Education and Inspections Bill

My Lords, I will vote for this Bill, but not, I fear, in any belief that it will make education any better. But a hundredth part of a cake is better than nothing. That is the value of my vote. Deep down, for the past 30 or so years, I have been very concerned about English education and the enormous fault lines that lie within it. Let me give your Lordships some illustrations. About a year ago, I went to a 1960s university where I was shown a science building it could not fill—in fact, it had closed down the physics department. This was a beautifully created 1960s university. But not enough students wanted to do physics or chemistry and to that extent, the physics department had had it. The sociology department, however, was thriving. I have nothing against sociology—I recognise great value in it. But I do not see it prevailing at the expense of pure science. The problem is that this is a vicious circle. Schools cannot produce people trained in science in sufficient numbers to fill university departments. As a result, not enough graduates leave university to teach sciences in schools. So the circle goes on, with fewer students going on to read science at university. Many people teaching science in schools do not have decent science degrees—in fact, some have no science degree at all. How can you teach physics or chemistry without a degree in physics or chemistry? One of the last appointments I made as a headmaster was a physicist—he was very hard to find—who had been made redundant by his university. This malaise continues through the system. More than 20 years ago, the Cambridge engineering department extended its course to four years because the students did not have good enough mathematics to do the course. There must be something wrong with our school system if, for generations, it sent people with mathematical ability to the big universities to do engineering courses and now they cannot do them. In history, my own subject—I taught it at A-level for 40 years—periods have been abandoned, so you never know the cause and effect. For example, a course in the history of Vietnam did not cover the fact that the French had occupied Vietnam in the 1880s—it began somewhere in the 1930s or 1940s. As a result, people no longer understand cause and effect, which is the essence of history. For example, there are endless courses on Hitler, but people do not study Bismarckian Germany, which began the whole problem. In fact, you could go back further than that. The other thing I found was that examination papers were easier. I do not think that the marking was manipulated but, as I say, I taught history for 40 years. I was a decent enough teacher of history.