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Education

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for providing the opportunity to hold forth on education again. I am absolutely delighted to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Huyton. A dozen years ago I remember making speeches like that—perhaps not as good, but similar—from those Benches and getting an extremely hostile reception from these Benches. It is wonderful that things have moved on and we are now looking at a common set of ambitions, goals and assumptions. That makes progress much more possible because it gives the Government confidence that if they do things right, they will not immediately find their policies reversed by the next government. That is all to the good of pupils. I also enjoyed the speech made by the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Drefelin. As a physicist myself it is nice when someone champions science, although I am worried about her references to ““rocket science”” and ““bang goes the national curriculum””. She and the pupils could be in trouble with the Terrorism Bill. The difficulty of science comes down, particularly, to the GCSE curriculum, which is incredibly boring. The way pupils achieve a good grade at GCSE science these days is to have a little pack of cards with facts on them; they memorise them and they get an A grade. It is absolutely simple, and it is boring. The science you are taught is science nobody needs to know; it has no relevance to life outside and the lives people lead. It is unsurprising that that theme has been echoed by the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, and the right reverend Prelate. There is a real problem, a real disconnect between what children are taught for GCSE and what they really need and want to learn. The curriculum has been designed on an almost Platonic basis as ““this ought to be what people learn.”” It does not address the fact that for every child who takes a GCSE and continues to follow that subject afterwards, there are five who do not. The curriculum entirely addresses the needs of those who are going on; it therefore leaves 80 per cent of pupils out in the cold. To my mind, a lot of the problems of discipline and disaffection flow from the flaws in the curriculum. An interesting illustration of that is that there is a school in England with a very high level of special needs, where last year, at least, 40 per cent of pupils got five A to C grades, but where there are no written school rules and no disciplinary problems. That is because the curriculum is absolutely centred on what the kids want to learn and is very heavily practical. That school is Brymore, in Bridgewater, if anybody wants to look it up. It illustrates that if children are learning what they want to learn, however disadvantaged and educationally challenged they are, they will behave. I have total sympathy with those faced with the GCSE, who say, ““I do not want to know this.”” That is the way I feel about maths GCSE, which I have recently taken my kids through, when I look back on it. I have never used it. I have been a scientist, an accountant and a merchant banker, and very little of it was maths that I have used in life. So I think there is a lot to be done on that and I very much hope that at some stage the Government will turn their attention to it. What I want to talk about today is selection. In this country we have an almost entirely selective school system. Some of it is a little bit academic, but most of it is social. Some of it is directly social—largely in religious schools—but the great majority is geographically selective. As the Sutton Trust has demonstrated, the middle class have captured every form of selection going. Of course they have; they are bright, they are active and they care about their children’s education. Of course they go all-out to get the best possible education for their children. We have allowed the system to be such that the middle class has effectively been able to exclude from the best schools in the country the disadvantaged 20 per cent, not because that is their objective, but because we have not produced a system that works any other way. The ambition we share on both sides of the House is that there should be good schools for all. Everybody should have the chance to go to a good school. Yes, there should be choice; it should be choice between good schools. There are different kinds of schools; parents want different kinds of education; children have different kinds of aptitudes and experiences and opportunities that they want to pursue. There is a great scope for variety, but there ought to be access to good schools for everybody. Despite what my noble friend Lady Shephard said, we can allow a little bit of social engineering, in that none of us really wants schools to be an engine for the ““ghettoisation”” of society. We want schools to be part of a cohesive society rather than one that produces a lot of little sub-groups which spend the rest of their lives at war with each other. Does the present system work or have any hope of working? No, I do not think it has. I do not like the grammar school system in Kent. I find it very destructive of the education of those who do not get into the grammar schools. It is very hard to find a good state education in Kent outside the grammar schools. It just does not seem to work in that way. The middle classes of course run across the border or buy private education, but it makes life extremely difficult for those who start out socially disadvantaged. I do not think the grammar schools, again to look at those in Kent, really flourish as schools. They become complacent, they do not go all-out for challenges like inclusion or broadening the curriculum. A lot of them are quite narrow and relatively uninteresting schools. Looking at them from my point of view as publisher of the Good Schools Guide, we do not include many of them. I do not think that is the answer and nor do I think that geographically selective schools are the answer. They are very easy for the middle class to navigate, but geographical selection is enormously effective in keeping the disadvantaged out. You can just do it by house price and draw the maps so that they cannot get in. I do not think that any of the current systems of selection work. I do not think, either, that abolishing selection is an attractive idea. The only proposal I have heard for that is admission by ballot. That has an enormous collection of disadvantages. First, how do you handle the fact that everybody would go for the same schools? There is no reason why the ballot should be evenly spread; you might have schools where 20,000 people apply for 200 places and no applications elsewhere. There is no regulation. As soon as you start to introduce regulation, you are introducing geographical selection again. It is uncertain; parents do not know what is going to happen so it is an unfriendly system from a parental point of view; and it is destructive of community. I do not think that is a road to go down either. I do think that we can learn a lesson from Adam Smith’s book and harness our natural self-interest to be the engine of a system that would work much better for the whole community. We can do that by seeing selection as a means to an end. What selection does is create character in a school. If you have a sufficient number of Catholics in a school, it becomes a Catholic school and it will have the virtues of a Catholic school; it will be the kind of education that has a particular attraction to particular parents and particular children. The same applies to academic selection, certainly as practised by specialist schools. If you want a school that is good at languages you need a sufficient cohort of pupils who are good at and interested in languages, otherwise it is extremely difficult to maintain. There is certainly a home for geographical selection because it allows a school to be part of a community. That, I think is enormously valuable; a school is a very important part of a community and we ought not to lose geographical selection from that point of view. I find selection a very useful tool in creating a variety of schools and in maintaining character, but it must not be allowed to go too far. I think we have let it go too far; I think we should row back on it. We should say that all selective schools, which effectively means all schools, because there is selection of one kind or another, must admit a proportion of children by ballot. Ballot is the simplest and cleanest system. You might get up to 25 per cent quite happily. I do not think this destroys the character of a school. I do not think Ampleforth is less Catholic because 40 per cent of its pupils are not Catholics. I do not think Eton, in the days when I was there, was a less academic school because it was not particularly selective. So long as you have a cohort who maintain the ethos of a school and that is a settled ethos, you can accommodate a very substantial proportion of pupils who do not share that particular aptitude or background. I think that would give pupils a real opportunity to move across borders and to access the opportunities presently closed to them, whether it is getting into the grammar school, which is next door but closed to them because their 11-plus results were not quite good enough; or getting into that school in the smart suburb when you live in the high-rises next door. A mixed application of selection and ballot would result in opportunities that are just not there and will not be under any system that we are likely to reach under this Government for broadening the social intake of all schools. As a Conservative, I would move further. I would want to accommodate the right reverend Prelate and allow him to establish his school, not with an LEA’s permission but where he saw the opportunity. I do not see why LEAs should act as gatekeepers to stop such an enterprise. I do not see this Government, who, after all, have been with us for quite a long time, taking that step but I hope that I can persuade them to open up our selective system and allow access to the less privileged.