Literacy

Lord Tebbit Excerpts

Thursday 10th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for his question. There are different schools of thought about the accuracy of the statistics. A study on this was published recently by the Sutton Trust. However, the overwhelming conclusion from these statistics is that other countries have overtaken us and that we have a lot of work to do quickly to improve our schooling and our literacy and numeracy.

As far as home support is concerned, we all know, of course, that the number of words that a child experiences in early age is terribly important, and can be too little. We do all that we can to support parents; however, it comes down basically to improving schools, which have to do so much more because of poor parenting.

[Lord Tebbit (Con)]

My Lords, without detracting in any way from the rightful concern of our noble friend Lord Addington for those children with special needs, is it not clear that there are special educational needs among the teaching profession, which no longer seems capable of teaching basic literacy or numeracy to children in the way that always was done in the past?

[Lord Nash]

We now have the highest quality of teachers entering the profession that we have had for many years. I am afraid that I have to disagree with my noble friend. We are doing a lot to support the teaching profession; it is the most noble profession, in my view, and the issues are much more complicated and deeper than that.