Equality and Human Rights Commission of a few weeks ago which showed that the highest performing ethnic group in our country is Chinese girls and the second highest is Chinese girls on free school meals. They overcome poverty because of the culture and motivation at home.

We need new forms of home engagement and new forms of accountability which will incentivise different forms of teaching in our classrooms, and encourage more—what better place to propose it?—peer-to-peer working in our classrooms, and more partnership between pupils and between pupils and teachers using technology to the full. Then I think we can get the sort of collaboration, teamwork, leadership and confidence to present that our employers say we need, and the teaching will then reflect that, whereas at the moment collaboration in school is regarded as copying—and that is cheating.