National Curriculum

Lord Northbourne Excerpts

Tuesday 26th March 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Northbourne]

My Lords, I am most grateful to the Minister for making it possible for us to have this debate on the curriculum, which it is not going to be possible to debate in the Chamber because it will not involve any new lawmaking.

Personally, I have no argument with the Government’s policy of basic skills such as reading and writing being improved, nor with maths, science, English and foreign languages being emphasised and standards being raised. However, I am concerned about what the Government have left out. There is a real danger, given that schools’ resources are finite, that if they are told to do subjects A, B and C but no mention is made in the curriculum of D, E, F and G, they are going to concentrate their resources on A, B and C. Of course they are; that is how they will get rewards and a good Ofsted report, and it is what the Government will give them more money for.

I am going to raise only one issue, which is of particular importance to me, but first I should like to make this point. The Government’s position paper speaks eloquently about the importance of clear aims in education policy and the curriculum, but it fails to spell out clearly what those aims are. They refer to the wider definition set out in the 2002 Act of spiritual, moral and cultural development, but even that does not include social values, which I shall talk about in a moment. I can find nothing in the Government’s proposals to suggest that they recognise the importance of the so-called soft skills. Surely the overriding aim of education must be to prepare young people for the challenges, opportunities and responsibilities of adult life. Soft skills play a key role in adult life. They are important for employment and are crucial in establishing and sustaining a family and raising children. Further, they can make a considerable contribution to increasing social mobility in our society. I will not detail what the soft skills are because I might take too long, but I expect that most noble Lords are fully aware of the skills of empathy, emotional literacy and so on.

Recent neurological research shows that a child’s experiences in the first two years of life are a critical factor in that child’s success in school and later in adult life. It is during the first two years that a child learns the crucial emotional skills. It learns that it is safe and valued, and it begins to learn to love and be loved. That is why secure attachments in the very early years to one or two dedicated carers, which Bowlby told us about 50 years ago when no one believed him but have now been proved by biological science, is fundamentally important to a child’s development. The Government have responded to this research by introducing the early years initiatives, excellently presented by Graham Allen MP. I strongly support the programme, but standing alone, in my view, it is not enough. We must do more to prepare all the nation’s young people for adult life by helping them to acquire while at secondary school the soft skills they will need for employment and to form stable families.

Sadly, PSHE has been relegated to a very low priority in most secondary schools. In those schools where it is covered at all, it is often taught by teachers with no specialist training in the subject. To achieve this kind of education effectively, a new and broader PSHE programme should be developed and then delivered by specialist teachers with experience. They should be trained to lead young people in an exploration of and preparation for adult life.

I want to suggest three modest things that the Minister might do to help this along. The first would be to make mention in the current revised curriculum of the importance of developing soft skills. Reference should be made to the importance of these skills outside the narrow curriculum, but certainly in the wider one, or how will schools know what their priorities should be? They have a limited amount of money and a limited number of teachers. The second would be to bring together an expert advisory group to prepare a report on the best ways to give secondary school pupils the opportunity to prepare for adult life, while the third would be to sponsor a pilot project at a major teacher training institution to undertake an experimental course training specialist teachers to deliver such a course interactively, led by young people’s own needs and interests.