Pupil Mental Health, Well-being and Development

Lord Vaizey of Didcot Excerpts

Thursday 22nd February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to speak briefly in the gap. I had put this debate in my diary but failed to put down my name to speak—a schoolboy error for which I deserve extensive detention. I declare my interest as an adviser to Common Sense Media, a US not-for-profit that focuses on protecting kids from the harms of the internet. I am also a trustee of its UK charity.

I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, on calling this excellent debate. I agreed with a huge amount of what she said. There was a tantalising moment when she said that the classroom remains a Victorian construct; I could not agree with her more—in fact, it is a line that I trot out regularly at the kind of London dinner parties that Liz Truss has taken randomly to be so disparaging about. I find it astonishing—this is not to be rude in any shape or form our educators and teachers—that the classroom structure has not moved on for 150 years. There is a great debate to be had in this Chamber at another time, calling on the huge expertise that exists here, about how we reconstruct education; the purpose of the classroom; the use of technology, paradoxically, to provide personalised curriculums to allow children to proceed at their own pace; and the role of exams. I am prepared to be as radical as possible; I for one would, for example, abolish school uniform. But that is a whole other debate.

I want to focus, in the short time I have, on two brief issues. First, I heard my noble friend Lord Effingham mention the mobile phone at the end of his speech: social media is the great issue that our children now face inside and outside school; it is the biggest impact on children’s well-being and mental health in the last 10 years. A lot of it can be for the good, but we know that children—girls far more than boys—are bombarded with content, some of it inappropriate, and text messages, and this brings the opportunity for bullying. Common Sense Media, for example, provides a digital curriculum; we have constructed a partnership with the NSPCC to promote that in schools. It is about educating parents, but it is also about helping children become savvy digital citizens, and, above all, helping teachers, who are behind the curve, and their own pupils, on the use of technology. This is an absolutely vital issue and should be front and centre of our thinking.

The second issue I want to concentrate on, which was so ably covered in detail by the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, who knows so much about this subject, is the role of the arts and creativity in our schools and education. I stand guilty as charged, as the Arts Minister who could not save some of the creative programmes that were set up by the previous Labour Government; they were the most vulnerable when it came to having to reduce our budget. But one scheme I was able to save, by working with the Department for Education on music education, was the astonishing In Harmony scheme, which is one of the most emotional things I have ever been to. It is exactly what noble Lords are talking about; it is not about learning music, it is about learning confidence. It was about kids aged nine and 10 educating their own parents about what they were learning and gaining enormous confidence from performing like that.

I applaud the Government in focusing on the rigour of reading and maths, and I accept that Nick Gibb can be proud that we are moving up the league tables in how well our kids are now reading and doing in maths. Those are the building blocks of education and success in life, but creativity is also a fantastic way of building confidence and academic rigour, and, as I think the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, said, it is a space to think. Above all, it is a route for kids who are not suited necessarily to the academic path to find a way forward. I was always a great sceptic about free school meals, and I have done a complete volte-face on that as well because, if you have kids in school from age five to 18, feeding them well and properly must be a no-brainer. Then there is sport as well. My message is that it is called the soft stuff but it is unbelievably important.