Educational Opportunities: Working Classes

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Thursday 5th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I praise my noble friend Lady Morris for her inspiring speech and for the debate, and I remind the House of my interests as the chief officer at TES Global and as chair of Whole Education.

I believe that education is failing working-class communities in this country. Many of those places were formed to serve an industrial economy that has since moved on. Our education system emerged as those places became established and has yet to move on with the economy, as the noble Lord, Lord Baker, has told your Lordships on a number of occasions.

Our current system is a sift, and academic exams are the sifting mechanism. You go to school, work hard and get good grades. If your grades are good enough, you go to university and get a great career; if not, get some skills and get a job. Policy-makers have been delegating more to schools in exchange for more accountability, in the hope that it will generate more improvement so that more young people from more backgrounds can access the higher aspiration university route. Yet, the Sutton Trust tells us that the eight top schools in this country send as many pupils to Oxbridge as three-quarters of all schools. Working-class children are being failed. Teach First research in 2018 revealed that poorer pupils are more likely to be excluded than to pass the English Baccalaureate.

The most the current model can do is work for two-thirds of young people. For working-class kids, we would be lucky to get to half, however hard we drive the current system. There simply are not enough teachers and leaders to make the system work, and academic learning is not for everyone. For working-class communities, it is not just about learning and exams. On Saturday, I met the job-sharing head teachers from an all-through school in Portland, Dorset, where I used to be the Member of Parliament. They asked me to tell you this:

“We have felt that things have become even harder over the last few years. Students starting school with us have vast gaps in their education, not just academically. We support that well, and are proud to say we’re in the top 10% of schools in the country for progress, both at secondary and primary. However, the social and emotional needs of our students are challenging. The support Sure Start centres used to offer families had a vast impact on parenting skills and abilities. Now, there is very little early intervention for families who struggle or need assistance. The threshold for children who are at risk appears to be unknown. We leave students to go home on occasion unsafe to homes that are not suitable for them, and hope to see them the next day. Social care simply cannot support the needs of families like ours.”


We need a national debate about a new system. There can be no change in working-class communities without regeneration through education. That system must be designed for a long life of continuous reskilling—one that prepares people for a working life of 60 years, multiple careers, being great at interacting with machines as well as humans, but also out-competing machines at being human. It must be one that accepts that analytics will replace qualifications and that universities will have to innovate to deliver lifelong learning rather than a debt-loaded rite of passage, as at present. It will have more grow your own: across a lifetime, someone with a higher apprenticeship has higher average earnings than a graduate from a non-Russell Group university. Employers are increasingly growing their own talent rather than relying on graduate entry schemes. Schools should be growing and qualifying their own teachers from their own working-class communities, with less high-stakes testing and more trust in those teachers. We need a curriculum, not unlike that of some of the UTCs, that balances knowledge and skills, and is designed to nurture a love of learning, curiosity and skills for self-directed learning. This needs cross-party consensus, and what better place to start than in your Lordships’ House?