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Education: Science and Technology

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Greenfield, on securing this debate. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, I cannot claim to have any scientific background, and I, too, come to this debate from the point of view of education. I also pay tribute to the noble Baroness for something that she is unaware that she gave to me. I remember listening to a lecture that she gave to the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust way back in 1998–99. It was her speech on that occasion that started my interest in the science of the brain and how it might impact on the development of education policy. The noble Baroness probably doubled or trebled my knowledge of how the brain works in that one speech, such was my lack of knowledge beforehand. It has intrigued and interested me ever since, and I want to address my remarks to it in the next few minutes. In that speech, the noble Baroness used a figure which I have since misused on many occasions, and I had hoped that she would reuse it today so that I could get it firmly in my mind. She did not, so I will have to misuse it again. It is something like this: 80 per cent of what we know about how the brain works we have learned in the past 20 years. When I heard that five years ago, I drew the obvious conclusion that, if that was the case, the way we teach our children, and approach teaching and learning, should have seen a revolutionary change in those 20 years, as we absorbed new information about the science of the brain. The truth is that nothing could be further from what has happened. I came across a good little book the other day, Less is More, by Human Scale Education. I mention it because it produces two documents: one a description of the national curriculum in 1904, the other a description of the national curriculum in 1989, which is still with us. Reading that book, we see that the subjects we teach, what we call them, how we arrange them in the school day and even the amount of time we allocate to each discipline area has barely changed in almost a century. That is the great problem with teaching, learning and schools. There is a sort of underlying fault in our education system, which has got a lot better in the past 10 years, but which still ought to concern us. If we are, as a school system, to be able to use the rapid advances in science and technological research, we have got to have schools and teachers, and school leaders, who understand the research and allow it to implement their practice. Until the past 10 years, we have not even looked upon schools and teachers as being places and people that should, day by day, look at the latest research, evaluate and adapt their performance in the light of that, measure its impact, and adapt and refine again. The notion of teachers as researchers has had life breathed into it over the past decade, but we need to see even more of it. We need our 240,000 teachers to be aware of recent brain research and how it can affect teaching and learning, in the same way that we assume that our surgeons and doctors are up to date with the latest technology and research in their field. That has got a lot better, but a lot more needs to be done in making our schools places of research, and making our teachers researchers. A number of things could be done to make this happen. First, traditionally, there has been too big a gap between those institutions who say they practice education research, and schools which actually deliver education. Although they are coming together, they need to be closer. There needs to be a much closer relationship between the fields of scientific, technological, health and education research. Whereas we are better at looking at education research to inform us about what happens in our schools, I am not aware of the organisations that can bring research from the other disciplines to bear and help us in that. The Department for Education and Skills clearly has a leadership role in this, and I pay tribute to the work it has done. It now has a strong analytical research department, and I think it tries to work on what the evidence shows it should do. I look over the past decade at the literacy strategy, the numeracy strategy, thinking skills and the key stage 3 strategy, which are all evidence-based in a way which I did not think happened before. My message would be that when we are looking at research, we must stay true to the evidence we find. In my time at the DfES, we launched upon thinking skills, which is a good area for teaching. Research tells us that we ought to do more with our young children. Noble Lords will not be surprised to hear that it did not get the warmest of receptions in the Daily Mail and like-minded papers. The message there is to keep the faith for evidence-based research and practice. That is the wider background which underpins this. What this debate also tells us is that the big ideas, the big whims, the brave new future of what happens in our schools, is around this area—it is how we use what we know about how the brain works to impact on teaching and learning. If I may also say as gently as I can to the Minister, because this will be subject to future debates between him and me, that that is the route of my disbelief—that changes in government and structure are the big idea for the future. It is the solidity of the evidence about what we are learning about how the brain works that convinces me that learning more and doing more about teaching and learning is the big idea and the revolution for the future. When we go along that path it will tell us three things—I am guessing here. First, that we need to use time, space and skills in a totally different way in our schools. Schools need to look different, they need to use time differently and they need to use space in a different way. They need to smell different and feel different. There is a lot of truth in the old saying that for some children what is wrong with education is the schools. We have still got a system whereby the structure in which we educate children just does not work for some of them. In the years to come, as we use this evidence we will find that the way our schools and teachers use time, space and skills will change. Secondly, I would like to make mention of a primary school I visited in Birmingham just before I stood down as a Member of Parliament. The research that they were linking into was teaching every one of their children as an individual and trying to develop for them a timetable which enabled each child to learn at the time of the day which suited them best in different subject areas and different disciplines. They even went further and had a classroom that had so many different seating arrangements that the teacher was able, with any one child, to place them in a space with a style of teaching and a time that would suit them best. That is what personalised learning should be. Personalised learning is a great idea and one of the things that we have to develop even more. What personalised learning should be at its best is not enabling individuals to access the present curriculum and the present style of learning more effectively, but to enable us to use what we know about learning to wrap around each individual child and his or her needs so that they can achieve their potential. The third thing that this will tell us is that we have to learn to value those skills and styles of learning that we cannot measure. I understand the problems here and it has taken me a long time to get my mind around this, but the more I learn about how the brain works, the more and better I understand the place of creativity—not just in developing a set of creative skills and knowledge, but the impact that learning about creativity and through creativity can have on children’s ability to learn every other skill and every other discipline. The future is exciting. It can be challenging. What I am conscious of is that there is no previous generation of educators who have had as much knowledge at their fingertips as to how the brain works as we have. It therefore falls to us to reshape our education system around the needs of children and, using that knowledge, to make sure that we can teach in a way that will enable every child to reach his or her potential. It is exciting and daunting, but it is a task that must be done. My last sentence is this. When we have worked it out, there is only one thing that we can be sure of, and it is that by then, the scientists will have found out something more about how the brain works and we will have to start again; the real message is that the way we organise our children’s teaching and learning has, by the necessity of the job in which we operate, the need to be flexible.