Education Bill

My Lords, I find myself in the position of agreeing with a little of what everyone so far has said, even when they have been speaking in opposition to each other. I join the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, in paying tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Baker, who set up the national curriculum all those years ago. In the 1980s, I was a teacher in an inner-city secondary school when the national curriculum was first set up. I know how it transformed how we dealt with not just children throughout the school but particularly those on whom we had given up to some extent. We were made to address the issue of teaching difficult, underperforming children what seemed to them to be tough subjects. When the national curriculum came in and teachers, not just in the school where I taught, but throughout the country, took on that task, they were incredibly successful. A generation of children have had a better standard of education since then. That is my starting point. Having taught before the national curriculum and having seen what happened when a national curriculum secured, by legal means, an entitlement for children from all backgrounds to have access to certain subjects, I am instinctively very apprehensive about taking that structure away. It was one of the most successful ways I have ever seen of putting high expectations into a framework. It is how the teacher relates to the student that really embeds high expectations, but the framework of the national curriculum instigated it and gave it a push. As I have on previous occasions, I will always pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Baker, for introducing it. I think it is probably the best thing that happened. That is my first concern. Secondly, the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, must see history repeating itself with everybody now trying to get their subject into the English baccalaureate. I was in a meeting this afternoon where somebody said with confidence that their subject will be the sixth pillar of the English baccalaureate. I will not say where I was this afternoon or what that subject was, but that person is not the only one who thinks that they have secured the sixth pillar of the English baccalaureate. We have a genuine problem. On the one hand, we want to make sure that all our children have access to a wide range of subjects, but on the other hand, we know the consequences of an overcrowded curriculum. Ever since the noble Lord, Lord Baker, introduced the national curriculum, we have been playing a game of wanting both things. What happens? We allow other good things to be put into the national curriculum, it gets overcrowded, then another Government come in and want to slim it down. We cannot keep going on like this. We have to look at what is happening and what messages we are giving to schools. I agree with my noble friend Lady Massey about the need for a broad and balanced curriculum. Nobody can deny it. I agree that children and young people should be entitled to all the subjects she listed, and I could not agree more with my noble friend Lord Knight about the importance of creativity. I have always said that I wish I had done my ministerial jobs the other way round. When I was Secretary of State and Minister for Education, I thought that I understood the place of creativity in the curriculum. It was not until I went to DCMS that I really understood that I did not understand. In the Government, with the greatest of respect, the present Ministers may understand this, because I think I understood it better than some of my colleagues. In a department such as the Department for Education it is very difficult to understand what creativity is unless you have spent a fair amount of time with people who are creative by nature. Successive Governments have failed to embed that creativity at the core of the curriculum. It is not about finding an hour a week for art; it is about understanding in your soul that there is something in people that is creative that can lead learning right across the whole of the curriculum. The problem the Minister has is how to bring all those things together. I suspect that so far he does not disagree with a great deal of what I have said. The problem the Government have is that we want to guarantee entitlement to a broad and balanced curriculum for all our children, to protect all children against schools that do not deliver that and to have a message that raises expectations in the average school, because a lot of legislation is putting into the average school what naturally occurs in the best school, and at the same time we have the problem mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, of the overcrowded core curriculum. We have to get out of that difficulty. One of the problems that the Government have made, about which I have been most critical, is to some extent about message giving. If they were intent on trying to get a broad and balanced curriculum without overcrowding it, the English baccalaureate was the worst way that that could have been done. What we have also learnt from 20 or 25 years of educational reform is that schools follow the assessment measures. They have always done it and always will. Somehow, what we needed from the Government was a message through the assessment framework saying, ““All right; we trust you. We want a small core—that is what the Government think—but we value that broad and balanced education””. My problem now, with the Government moving away from a broad and balanced curriculum, is with what that is doing not so much in the curriculum but in the assessment framework. On the English baccalaureate, I would add that, predictably, you can see schools doing it—getting rid of music and creative arts from the curriculum to employ more modern foreign language teachers. They will chase the measurements because that is the school system in which we live. It is compounded by the Government's failure to give a message about what they value in any way, other than on the English baccalaureate. I am still looking for the pronouncement that values information technology; I suspect that the noble Lord, Lord Willis, will have something to say about that later on. There is not that voice coming from Government about the importance of creativity and when they tried to give a voice about the importance of sport, they got it wrong. I listened to what the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, said. Again, I do not differ with anything that was said but, of all things, I think it is the sports curriculum which we have made the most progress on—I know it is core—in terms of the non-academic curriculum over the past 10 to 15 years. What we have now with the youth sports partnership and its links into sport outside school is an excellent thing. I know that we are not there yet but it is the best basis for sports education that we have had for a very long time. That happened because it had some central direction and resource. More than that, it had a clear message from Government that sport mattered. I remember the former Prime Ministers, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, making a lot of speeches about sport. It needs that leadership to give school leaders and teachers confidence that that area of learning matters. That is my worry on this: for a broad and balanced curriculum, we cannot rely just on what is written in the curriculum. It needs to be about messages given and the assessment adopted. On the latter two, I agree with my noble friend Lord Knight and those who moved the amendment. It is leaving us wanting and I am really fearful not just of a narrow curriculum next year but, unless something is done, of even worse in subsequent years.