Covid-19: Children

Lord Puttnam Excerpts

Thursday 17th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Puttnam (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, in thanking my noble friend Lady Morris for making this debate possible, I take the opportunity to wish her a very happy birthday. I shall risk embarrassing her by saying a little more about why the House should not be surprised by how she set out with remarkable clarity both the challenges and the opportunities we face in respect of our children’s post-pandemic future.

By way of background, in 1997, I was fortunate enough to be invited to serve in your Lordships’ House and, a few months later, offered a role in the then Department for Education and Employment. My job spec, as drafted by the new Secretary of State, David Blunkett, now my noble friend Lord Blunkett, was to go around the country visiting as many schools and meeting as many school principals and teachers as possible in the hope of discovering why we had inherited such a serious recruitment and retention crisis. It was my good fortune to find myself working alongside the then relatively junior Minister in whose name today’s debate is being held. I should like to take just a few moments of my contribution to place on the record what a total joy it was over the following five years to work with, and eventually for, my noble friend Lady Morris; in many respects, they were the best of my life. I am eager not to sound like a character from “The West Wing” but, as many in this House will know from personal experience, my noble friend Lady Morris remains one of those political figures who offers a relatively apolitical person such as myself a reason to believe that politics continues to hold up the possibility of being a genuinely honourable profession and, at its best, offers the opportunity to obtain total integrity while fulfilling a desire, in that overused phrase, to make a difference.

Thanks to the support of my noble friend, I believe that I was able to engage with and come to understand and admire the teaching profession in ways that few outsiders can ever have experienced. Our comparative success was not achieved through massive wage increases; it was done by working to instil trust and professional pride back into an army of talented people, many of whom had forgotten why they had become teachers in the first place. They placed an unusual degree of trust in the Minister, who had been one of them, and that trust was repaid a hundredfold.

For many recent Members of the House, this may sound like ancient history, but as so often in history, the wheels have turned and, for a variety of reasons, much of that hard-earned trust has evaporated and morale in the teaching profession has returned to a new low ebb. Every one of us who has a child, a grandchild, a niece or a nephew at school understands the enormous debt we owe teachers in both primary and secondary settings, who have helped to navigate the nation’s children through a previously unimaginable 15 months. I should like to think that this is a country in which there would be an outpouring of gratitude for the profession, but I fear that, under cover of the pandemic and its attendant distractions, something very different is being attempted.

One characteristic of authoritarian states is to promote policies and practices in terms that are precisely the opposite of their intended effect. So it is, I believe, with the document published last week by the department entitled Delivering World-Class Teacher Development. This policy, if pursued, will have the effect only of diminishing the confidence and competence of an entire profession. I stress “profession” because many in our House have devoted a great deal of their lives to promoting and protecting it. I do not for one moment attach blame for this misadventure to the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, for whom I have a great deal of respect, but the proposals in this document can be interpreted not only as an attack on academic freedom but as an ideologically driven attempt at social engineering—a form of social engineering whereby the Government can decide from whom, how and from where they wish the next generation of teachers to emerge.

This House has always defended the principle of academic freedom as being, along with the independence of the judiciary and a free and responsible press, something worth dying in a ditch for. That being the case, once they have studied them, many in this House are unlikely to approve of these proposals. I beg the Minister to use her good judgment and take this document back to the department for a wholesale rethink before the entire education world comes to understand its underlying purpose and all our children are made to suffer for a clearly clumsy and ideologically driven misjudgment.