Education Bill

Lord Peston Excerpts

Monday 18th July 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, again I have received a very satisfactory e-mail from the Government on this subject. My object here is merely to try to persuade the Government to release more information about the actual marks obtained by students in examinations.

If you are trying to use data to evaluate schools, having things divided into grades is very inconvenient and is a very coarse measure of student achievement, which therefore tends to produce rather coarse judgments of how well individual schools and students have done. It is much more helpful to have the detailed grades. If the Government allow more access to government data in respect of not just universities but schools, that will help parents and whatever intermediaries they use—I declare an interest as the editor of the Good Schools Guide, which uses a lot of government data—and it will greatly improve the information that can be passed on to parents. Generally, it will also improve people’s understanding of where a school is. To have a C-D boundary—or even an A-B or B-C boundary—and to judge schools on how many children they get to one side or the other of that boundary is a very coarse way of measuring the performance of a school, which might be one mark either way. What is interesting is where the preponderance of the students are on a much finer scale.

I am encouraged that the Government are thinking of making this sort of information available. The information may not sink in with employers very quickly, but that will happen eventually. The Swiss publish individual marks, so that people can see where they are on a scale out of 100, and Swiss employers now understand that the mark is more important than some artificial boundary that has been inserted in the middle to say whether someone is a C or a D. I think that this would be progress for everybody, and I am very glad that the Government are prepared to contemplate moving in this direction. I beg to move.

[Lord Peston]

My Lords, I ask the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, to enlighten me, as I do not know much about what goes on in schools. Certainly, as someone who was once a university teacher, it never occurred to me that the marks meant anything at all. Is it the case that the pupil is given a mark by the teacher but the pupil does not know the mark and is instead given a grade? Is that what actually happens now?

Certainly, what used to happen in universities was that, essentially, you gave students marks and, if those marks corresponded to certain grades but there were not the desired number of people in the grades, you just changed the marks. In other words, the marks were meaningless. What does it mean to be given a mark of 80? It means nothing at all; it is not a measure of achievement because we could have given a mark of 0.8 or 0.08 or anything else. What matters is first how the students are ranked, and you then need some other measure of their achievement, which I do not believe is given in any way by either numbers or grades.

Can the noble Lord at least tell me what actually happens in schools? When someone marks the student’s papers, would the student know what grade they would get if they knew the mark? Are the marks adjusted to get to the grades, or are the grades adjusted to make them come out the way that they ought to come out?

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, perhaps someone will rescue me if I get this wrong—there are several experts here—but, generally, rather than the marks being shifted, the grade boundaries are shifted, so you do not know what mark the C-D boundary is until the assessors have gone through the whole process of marking the papers and assessing how the students have answered the questions so that they can see where the level of difficulty lies.

The importance of knowing individual marks is that the information allows you to look more finely at how students have done and how a school has done. That would enable, for instance, parents to look at the results in a norm-referenced rather than criterion-referenced manner, if that was a judgment that they preferred to make. At the moment, you cannot say whether a child is in the top 10 per cent nationally, because you only have very coarse information as to where the grade boundaries are. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Peston, that there is no significance to the marks themselves—it is all a matter of relativities and rank and order—but my proposal would start to give us more and better information about schools. What use we can make of that information is down to our individual ingenuity.

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[Lord Peston]

I would like to add another question. Is the purpose of this to compare schools? Is that the point? What you need therefore is some ruler which enables you to say that this school is more successful than that school “because”. I do not understand what you put in the “because” bit.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, comparing schools is a complicated business and you have to take all sorts of things into account. Exam results are part of that. To have the marks finely graded makes them a better part of measuring how schools have behaved. When the system gets used to it, such information will be better for students in that they could show that, for example, they are in the top 1 per cent nationally or that they only missed a C by one mark. In either sense, students would benefit from being able to display them.

Students can get the marks under certain circumstances now. If you ask for a regrade, you get to see what your marks have been but, because you cannot see everybody else’s marks or what the universe of marks looks like, there is very little you can do with that. So they exist but they are not disclosed.

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[Lord Touhig]

Yes, indeed, and a number of Members did not come into the Chamber. It is right and proper that they should be able to exercise that right. Equally, parents on behalf of their children can exercise the same right under the law as it stands. My noble friend said earlier that the law was flouted and therefore asked why we have it, but there is a law which says you should not drink and drive. Would we imagine abolishing it because some people flout it? This morning I saw two people driving cars while using their mobile phones. Again, that is against the law, but because the law has been broken, should we take it off the statute book? Of course we should not. I do not think that that arguments carries any weight.

For the reasons I have given, it is worth while to maintain the collective act of worship in our schools and I believe it is right that that collective act of worship should be Christian in nature for the reasons I have argued. Other noble Lords may have different views, and it is important that we should respect each other’s views. The present law allows for that.

My final comment is this. One of my oldest friends, the late Leo Abse, represented Pontypool and Torfaen in the other place for over 30 years and was probably responsible for more social legislation than any Back-Bencher in the history of the British Parliament. His final words to his constituency Labour Party when he announced his retirement were these: “Tolerate everything and tolerate everyone, but do not tolerate intolerance”. I believe that these amendments lead to a degree of intolerance. I am sure that that is not the intention, but it is where I believe they will lead.

[Lord Peston]

My Lords, I start by declaring an interest, or in my case a lack of interest, in that I am an atheist. I regard all religions and religious doctrines as simply nonsensical—tout court nonsensical. Over the past few years I totally opposed the Government, who I supported, in their total misuse of public money in order to increase the vast number of religious schools in this country. It is a source of pride to me that I never once voted with my own Government on that extension and waste of public money, and I stick to that view.

Referring to my noble friend’s remarks just now, only once in my 25 years in your Lordships’ House, I ended up in the Chamber by mistake and I could not get out because the doors were locked, so I was present during the act of spiritual worship or whatever it is called. I have to say that I regarded it as one of the weirdest experiences I have ever had, in a life that has included a great many broad experiences. I could not believe what I was observing, and I say that in terms.

Having said that, I am as committed as anyone in the Room to freedom of thought, belief and expression. I have never spent any time trying to persuade anyone who was religious that they should not be. Quite to the contrary, I would regard it as a disaster in our country if our young people were not brought up to read the King James version of the Bible, one of the greatest works of literature in our history. I discovered the other day on Google that there are several other versions of the Bible, and they are so bad that they must have been written by people with the prose equivalent of cloth ears. I gather that they are more correct translations of the Hebrew, but compared with the King James version, I would not allow any child to read them.

I have no difficulty whatsoever in our children knowing about religion, but I insist that this has nothing to do with religious education. I want people to know that there are many religions. Indeed, speaking as an atheist, I think that the more religions they know about, in my view, the less likely they will be to believe that any of them can be true, because how can you have so many if they are all true? Not long ago, the Chief Rabbi made the terrible mistake of saying, “Of course, we have different religions, but we all worship the same God”. The Orthodox Jewish rabbis said, “No, we don't”, and the Chief Rabbi—mistakenly, in my opinion—withdrew his remark.

Therefore, the question is not one of religion; it has nothing to do with whether you are a believer. I reiterate my point that I am not seeking to persuade those of you who are believers that you should not be—that is your choice—but the act of assembly in school, which is vital to the unity and whole atmosphere of the school, should be conducted on a totally non-religious basis.

I would go further. My view is that the assembly should be conducted largely by the pupils, not by the head teacher or other teachers. To give an example, if it were my choice, every day I would have one of the pupils talking about some great figure in the world, their courage and what they achieved, such as Aung San Suu Kyi or the woman who is being threatened with being stoned to death by the Iranians for sticking up for what she thought was right. Pupils in schools could choose those great figures, and that is exactly the atmosphere that I would want to develop—plus the bit about someone telling the school that the first 11 lost at cricket yet again, and so on, which was certainly my experience of school assembly.

As my noble friend Lady Massey brought to our attention, the whole point of the gathering is that people meet together for the sake of producing a decent spirit in the school in which religion should have no part to play, other than that people should be aware of other people’s multiplicity of opinions and views. I would have no objection if, one day, one of the pupils who spoke decided that their address would be to say why they were a Christian, a Jew or a Muslim, but they would be saying it only as a contribution to general discussion not as a formal religious matter.

Times have changed. We need to know that the world is full of different people. When I went to school, I did not know that there were any blacks around at all. There were no blacks to be seen in any of the schools where I was. I was happy, when my children went to the local comprehensive, that they knew that there was a vast range of different people in the world. I am certain that they benefited enormously from that.

I am not certain that I like the detail of any of the amendments, and I say to my noble friend that I hope that we can come back at Report with something that we can divide on so that we can at least test the opinion of the House.

The important thing is the gathering at the beginning of the school day which unites the school and does not divide it.

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood]

My Lords—

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[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Hill of Oareford)]

Behind me is a portrait of the judgment of Daniel. Actually, I think that it should be a portrait of the judgment of Solomon, given today’s debate—

[Lord Peston]

I am sorry to interrupt the Minister. I am very much looking forward to hearing his speech, but the monitor suggests that we are possibly within seconds of voting in the Chamber.

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

I am going to speak very quickly.

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[Lord Peston]

It is just that I do not want his speech to be ruined by the fact that we may need to march out during the middle of it.

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

My Lords, I would have finished it by now if the noble Lord had not intervened.

There is an extremely wide range of views on this important issue, as I knew there would be, and, like others, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Avebury for raising it. In considering the current system and the way forward, the Government’s guiding principle is that the arrangements for collective worship should be flexible and fair to pupils and parents as well as manageable for schools. The requirement for a broadly Christian collective worship is a long-standing one, which I think was the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, who referred to it as our Christian heritage. A similar point was made by the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths of Burry Port.

If I may declare an interest, as other noble Lords have, I am the son of a Methodist mother, who herself had to go to chapel three times a day on Sunday, and of a father who was a chorister at Westminster Abbey and so went to church almost every day for six years. As a result of that, we had no church at all in our household because I think that my parents suffered from overload. However, as a kind of historian—or a historian manqué—I think that it is difficult to write out the role that the church has played in education and in the history of our country for many hundreds of years—