Education Bill

My Lords, I speak in support of this proposed new clause, which I have also put my name to. It is a pleasure to follow on from my noble friend Lady Massey who made the case extremely well. I am sure those who are worried about time would ask what more have I to add. There are a few things. I have not reminded the Committee, although I did at Second Reading, of my interest in respect of education, which some of this discussion may stray into. I advise Apple on education matters, I do some work for TSL Education and I have a number of other education clients overseas. This amendment, as we have heard, seeks to ensure we have balance in the curriculum. At its heart, the importance of that is ensuring that we give every child the chance to realise their talents. Some of us are not particularly right-brained, some of us are not particularly left-brained. That means that some of us are not desperately academic and some of us might be more creative. We need to ensure that we have a curriculum that can bring out those talents, use them and foster them, so that every child can be a success in later life. At the root of my support for this amendment are my concerns about some of the changes that Government are making that I think will narrow the curriculum rather than giving it more breadth. I hate to keep harping back to my time but it informs my view. I sought to reduce the amount of prescription in the national curriculum at secondary with a review—perhaps I should have gone further. When instigating the independent review of the primary curriculum by Sir Jim Rose, we also sought to include a lot of balance in the new primary curriculum but unfortunately that has now been abandoned. In both cases, the question is: how do we get every child to want to get up in the morning and go to school? It means making sure that there are things in the day that will motivate them and, in part, what is in the national curriculum informs that. The other part is the accountability measure that drives and motivates schools. Certainly, successive Ministers will always use an accountability measure as a way of driving behaviour among head teachers, governors and teachers. I am worried not only by the abandonment of the new primary curriculum in favour of an understandably dogged focus on particular forms of synthetic phonics in reading and a reading test, but because that focus is particularly narrow—I do not think anyone could argue that it is not. It is very important that we get children to read and I am mindful of the report of the all-party parliamentary group for education, published last week, which argued that we need to have more than just the one tool in the box to ensure that every child can be engaged with reading, and that teachers have all of those tools to use. At secondary, I am also really worried about the implications of the English baccalaureate because it takes five academic measures but does not include sport or any creative or practical subjects. To me, that says that we are going to be driving those schools which are worried—particularly those worried about their performance and about the effects of choice, and which might be worried today by the public service reform story in the Guardian that schools will be allowed to fail and close—to make sure that they are performing as best as they can on the preferred measure of success for secondary schools. That is: how are you doing in terms of the numbers getting A* to C in English, maths, science, a foreign language and a humanity? What would happen if we included sport? Some would say that is not fair as not everyone is good at sport, to which I say: precisely—not everyone is good at academic subjects either, but it is a good idea to motivate people to do sport and to do creative learning. It is also not just about engaging every child and giving them a chance but about equipping young people for the current labour market and for the future. I refer noble Lords to an excellent article by the head of the OECD Education Directorate, Andreas Schleicher. I know that the Government are very keen on the OECD’s performance measure and I hope that they are just as keen on what the head of that directorate has to say. I quote a little of it, as he puts the argument better than I can: "““What we learn, the way we learn it, and how we are taught is changing. This has implications for schools and higher level education, as well as for lifelong learning. For most of the last century, the widespread belief among policymakers was that you had to get the basics right in education before you could turn to broader skills. It's as though schools needed to be boring and dominated by rote learning before deeper, more invigorating learning could flourish. Those that hold on to this view should not be surprised if students lose interest or drop out of schools because they cannot relate what is going on in school to their real lives. If you were running a supermarket instead of a school and saw that 30 out of 100 customers each day left your shop without buying anything, you would think about changing your inventory. But that does not happen easily in schools because of deeply rooted, even if scientifically unsupported, beliefs that learning can only occur in a particular way””." I hope that the Minister of State for schools in the other place is listening. Schleicher goes on: "““Education today is much more about ways of thinking which involve creative and critical approaches to problem-solving and decision-making. It is also about ways of working, including communication and collaboration, as well as the tools they require, such as the capacity to recognise and exploit the potential of new technologies, or indeed, to avert their risks. And last but not least, education is about the capacity to live in a multi-faceted world as an active and engaged citizen. These citizens influence what they … learn and how they want to learn it, and it is this that shapes the role of educators””." I could not say it better myself. That is why we need a broad curriculum. I continue to visit schools. I mentioned the North Liverpool Academy earlier. That academy deals with probably the most deprived ward in the country, and the children from that ward who need educating, and uses the creative arts strategically. Every child takes part in performing arts, in part to give them more emotional literacy so that they can then deal with some of the issues that they face outside school. I also visited the excellent secondary school in Corsham, Wiltshire recently. I visited the North Liverpool Academy because it was at the top of the contextual value added league of secondary schools in this country for the second year running. I visited Corsham because of the extraordinary A-level results it is achieving across the academic range. The root of its success is, again, creative learning. It has a ““doing”” room where it employs two full-time artists in residence, so that anyone across the curriculum if they want to come and do stuff and make stuff can engage with these artists and bring the curriculum to life. The school is also using the AQA Bacc qualification post-16 to do extended projects which again engage young people in very creative ways, and makes them love going to school—because that is at the heart of it. Do you want to go to school? Do you want to get out of your duvet every morning? We can say the same about sport being used strategically in schools. At the root of a lot of the success of some of our finest independent schools is how they use sport to motivate pupils. We have seen the success of schools sports partnerships. We have even seen the Australians coming to this country to find out how we do school sport so well, although that was threatened by some ill thought out decisions by the Secretary of State on which he had partially to back track. Some of my most inspirational visits to schools have been with Olympians and Paralympians as part of trying to encourage schools to think about how to make the most of the Olympics coming to this country next year. The Paralympians particularly motivated young people because they could relate to them overcoming some of the challenges that they had faced and going on to achieve the best that they could. That was hugely motivating for young people. Mention was made of China and the Chinese results. Confucian cultures inspire a great culture of learning in the home and parents driving forward learning in the home. However, it is worth noting that as jobs are now moving in part from China to Africa, in the pursuit of cheap labour, the Chinese are coming over to this country to find out how we do creativity, make people inquisitive and make them entrepreneurs. However, we do not design that into our school system. At the heart of this amendment lies a desire to be less prescriptive about the curriculum. We should not introduce measures such as the English baccalaureate, which works against a broad and balanced curriculum.