Education: English Baccalaureate Certificate

Lord Lipsey Excerpts

Monday 14th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, on obtaining this debate. With the support of the House I will also congratulate Darren Henley, whose excellent reports on cultural education were recognised in the New Year’s Honours List with a very well deserved OBE.

I chair the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. We train outstanding musicians and dancers and are fifth out of all higher education institutions in the country for employment of our graduates, 97% of whom are in work or further study six months after graduating. We can achieve that quality of output only because of the quality of our input. We have all heard of child prodigies in music, but you do not very often hear of adult prodigies—that is, performers who started late in life. Music and dance in schools are what enable us to do what we do.

The EBacc as it is presently conformed is very bad news for Trinity Laban: no music, no dance, no arts; instead, the Daily Telegraph suite of subjects. Ministers claim—and I am sure the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal, will do the same—that they still value the arts and I expect some of them do, but we live in a harsh world. If they do not figure in the EBacc, then schools, which will be judged by their EBacc success, will downgrade them and, indeed, they are already doing so. This is despite a YouGov poll which shows that 88% of the public expressing an opinion think that music and other creative subjects are important or very important to a child’s education. With some children whose level of performance needs to be increased, it is very often through the arts, music or dance that they make the breakthrough to seeing the value of education and then apply that to other, less congenial, subjects.

If the Government do not change tack, the composition of those who come to Trinity Laban will change as well as the quality. Those whose parents can afford to will provide school-age education in music and dance privately. Those who cannot will see their children’s talents wasted. The answer is a sixth pillar to the EBacc for such studies. If Michael Gove wants to retoxify the Tory party as the philistine party, he will continue to resist it.