Educational Opportunities: Working Classes

Lord Storey Excerpts

Thursday 5th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, for her debate and for her tremendous contribution to education. Everyone should have access to outstanding education, whether they are from a working-class family or a BAME community or have behavioural or learning difficulties. That means that all our schools need to educate and enrich our children to the very highest standards. That happens when schools are well-led and our teachers are well-trained, highly motivated and well-respected, and when we put in the resources to make this happen.

Noble Lords have all had four minutes, so here are my four points on how we can support working-class children. First, “It starts with early years, stupid.” If we do not get it right in the early years, as we have heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, the attainment gap gets wider and wider as the child progresses through the school system. The first years of a child’s life are a critical period for social mobility. Evidence shows that the poorest children are already 11 months behind when they start school.

So what can we do? The Government need to review their 30 hours of free childcare and shift the entitlement from high-income families to those on lower wages. Secondly, we need to see the development, not decline, of children’s centres. They were an incredible way of providing for not just children but the whole family, particularly mums. Thirdly, as we have heard, the Government should invest in improving the qualifications of early years staff.

My second point is on special needs. Last night, we had a good debate on special needs in general and dyslexia in particular. Every speaker highlighted the need for early identification and intervention in providing the support needed. The education, health and care plans are not fit for purpose, and I welcome the Government’s proposal to review them. As my noble friend Lord Addington rightly said, teachers need to be trained to identify educational needs.

My third point is that children from disadvantaged backgrounds do not have the wraparound support that children from wealthier families have, such as one-to-one private tuition. For example, my daughter, at a secondary school in Liverpool, was told that she could not do three sciences because she was not very good at physics—surprise, surprise. We, as caring parents, bought in private physics tuition for her; we had the financial means to do that. Guess what? She passed all her science subjects with a first. She would be embarrassed if she knew I was saying this, but the point is that we had the means to provide that private tuition. When she was looking for a career—finally—we had the ability to network and to talk to friends. She was interested in the law, so was able to spend a week with a barrister. She also had the opportunity to enrich her interests at weekends, with different clubs and activities. That should not be the preserve of only those who can afford it; it should be the preserve of everybody. Whether you come from a council house or a mansion, you should have those opportunities.

As a norm, we should expect one-to-one or small-group tuition in our schools. We should see schools offering a gold standard in careers education, with careers monitoring and mentoring, particularly for disadvantaged pupils. Business and organisations should be encouraged to offer paid internships to young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. I am delighted that the Liberal Democrats in the Whips Office all put money into a pot to employ, every year, an intern from a disadvantaged background on a living wage. Would it not be good if other groups did the same? We have had people from Bradford, Manchester and London. I very much like the proposal of the Sutton Trust, that state schools should be funded and incentivised to develop essential life skills, such as confidence and motivation.

My fourth point is on post-16 education. As the noble Lord, Lord Kirkham, rightly said, we should break down those barriers. Young men from working-class backgrounds are half as likely to take up an advanced apprenticeship than their better-off peers. Why is this? Our school system is still geared to academically able pupils. We need to realise that over half of young people would be better pursuing a vocational route in education. It took an amendment to the FE and research Bill from the noble Lord, Lord Baker, even to allow—God forbid—FE and university technical colleges to go into schools and show young people the variety of opportunities and courses available. I must tell the Minister that, sadly, many secondary schools actively discourage this from happening. There should be a proactive information service, where young people can easily find information about the best vocational opportunities and apprenticeship schemes available. This would help to increase parity of esteem with academic routes. Those are my four proposals.

Finally, I was interested in the comments from the noble Lord, Lord Knight, and the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, who talked about our present school system. I have always been concerned that children in our primary school are nurtured and developed, in small teaching and learning environments, but suddenly, at the age of 11—and some are summer-born children —we thrust them into large secondary schools, often with 800 to 1,000 pupils, and a very different ethos and environment. Children, particularly from working-class backgrounds, struggle to cope. Oh, how I regret the loss of middle schools. We have to think through how we can improve on those transitional arrangements.

I want to end by being positive and celebrating our education service, which is the means by which we are able to give every child and young person the opportunity to flourish, to be enriched, to discover the excitement of creative subjects and to find the joys of learning. It is wonderful. I have always taught in working-class communities—including some of the most deprived communities on Merseyside—and for me, it was an absolute privilege to teach those young children and see how, like a sponge, they soaked up knowledge. Imagine how I felt when a girl of Nigerian parentage, Intang Ekoku, went on to university and came back to teach at my school, in a working-class community. As the noble Lord, Lord Baker, rightly said, it is about changing life chances.