Education Bill

Lord Lexden Excerpts

Monday 18th July 2011 Grand Committee

I hope that these amendments are reasonably straightforward. I am looking for the Minister to indicate the extent to which the Government are sympathetic towards these aims and the extent to which legislation in this form would be helpful so that we can take a view on whether and how they ought to be pursued on Report.

[Lord Lexden]

My Lords, I vigorously support Amendment 107, on which my name appears. It would be even better if subsection (1)(c) in the amendment included the words “independent schools” after the word “academies”.

Speaking on an earlier amendment, I laid stress on the importance of partnerships between independent and maintained schools. Nowhere is co-operation more likely to be valuable on both sides than in the areas covered by the amendment. In subjects like science and maths, independent schools can really help to raise standards and prospects for high-ability pupils overall because of the successful results that they achieve. In modern languages, for example, almost 50 per cent of top grades go to pupils from independent schools. Let that expertise be shared widely in order to break down even more of the barriers between the two sectors. Independent schools see themselves as part of our national education system. Their inclusion in co-operative ventures of the kind envisaged by the amendment would be greeted by them with considerable enthusiasm. For those reasons, I support Amendment 107.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley]

My Lords, I have a great deal of sympathy with the intention behind these amendments, but I have a few issues about the solution to the problem. I want to ask a particular question that the Minister might address in her response. In the past we assumed that very bright children will succeed despite school and that we should not put in a place a system where they could succeed because of their schooling. I am very much in favour of the proposal that all schools should try to meet the needs of all their students. I have often thought that the most able 2 per cent to 3 per cent of young people in this country have special educational needs in the broadest sense, and that they need to be supported. So I am entirely on board with the idea. I welcome the debate, and although I will have to look at the amendments more closely, raising the issue is a good thing and this should be a feature of our education system. We should ask schools to address the particular needs of this group of children just as we ask them to look after the less able.

I welcome what the mover of the amendment said in terms of not wanting to go back to selection, and I can see that the amendment is not about that. However, I think that there must be a more imaginative approach than creating what is essentially a high ability stream within a school. I am no great researcher, but I know that all the evidence shows that separating children in schools is not the best way of raising standards. With reference to the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, work has been done about children working with those in the independent sector. I remember an innovative scheme that was set up under the Excellence in Cities programme in Manchester. Sixth-formers from state schools took an undergraduate module with students from Manchester University, or it could have been the Open University, I cannot quite recall. That was not an isolated scheme.

All I would encourage is more general thinking about how to provide for really able children who need to be pushed. What, in the first part of this century, can we do that has not been done before to raise standards? I would be much more interested in using new technology to set up master classes with the best in the world, even if they are located on the other side of the world. We should free this debate up in order to be more creative than we have been in the past, and therefore my question for the Minister is this: why did they abolish the Young, Gifted and Talented Programme? It was the one scheme that made every school in this country identify a number of students who were thought to be gifted and talented. It brought about cultural changes in schools; some schools had said, “We haven’t got any bright kids”, while others had said, “We’ve got too much on our plate with our struggling kids”, so there was a group of children whose needs were not being met. Over the years that the programme was in operation, we began to change the culture of every school in the country. It was not perfect, but it got on to the agenda in every school that the needs of the most able, by ability or aptitude, also have to be met. It was sad that the Government chose to abolish and destroy the programme, which would have been a good hook on which to continue the debate. I would not mind an explanation of why it was done and what will take its place.