Queen’s Speech

Lord Winston Excerpts

Wednesday 12th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, I join my noble friend Lord Griffiths in his lovely remarks about the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Portsmouth and his wonderful work. We wish him all the very best for the future. I also welcome our two maiden speakers. I declare an interest as an employee of Imperial College, where I research aspects of human development. I also supervise PhD students who measure the impact that universities can have on encouraging the aspirations of school students. As the university president’s envoy for outreach, I visit and speak to school students all over the United Kingdom, wherever requested. This has, sadly, been mostly remotely this year.

The gracious Speech contains laudable hopes to improve education and we congratulate the Government on the emphasis on early years, but there are major gaps if we are to offer better opportunity. Each week, my own outreach includes visits to some of the most deprived parts of England, including the coastal towns, the south coast, the West Country, South Yorkshire and the edges of Derbyshire, the north-west and north-east. If you go to towns just 15 or 20 miles away from one of our greatest universities in the world, you see massive deprivation in East Anglia. There is no question that this hugely affects aspiration; there is no awareness at all of what children could achieve, and this applies to both further and higher education.

Many children in deprived Britain have no idea what their huge potential actually is. This is not because they have bad schools or teachers; on the contrary. Their background, environment and diet, their parents’ employment or lack of it, their housing—perhaps with a TV set but no books—and the squalor in which they often live lead to intellectual and social impoverishment which cannot be corrected by a few hours in schools, with teachers stretched beyond belief with administrative necessities, academic targets and assessments, and a national devotion to a prescribed curriculum. This may discourage attempts to enthuse children with a delight in learning. The best that some teachers can hope for is no disruption.

Achievement goes far beyond education but depends on the enrichment of society. If we want to change society and improve its health, behaviour and economy, we need to invest much more in primary education, when the brain is most plastic and ready to absorb all experience. If we do not inspire children to wonder and encourage joy at learning, we lose so many later. The Government have promised £4,000 per child in primary education and £5,000 per child in secondary. This is not merely inadequate for A-level courses; it is totally inadequate for the most important time of our lives—when we start formal education. It is all very well to commit to increase teachers’ starting salaries to £30,000 a year, but the rewards for undervalued teachers are insufficient to attract enough of even the most committed and able individuals. I know of many professionals who seriously consider dropping better paid jobs to teach, but retraining and inadequate financial rewards still prevent young families purchasing housing. We also need to attract far more male teachers into primary schools. Male role models are equally important as female ones.

The Government hope that the UK will become a science superpower and admit that too few women enter science. However, the great majority of those teaching science in primary schools have no science qualifications. Excellent teachers and role models though they are, most of them do not have a science degree and very few even have one A-level in science, so they are teaching in an unconfident way. This is particularly the case when it comes to one of the most important aspects of primary school, which is practical education, which attracts interest and has a lifelong effect on so many children.

In one primary school that I visited just before the pandemic, I did an experiment with 180 children, showing them how we could exhaust 20% of a gas from a glass bottle—the gas being oxygen—and create a partial vacuum. I will not go into the result of this experiment, but they loved it. When I asked those children what the commonest gas in the air around them was, most said “carbon dioxide”; some hesitantly said “hydrogen”—fortunately, that was not the case of course. Eventually a number said “oxygen” and, finally, one little boy put his hand up and rather tentatively said, “nitrogen?” Immediately, the science teacher shut him up and told him not to talk nonsense. Of course, the problem is, thereafter, what do you do in a school like that? I had a very gentle chat with that child before I left, but I could not say that the teacher was wrong.

We have gone through hard times and we must not leave the experience of education to a Gradgrind approach to facts. Education must engender a delight in learning, and it should not be a process but a journey to discover, to wonder and to delight.