Education Bill

My Lords, in a spirit of attempting to clarify rather than add to the duties of Ofsted, the proposers of Amendment 117 hope that it will find favour with the Committee and with the Minister. Indeed, we can see no reason why it should not, for this minimalist, one-word addition to the Bill very much runs with the grain of the clause in which we propose to embed it. For those who may say, not unreasonably, why not add also other terse desiderata, such as mathematical, musical or physical, we say, no, linguistic is in a class of its own. The social and cultural development of pupils depends critically on their command of language and the interpersonal relations that promote such development proceed above all else on successful and confident facility with language. In other words, the social and cultural development already in the clause actually entails linguistic development. So manifestly true is this that it might well be felt that adding ““linguistic”” is superfluous, but it is not. Rather, its omission from the clause should be viewed as a glaring oversight, so much do the other two—social and cultural—depend on it. Language is what supremely distinguishes the human species, giving us uniquely the facility to talk about the past, speculate about the future and analyse the present. This is why Ofsted's attention needs to be specifically drawn to the monitoring of linguistic development, not only for the sake of the unfortunate minority of youngsters with pathological problems in speech and language, nor for the sake of the much bigger minorities who come from non-English speaking homes or from homes which are non-speaking, and in which conversation in any language is in short supply. Our amendment has all these in mind but we propose it for the sake of the school community as a whole, for whom rich, rapid and early language development is the key to their whole education and subsequent careers. Moreover, the richer their English, the likelier it is that their interest—social and cultural—will reach out beyond English to the social, cultural and, indeed, vocational opportunities to be found in the realm of foreign language learning.