Schools: Well-being and Personal and Social Needs

Lord Wills Excerpts

Thursday 14th June 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wills]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Jones on giving your Lordships the opportunity to discuss some of the fundamental challenges facing our education system. I hope there will be general agreement on the proposition that schools can make an invaluable contribution to the well-being and personal and social needs of young people. I hope that there will also be general agreement that, as my noble friend said, the introduction by the previous Government of personal, social, health and economic education was a valuable addition to the curriculum. Therefore, the outcome of the Government’s review, when it finally emerges, will be important. Judging from what the Schools Minister, Mr Nick Gibb MP, said last year when announcing the review—that children “can benefit enormously from PSHE education”—it seems that the Government may at least pay lip service to its importance and its value. However, in considering how to proceed, I hope that the Government will make resources available to schools so that they can deliver whatever will be asked of them.

The national curriculum, for all its well rehearsed merits, has over time proved an irresistible temptation for Ministers to pursue their pet interests without always thinking through all the consequences for schools. The present Ministers seem to be no exception. I make the exception of my noble friend Lady Morris, who will be speaking later in the debate, who was an outstanding Schools Minister and an outstanding Secretary of State.

There are always compelling arguments for changing what is taught and how it is taught. Temptation is ever present for Ministers. Schools are now being told, for example, that they need to do better with basic numeracy and literacy; that they need to give young people a richer account of our national story; that they need to encourage greater take-up of foreign languages; that they need to stimulate more interest in maths and science; that they need to pay more attention to inculcating the soft skills that are increasingly important for employers; and that they must not overlook the importance of the humanities in producing well-rounded citizens.

Schools are being asked to deliver all this in the face of profound societal change which makes the task of teaching complex and demanding in a way that it was not a generation ago. Young people are exposed from an early age to an unprecedented amount of information and influences from a wide range of authorities. All this amplifies peer pressure in an unprecedented way.

This clearly creates new and demanding challenges for teachers. For example, the quickest way to secure a dramatic improvement in GCSE results would be to get boys to do as well as girls. However, there is a stubborn and intractable gender gap, with girls outperforming boys across the curriculum. This applies, to varying extents, across almost every social class, region and ethnic group. The precise reasons for this are unclear, but what is clear is that a significant cause must lie in societal change, which teachers are having to address on top of all the frequent and extensive changes that politicians demand of them.

Tackling these challenges might not be the problem it is for so many schools if sufficient resources of time and teachers were available, but they are not. Education, like everywhere in the public sector, is enduring tightening budgets which are not going to ease at any time soon.

Apart from budgetary pressures, there is the problem of trying to meet all these demands within an institutional framework which has changed too slowly to meet the new demands on it. The exam system, for example, is still based on the flawed premise that young people all mature, emotionally and intellectually, at the same rate, and so they are all due, more or less, to take exams at the same time. A system which allowed and encouraged young people to take exams as soon as they were ready to do so would create valuable flexibility which could help meet some of the challenges faced by schools.

Again, for all the waves of reforms launched by Minister after Minister to the curriculum, to the exam system and to school structures, far too little attention has been paid to methods of teaching. Schools still rely too much on the teacher acting as a sage on the stage even though new technologies and learning programmes could enable more flexible approaches, tailored more to the needs of individual students, with teachers acting more as a guide by the side. This is not to replace whole class teaching but to enrich it.

A longer school year would create more space for all the subjects that merit inclusion in the curriculum. It would allow more intensive teaching of core subjects; create the space to tackle the difficult transition between key stage 2 and key stage 3, where many pupils regress; and many parents would welcome shorter holidays. If we want improvement in educational outcomes, I can see no good reason against lengthening the school year, apart from resourcing it. Has the Minister’s department done any research into the returns from such an investment?

The Minister may well argue that the new freedoms the Government are giving to schools will enable them to meet these challenges—and so they may—but they can never be a complete solution. Our education system is one of the most important forces that bind us together as a nation. If the Government abdicate from their responsibilities to ensure an appropriate curriculum, an effective pedagogy with agreed outcomes and, crucially, adequate resources to deliver all this, the result will inevitably be uneven provision of varying quality—and those who are likely to suffer most from this uneven provision, whatever the pupil premium will deliver, are the most disadvantaged, those young people who have most need of a good education to get a better start in life. Such an abdication of responsibility by government can never be acceptable.

Schools can make an invaluable contribution to the well-being and personal and social needs of young people, but only if government enables them to do so. I hope the Minister can reassure us today that this Government will not walk away from their responsibilities to do so.