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Children’s Plan

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend, who speaks with great authority in this area. She is right that there is a big implementation challenge with the various measures set out in the plan. We will be saying more about that over the coming months. Let me deal with the points that my noble friend raised. She is absolutely right to highlight the significance of introducing masters degrees into education in a systematic way. This is a serious process of learning from international best practice. Over recent years, I and many of my colleagues have visited Finland and other Scandinavian countries, where masters courses are widely available; indeed, in Finland, they are now generally undertaken by teachers. It is hard not to make a connection between the degree of professionalism that is brought to the training and to the updating of skills in Finland and the success that Finnish schools achieve. Although we have said that this will be in the first instance an opportunity for newly qualifying teachers, I hope that we will be in a position to extend that in due course. I am very attracted to the idea that continuing professional development, which we rightly expect of our teachers, should, where they wish it, take the form of study and project work that leads to a higher-level degree. That would also help to raise the esteem and attractiveness of the teaching profession, if we can carry it through. My noble friend is right to highlight the importance of comparable statistics on the performance of schools. I entirely agree with her comments on testing in schools; it is not overburdensome to have one externally assessed national test between the ages of five and 11. It is our intention with the new single-level tests, if they are introduced, that we will still have reporting on a comparable basis, school by school, of the proportion achieving at each of the levels. Although the pupils may sit the tests at different times and will sit the tests at single levels, rising up the levels as their capability advances, we expect to see the results reported level by level, school by school. On the curriculum, I entirely agree with her that arts, creativity, sport and humanities are all absolutely vital. In my experience, those schools that are best at teaching children the basics also tend to do best in developing the arts and creativity. Like my noble friend, I entirely reject the notion that having a solid grounding in the basics, school by school, including proper catch-up support if necessary and one-to-one support for those children who are falling behind, as we also highlight in the Children’s Plan, is in any way antipathetic to the development of the arts, creativity, sports and the humanities, which we also want to see as a central part of the work of our primary schools.