English Baccalaureate: Creative and Technical Subjects

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Thursday 14th September 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Stedman-Scott for giving us the opportunity of this debate and I declare my interest as editor of the Good Schools Guide and parent of a 14 year-old.

I am unusual in this debate, in that I am a fan of the EBacc. In a fast-changing world, an academic education is as good a foundation as you can offer any child. I share the Government’s estimation that eventually we might be able to offer that to—I say “offer to” rather than “impose on”—90% of children. There is a lot to do to get there but we are doing a lot. A lot of good things are happening in education and I am very cheered by a move to evidence-based practices, but there really is a lot to do. I listened to a 16 year-old today who had just moved from a Kent comprehensive to a Kent grammar. She said to me, “At last, I can ask a question without losing my friends”. When education at that sort of level has a disdain of academic success, I really feel that there is potential to improve.

Because I believe in the EBacc, I am an immense opponent of having more grammar schools. I cannot begin to understand how the Government reconcile their ambitions for the EBacc with the creation of selection for the top 25%. Nor can I understand how they continue with comparable outcomes as a measure at GCSE. What is the point in thinking that you can give 90% of children an academic education if the system of scoring in the exams means not more than 60% can succeed? These dissonances at the heart of the Government’s education policy need sorting out but I still support the EBacc.

Beyond the EBacc, we all need a strong, creative part to our lives. As the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, said, we need what we individually do best to be valued while we are at school. It is an enormous motivator; if you are good at art and art is valued at school, it really helps you to do well in your academic subjects. It gives you confidence and impetus, so we must not lose the breadth and the art content, particularly in 11 to 16 education.

However, we do not deal with it best by fighting over how much more we can stuff into the pie and what we should chuck out. I will go with George W. Bush on this: we must make the pie higher. There are lots of ways of doing this and I will suggest a few to my noble friend. There should be a real, concentrated effort to reduce teacher workload so that they have more space to bring their passions into it. There is an overemphasis on marking but some interesting things are going on: the Michaela school, for instance, is really working to reduce it. We should pick out good practice on how to chuck the time-consuming rubbish out of teaching GCSEs. For instance, there is excellent work going on with the alternative qualifications created by Sevenoaks and Bedales. They show the way and we should pick up on that. There should be much more technology. If we really get assessment techniques so that an essay can be evaluated properly, rather than reducing it to, “Did you introduce these six forms of grammar and five points about the subject?”, that will make a great difference.

We can bring creativity into a lot of subjects which it has been excluded from. If you go to the American School in London, you will find that in the course of its art lessons they cover the physics of light, the chemistry of colour, the biology of sight and the mathematics of perspective. They link across the curriculum; that way, you get creativity running out into the science subjects. Sir Anthony Seldon is quite right that a lot is coming down the line from technology, which we will see in the next 10 years. I have seen my daughter pick up something from YouTube videos in no time at all, while most of the people who give us trouble in hacking scenarios have learned that all online. No teachers have been involved at all; it has been a totally online experience. Bringing that sort of thing into schools will enable more breadth and a greater density of teaching.

On good discipline, there has been a great Twitterstorm about a school in Norfolk that went overboard on that, but there are still too many schools where the discipline does not allow concentrated learning.

Another way is broader university courses. So much of the focus in school comes down to the fact that universities are selecting on just one subject, so GCSEs focus down to A-levels that focus down to university. That is entirely contrary to people’s interest in a varied life. They need to keep a broader base. There needs to be some breadth to university courses. Even if you are studying history, you need a bit of science, arts and business in there somewhere if you are really to flourish afterwards. You ought not to have to pick them up afterwards.

We also need collaboration. There is a marvellous experiment going on in Plymouth that I urge my noble friend to visit. The whole city—businesses, the city authorities, higher education, further education, the university technical college and the schools—has come together to help kids who need to have a space to exercise their programming skills and be valued for them. When you get the whole city working together like that, there is so much more you can do than if you try to break things into little bits. It offers enormous opportunity in science, English and other areas to bring practical experience into GCSE and A-levels and broaden people’s experience. Switzerland does that much better than us. Early involvement with the real world is something to aim for.

We need state school/private school partnerships. I know my noble friend listened to a lecture on those yesterday. If you are looking for access to the arts, as Thomas’s Battersea does, open out your extraordinary facilities to local state schools.

As the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, said, Ofsted is crucial in this. Only it has a mechanism to force schools to keep breadth in 11 to 14 key stage 3. It ought to be communicating much better with parents about what is going on in schools. The whole Ofsted model needs to be revisited so that it is much more ongoing, rather than the just once every five or 10 years we are stuck with at the moment.

We really need to support the Careers & Enterprise Company on the skills passport. It produces a mechanism for things outside the EBacc that are to be valued.

Finally, we need really to focus on the measures we are imposing on schools in league tables. We need to make sure that what they are incentivising is in the interests of the child, not the school. What we have seen revealed in Orpington in the past week or two is not uncommon, and we have to root it out.