Education Bill

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Willis, for keeping this ball on the park. Like many other Members of your Lordships' House, I have a number of interests in the education sector, all of which appear in the register of interests. The omission of a clause such as this in the completed Bill in my judgment—and I put this to the Minister—would be literally mind-blowing: not a small omission, not something that has just slipped by, but a truly mind-blowing omission. That is why I support what I think is a very modest, simple and very easily deliverable objective, as laid out marvellously by the noble Lord, Lord Willis. My contribution will concern the very serious issue of employability, possibly pre-empting one or two debates that will come up later on Report about jobs. During the summer break, I read a book by Jim Clifton, the chair of Gallup, entitled The Coming Jobs War. It is drawn from the largest survey Gallup had ever undertaken in its history. The view expressed in the book, and the conclusion that Mr Clifton comes to, is that the relationship between ICT skills and jobs in the developed world is absolutely everything. There will be winners and losers, and unless this Government —this was to an extent true of the Government previously—get a real grip on this issue, we can only be among the losers in the next 10 to 20 years. I would like to offer a few statistics that may alarm the Government. If they have different statistics, I would be very happy to hear from the Minister. Only 9 per cent of ICT classes in this country are taught by teachers with any relevant qualifications. That means that 91 per cent of young people in this country are being taught so-called ICT by teachers with no qualifications whatever in the subject. I am not sure what other subjects fall into this category. I cannot believe that there are very many, and I cannot believe that a civilised nation would let this go on for very long when it knows that its entire employability framework for the next 10 to 20 years is reliant upon success in this area. I also want to explain exactly what ICT is. If one does not understand the key component of it—that is, code—then ICT, taught badly, is nothing more than typing. It is the equivalent of teaching someone 30 years ago to change a typewriter ribbon and use a bit of Tipp-Ex. The key to ICT is to understand coding, and everything that goes into the creation of what appears on a computer screen. If we do not know how to do that, we cannot compete, and we cannot offer any alternative opportunities to develop the kind of companies that the United States has successfully developed, and other parts of the developing world are racing past us in developing. The important point, which I must get across, is that coding can be taught only through and by the use of technology. That is what makes the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Willis, so very important; there is no way of teaching this other than through technology. I will give an example of developments that are taking place—in a sense, this is the good news. One website alone, the Times Educational Supplement website, now has 1.6 million registered members. It is growing at the rate of 50,000 registered members per month. Fifty per cent of those registered members are in the UK. The rest are spread across another 190 countries. This is stimulating 6.3 million downloads per month by teachers in this country and overseas. At present, roughly 10,000 to 12,000 lesson plans are being posted on to the web through this one site alone. It is estimated that at the end of the school year that figure will be at least 20,000 per month—from one site. Why have I dwelt on all these figures? I feel that during the time that I worked for the noble Baroness, Lady Morris—and I was at the department for a number of years—we always sought solutions to improve teaching and learning that could be delivered at scale. That is what bedevilled us; it was not a lack of initiatives, or a lack of good ideas, or this school or that, or groups of schools doing well. We could not find access to scale the type of changes we were desperately keen to make. I would argue that now, through technology, we at last have it in our grasp. We have teachers helping teachers—the online equivalent of subject-specific organisations that thrived until 20 years ago. Those subject-specific organisations were the protectors and supporters of standards. When they died, we had no way—and at present still have none—of supporting and guaranteeing standards. Through ICT within schools, we can have that ability all over again. I will make one last point. Over the summer I read a remarkable book, called Now You See It, by Cathy Davidson. She is a professor in education at Duke University in the United States. She makes an unarguable case for using recent knowledge in brain science in order, as she puts it, to, "““transform the way we live, work and learn””—" most particularly, the way we learn. This country is brilliantly gifted with scientists. We have always been at the cutting edge of change. Why on earth are we allowing this complete revolution in the way that young people learn to pass us by? I strongly support this amendment.