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Education

My Lords, may I add my thanks to those of earlier speakers to the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, for making today’s refreshing debate possible. I have to confess to being a long-time admirer of the noble Baroness and I know that I speak for many others on these Benches when I say that she is a significant and welcome addition to the membership of this House. First of all, I shall set out where I think we have got to in achieving an objective that we all share, that of creating a world-class educational opportunity for all our young people. Eight and a half years ago, with no previous experience and enormous apprehension, I went to work with the Department for Education and Skills. My principal role was to get out and about and to discover at first hand the principal day-to-day concerns of the teaching profession, and to attempt accurately to relay the voice of the staff room back to the department. Some 400 school visits later, I can say without any fear of informed contradiction that nothing short of a transformation has taken place in the classroom, and indeed staff room, of most—I emphasise most—of the schools in England. Are there still problems? Of course there are. Have we moved as far or as quickly as I would have hoped? Of course we have not. It was interesting to find many of those disappointments and anxieties reflected in the forthcoming education White Paper. I am sure that Members of this House look forward to Second Reading and the chance to both praise and, if necessary, criticise whatever Bill eventually reaches us. But please believe me when I assure noble Lords that, certainly when viewed from the more apolitical chalk face, a transformation there has been. I thought that the noble Baroness, in introducing the debate, went quite a long way in generously acknowledging that fact. Time does not permit me to go into as much detail as I wish, so in the hope that you will accept my assertion, I will focus on just two moving targets, which I think deserve rather more debate and discussion than they would appear at present to be receiving. First is the overhasty—in my judgment—and politically driven abandonment of last year’s Tomlinson report. You will remember that these were the recommendations covering the future of education from 14 to 19. The recommendations sent a clear signal that the future lay in the adoption of the IB or a comprehensive diploma or bac in substitution for our present system of A-levels. To anyone who had taken the trouble to study the challenges that are likely to face the young people of this country over the next 10 or 20 years, the logic underpinning the Tomlinson recommendations was compelling. Sadly, it proved even more irresistibly compelling to score a few opportunistic political points in the run-up to the election. Both major parties, I am afraid, have to accept a level of blame in this respect. As ever, opportunism won out over principle, and Tomlinson was quietly shelved, at what may well prove to be great cost to a generation of young people. The important point here is that the report was shelved, not binned, and certainly not intellectually discredited. When the Minister comes to reply, it is my sincerest hope that he might offer some encouragement regarding the possibility of a rethink, and that this time the Government will refuse to be blown off course by any kind of rent-a-crowd media hysteria. Personally, I would lay a dime to a dollar that the gold standard we were last year being urged to cling to will within 20 years—just one generation—have turned to dross. If we fail to act, the following scenario becomes all too likely: the most forward-thinking and adventurous schools will slowly just peel away from the A-level syllabus, offering instead their customised version of the IB. Any number of university admissions officers, when pressed, will already tell you that they are finding IB students an increasingly attractive proposition, certainly from the perspective of teaching and learning. The likely result will be that the best schools will become ever more successful, through offering their students the curriculum and therefore the learning skills that most employers and increasing numbers of people in higher education are already actively seeking. That could turn very rapidly into a two-tier system; if you like, a form of selection into HE, but this time with knobs on. Needless to say, there are no problem-free options. If we are to return to nurturing the type of scholarship demanded by the IB, our teaching professionals need to have far higher levels of subject-based professional development, certainly sufficient to ensure that their knowledge and skills are continually updated. At present, that is far from being the case, as was touched on by my noble friend Lady Morgan of Drefelin. Currently, something less than 8 per cent of teaching professionals have any form of higher degree, and over 50 per cent confirm that they have received no subject-based in-service training in the past five years. Surely in most subjects that cannot be remotely acceptable. It is also a pretty dismal reflection on our progress in education since the James report in 1971, which recommended:"““Throughout their careers, teachers should have the time, space and funding to reflect, research and develop their own practice””." I cannot be the only person to have noticed that, 35 years later, many of those are concepts that have been enthusiastically taken on board by the commercial private sector but have failed to take root in the very sector at which they were specifically aimed. In fairness, a number of schemes and initiatives are attempting to address the issue, but most of them fall somewhat short of what is really needed. Everything that I learnt during my years as chairman of the General Teaching Council and in countless discussions in staff rooms up and down the country leads me to believe that, to maintain the high standards expected by parents and young people, continuing professional development must be part of each and every teacher’s contractual entitlement. Whichever way we choose to go with the curriculum, the quality of teaching, as has been said by any number of noble Lords this afternoon, will continue to be defined by the knowledge, the training and the professional development of the individual practitioner. Devolving responsibility for training to individual schools was not in itself a bad idea, but sadly it has not worked. There has been too much fragmentation, too many one-day or even half-day courses, many of them cancelled at the last minute due to lack of adequate staff cover. This is too serious an issue for the haphazard, make-it-up-as-you-go-along approach that has proved to be the norm. In his response I very much hope that the Minister will agree that the time has come for a new and comprehensive approach to subject-based professional development—a rather more committed approach, and one that can this time be endorsed by the entire profession. I wonder whether the Minister agrees that the success or otherwise of this country will be determined not on the playing fields of Eton but in the classroom of every single school—primary and secondary—up and down the country. This belief has now become something of a commonplace, but what does not seem to have been fully absorbed is the very real financial implication of this challenge. Significantly greater resources will have to be poured into education if we are to remain a genuinely first-class nation. It does not matter which party is in government; that will continue to be the case. As the Prime Minister once memorably put it, much has been done, but much, much more has to be done. I confess that the second ““much”” is mine, but it is that additional ““much”” that will be essential if education in this country is to really be a success story. We have heard some wonderful speeches this afternoon, but the speech of my noble friend Lady Morgan of Huyton was quite remarkable. In it, she took us into that school in the Bronx, and invited us to see what magic looks and feels like. I looked around the Chamber when she was describing the potency and power of the school orchestra, and every noble Lord in the Chamber was nodding. We all know that to be the case; we all know that if you go into a school with a wonderful orchestra or a wonderful choir, that school will be successful. Why? We could easily spend another debate discussing that. This form of education is labour-intensive, capital-intensive and time-intensive. It requires real money. I very much hope that this Government, my Government, have the courage to understand that they must go the extra mile if they want to have the education service that we all dream of.