Schools: Drama

Lord Storey Excerpts

Monday 5th September 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

What the noble Earl says about acting as a career could equally be said about many other careers, sadly, and that is why we have invested so much in school reform over the past five years. Specifically, we have provided means-tested support to ensure that talented 18 to 23 year-olds from all backgrounds receive the training they need to succeed in acting careers, and we have funded the Royal Shakespeare Company to provide all state schools with a free copy of its toolkit for teachers and to support young people performing Shakespeare in theatres.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, we all know how important the creative industries are to the economy of this country so it seems strange that we are allowing there to be a decline in the creative arts subjects in our schools. The Minister can quote little odd examples but the facts show that for all the creative arts subjects, there has been a decline in the number of hours taught and the number of teachers teaching those subjects. Does he think the new Secretary of State for Education might look again at the cataclysmic effects that the EBacc will have on creative subjects?

[Lord Nash]

I entirely agree with the noble Lord about the importance of the creative industries in this country. That is one of the reasons why we have reformed computing and D&T GCSEs and A-levels to make them more relevant and ensure that our pupils have the necessary skills to succeed in these great industries. However, I remind him of the situation we inherited in 2010, where only one in five pupils in state schools was studying a basic academic curriculum that would be regarded as absolutely common fare in any independent school and in most successful jurisdictions. That is why we introduced the EBacc, because that curriculum is so important, particularly to pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds who do not get that cultural education at home. We have doubled the number of pupils taking EBacc and we intend to double it again, and more. We hope that by stimulating the intellectual juices of our pupils to study better academic and creative subjects, they will in time want to engage in the arts more widely.