Education Bill

Viscount Eccles Excerpts

Tuesday 14th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Eccles]

My Lords, in his splendid maiden speech my noble friend Lord Edmiston referred to the expertise of this House. Of course, we are all educational experts because we have all been to school, but I go back to the point made by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford when he looked for an overall educational vision. I am not very good at visions; they always seem to appear rather mistily in the distance and then to fade away.

Where do we begin with education? There are three providers. As the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, said, parents come into the picture first—the concept of parents needs to be expanded to include family or whoever the child lives with when very young—then the teachers and the children join in. Teachers and parents look at each other and, one hopes, have a dialogue. They ask themselves the question, “What have we got here?”. The child, who comes in somewhat later but has a very real presence pretty early on, tends to respond, “Never mind that, who am I?”. These are complicated questions involving many variables. There are no statistical ways of measuring these variables. Indeed, the mathematical and statistical answers tend to become almost insulting to the individuals concerned because education is not something that is put into people—the Latin word for education means to draw out. What the providers and the child who becomes a young person and then a young adult are trying to do is to find out somebody’s talents, interests and shortcomings—that is, the mixture which makes up an individual. Each person is on an individual journey; some take very much longer than others to complete that journey. Indeed, it is a commonplace that education never ceases.

I give two examples to illustrate some of the complexities. I have told the House before that for some time I was allegedly in charge of a steel foundry. A crane driver came down for his break. I happened to be there and asked him, “How are you going on, Charlie?”. He replied, “Not too badly, but I’ve had some rather strange news. The headmaster of my son’s school has rung me up and told me that he’s been offered a place at a university”. I said, “You must be very pleased”. He said, “I’m not so sure. It couldn’t be me, you see, but I suppose it might have been the milkman”. He was, of course, delighted.

My next example is a sort of parent-child illustration. I wrote to my father who twice held the post of Secretary of State for Education. I think that on the first occasion he had a slightly different title, but that was what he was doing. It was at the time of Suez and I said that I thought we would probably find that that did not work. He wrote back in a letter which started, “The trouble with you is that you read the Guardian; you should read the Times”. That is an example of a journey during which a dialogue about education was going on between the parent and the child.

Governments are not comfortable with these messy, complicated individual journeys; they cannot cope with them. The Bill is very welcome because, in part at least, it recognises that. It is saying that this is a matter for parents, family, teachers, children and pupils; that is where the outcomes will be determined. It is true that the outcome will be determined in every case by the players in the front line and not by the Government or local government. Indeed, Government, local government and all the other agencies are only enabling mechanisms. The game is played and won or lost or comes out as a draw by the parents/family and the teachers. I would prefer us to talk about teachers rather than schools—if your Lordships think back, they will remember individual teachers as well as schools—and about the children or young persons themselves. As we go into the detail of the Bill, I hope that we do not forget that fundamental fact.