I beg to move Amendment 101 on British standards, which stands in my name and those of the noble Lords, Lord Blunkett and Lord Norton of Louth, and the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher.
The Ofsted chief inspector, Amanda Spielman, has said:
“When it comes to British values, we often see an oddly piecemeal approach, which too seldom builds the teaching into a strong context … we see a lot of wall displays and motivational assemblies, but not much coherent thinking about how a real depth of understanding can be built through the academic curriculum”.
British values have to be taught in schools, but there is a fundamental problem at the moment about them being taught.
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The Minister has been kind enough to see me twice and I thank her very much for that. The last time I saw her, she said that she thought that any problems—I think it fair to say that she would recognise that there are problems—could be addressed through changing the guidance given to schools. However, the problem goes much deeper than that.
When teaching British values was first introduced in 2015, some people here will remember that it met with quite a lot of opposition. That opposition may have been totally unfounded, but the fact is that it met opposition from those who objected to the whole concept of British values, as though it implied that British values were superior to other values, as well as from certain sections of the Muslim community. Whether or not that opposition was justified, it was there and, sadly, it has persisted to this day. That is one of the main reasons why I am bringing this amendment forward. We need to try to overcome that opposition and dissipate it. I believe passionately that the teaching of British values is absolutely fundamental to our education system, and it is not being done well at the moment.
I will give your Lordships an example. A friend of mine is from a left-wing political family and feels very committed to helping teachers teach British values in schools. However, when he mentions this to some of his teacher friends, they, as it were, back away from him in suspicion: “What are you doing, being involved in something so chauvinistic like this?” So, there is a suspicion and a hostility that needs to be overcome by many teachers and many pupils.
My amendment seeks to address this, first, by a very simple change. Instead of simply talking about British values, it talks about the “values of British citizenship.” There can be all sorts of interesting arguments about British values. Like Jeremy Paxman, you might think that one British value is a sense of humour or irony; no doubt Chinese and Russians have their own sense of their own values. However, when it comes to citizenship, that is a very clear legal concept. If you sign up to be a British citizen or you are born in this country and are a citizen by birth, there are quite specific values—or there ought to be—associated with being a citizen. They may be better or worse than being a citizen of China or whatever, but they belong to our society, and it should be quite clear in schools what these are.
That is the first change. There is a second change that my amendment would make compared with what is taught already. The present system of values concentrates on the fact that people should be respected whatever their beliefs or lack of beliefs. That, of course, reflects the worry in 2015 about religiously-based terrorism, which is why that was put in in that form. However, that resulted in something rather less rounded than it ought to be and rather skewed, and one fundamental value was left out: that there should be equal respect for every person. As I said when I introduced this in Committee, in our society, one counts for one. You get just one vote, not more than one. The law has to treat people equally whether they are wealthy or poor. Every government department has to treat people equally. That is an absolutely fundamental value, and it should be clear in the teaching of British values, as it is in my amendment.
Secondly, in the present set of values we have this rather loose phrase “individual liberty”. We need something much more precise than that, and which is clearly defined in both national and international law. It is a simple word: freedom, which goes alongside democracy, the rule of law and the equal worth of every single person.
There is an addition to my list which is not in a usual list: respect for the environment. This is partly because people feel very strongly about that these days, and it would also help to gather the interest and support of young people who are being taught British values in schools. One fundamental failure of the present system is that it is not at all clear who should be teaching British political values in schools, and my amendment makes it clear that it should be taught as part of citizenship education. As a result, citizenship education, which at the moment is not at all well done, would have much more substance to it and there would be a mutually reinforcing relationship between citizenship education and the teaching of British values.
My amendment is a simple one. There are 12 words in the present list of values that have to be taught, and my amendment would increase that by four words, to 16. Admittedly, I do include definitions, because it is very important that it should be clear in schools that children are being taught about liberal democracy, not the kind of democracy they have in Russia or that they might claim to have in China, where of course they do have elections. There are certain characteristics of liberal democracy which I have put in those definitions.
I very much hope that the Minister, even at this late stage, will have second thoughts about this and see the compelling force of the argument. I believe that there is good support for the amendment—at least, I hope there will be—from all around the House. I beg to move.