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Children, Schools and Families

My Lords, in respect of diplomas, the noble Baroness is right that we will be scaling up. We are starting with a more limited scale in the first year, after which we will learn the lessons from that and scale up. She is right, too, in saying that guidance for students up to the age of 14 in potential diploma lines will be vital, alongside guidance on potential GCSE options. That will be one thing that we will look at very carefully as we begin that work. On the business and university partners, we are saying that every secondary school over time will have one. That is an aspiration policy for the future—we are not in a position now to ensure it—but we believe that it is a goal that we should work towards. Looking at how we can make that achievable is one of the goals that we are setting for the new national council that my right honourable friend the Prime Minister has set up. Noble Lords on all side of the House will probably regard that as a desirable goal. It is absolutely desirable that state schools, as private schools have done since time immemorial, should have the closest possible links with universities and should simply take it for granted that they have university partners, as almost every private school that I know does. We think it right to build on the success of the specialist schools programme, whereby schools have sponsorship to become specialist schools, much of which has come from local businesses, which have often given support in terms of governance, curriculum, mentoring, work placements and so on. They have given support for schools in kind that is much greater than the financial support that they have offered. Building on that, it will be possible to have a much richer array of business partners for schools. That directly links to the noble Baroness’s first point. If we have much stronger business links with schools, the diplomas will also be more successful, because the emphasis on work-related learning and the quality of the work-related learning that takes place in schools will be enhanced. I do not disguise from the House the scale of the ambition. We have 3,500 secondary schools, so it is a very ambitious goal to ensure that they all have a meaningful higher education and business partner, but we believe that it is an appropriate goal. Learning from the experience of the specialist schools, academies and the large number of trust schools being established, many of which have university and business partners, we believe that it is an achievable goal for the future.