Education and Inspections Bill

The noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, has given a comprehensive introduction to this group of important amendments. I for one would not express any resentment that she has spoken on this occasion at greater length than is usual in Committee. The group of amendments is astonishingly important, covering as it does virtually the whole of the curriculum issue, what should be foundation subjects, what should be optional subjects and matters of that kind. Because of reasons of time, and because my noble friend Lady Sharp will want to address these issues, I will keep my remarks related to only two of the amendments, while saying in passing that I very strongly agree with what the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, has said about separate science. It is almost impossible to achieve high levels of attainment in science unless one takes the three subjects separately. Combined sciences have a rather limited level of achievement. Most children who do not take sciences separately will simply not qualify for scientific courses at university. They will in effect have to settle for lower levels of achievement. However, having said that, I shall briefly address two amendments in this large group. My name is associated with Amendment No. 192. I will not repeat the detailed and comprehensive set of statistics given by noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, except to agree with them and again draw the attention of the Committee to the very disturbing decline in language teaching, particularly in state schools. It has been quite dramatic since 2003 when languages ceased to be a foundation subject. Real international and economic factors arise here. Let me take a few examples. In Latin America few people except for a small elite speak languages other than Spanish or Portuguese, yet it is one of the major burgeoning markets of the world. It simply is not possible to trade in Brazil, Argentina or anywhere in central America without some knowledge of either Spanish or Portuguese as the case may be. Indeed, there has been recent experience of British businessmen who imagine that Brazilians speak Spanish—on the general theory that Latin America was a Spanish-speaking continent. Another example that springs to mind is that of China, where until very recently only a relatively small elite on the eastern fringe could speak English. The examples being set by our foreign competitors are quite staggering. The United States has just embarked on a major programme of teaching Chinese. Over the past couple of years, literally hundreds of high schools have decided to embark on teaching Chinese as a foreign language, and the programme has been extended widely across a range of young people in both junior high and high schools. They are taught in part by students studying at American universities who spend part of their time teaching Chinese. The United States has a bad record in foreign languages. Citizens learn very few and there is no compulsory foreign language teaching in most local schools, so it is striking that the US has seen the writing on the wall and is now moving rapidly towards recognising that both Chinese and Spanish are vital languages. In Florida, Spanish is now spoken by equivalent numbers to those speaking English, while a large and growing proportion of the southern United Statesis becoming Spanish-speaking. Indeed, Spanish is moving rapidly towards becoming the second language of the United States after English. Again, in substantial areas of the US, those who cannot speak Spanish will simply not be able to address large parts of the community, in some states moving rapidly towards half or more than half of the population. A third example picks up on the reference by the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, to Arabic. While there is not enough time to go into the argument in detail, it is significant to note that both in the United States and the United Kingdom, finding Arabic speakers who can assist in the business of building relations with the Muslim community has been extraordinarily difficult. There are so few Arabic speakers that one has to hunt around even to staff adequately the intelligence community, let alone moving beyond that to establish close relationships, as we desperately need to do, with Arabic-speaking parts of the world. We need desperately to revisit the issue of modern foreign language teaching and to consider whether, for our economic and international political future, it should not be given a much higher priority. On this I wholly agree with all that has been said by the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe. It is vital to bring back the concept of learning foreign languages. Moreover, I speak with a certain amount of confidence on this matter because I recall that right back in the late 1970s there was a proposal for French to be introduced in primary school and a second modern foreign language in secondary school. Unfortunately it fell by the wayside in the following years. I want to speak only briefly to AmendmentNo. 199A because my noble friend Lady Sharp will probably go into greater detail. I shall address the important issue of enabling young people over the age of 14 to study vocational and academic subjects alongside one another. Bearing in mind the remarks made so brilliantly by the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, about learning from our own history, I shall say this. Almost since the beginning of compulsory education in this country, the streams of academic and vocational education have been split at the point of the compulsory school-leaving age, which has created one of the biggest economic problems we face. We have not rated vocational activities, skills and achievements alongside academic ones, and there is endless proof of this. As apprenticeships have slowly been phased out—although I pay tribute to the efforts of the Government to bring in so-called modern apprenticeship schemes—a very large section of our population has simply been denied the ability to achieve the attainments of which it is capable. I believe that learning to put vocational and academic subjects together is a crucial element in establishing the significance, importance and status of vocational skills—and frankly, many young people are capable of both. One sees young men and women who are school-tired at the age of 15 suddenly begin to realise the importance of mathematics and English because they have spent some time in work experience or in the beginnings of an apprenticeship. It is quite striking how the motivation suddenly comes alive again and how the kind of young men and women about whom the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, is so very deeply concerned benefit from the combination of the two. The final point I wish to make on this issue, which I believe is the big unsolved problem of our education system, concerns the shockingly high levels in this country of young people leaving school when they have the earliest possible opportunity to do so. They are much worse than those of most other European countries. Incidentally, the age of 16 coincides with the period of adolescent rebellion, when people are most likely to say that they want to leave school and discover only later what a tragedy this is for their future and their families. Anything that we can do to knit together the continuation of education after the age of 16 in a way that enables young people to study together in tertiary colleges—or, if you like, in Tomlinson situations—is crucial if we are going to make a leap forward in this country. Everybody knows that we do well by the highly academic and have done so for many decades. The people we lose out on, the people we do not serve adequately, are those in the group one down from that: those who do not wish to go on to university but who have real capacity and real potential. Too often we write them off at the age at which they leave school and they do not attain the levels that our country, the economy and our educational system need. I strongly support what the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, has said about foreign languages and some of the other issues she has raised.