Education and Inspections Bill

I shall speak to my amendment before we get too far along. This group of amendments threatens to take three hours to debate if we do not constrain ourselves; there is so much to be said on this subject. I have complete support for my noble friend Lady Buscombe; she has got it absolutely right and identified the problems. The output that we require from this system is not coming through and we have to look at the systems we have put in place to see why. We need a strong flow of people who are good at science, mathematics and languages. They are difficult subjects, all requiring that moment of inspiration and understanding which leads a child to a very difficult course of study, because they see the purpose and worth of it. But we are not doing it. The way we have gone in GCSE science is a good illustration of where we have gone wrong and are going wrong. To pick up on a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, I think that to make key stage 3 last two years would help a great deal with some of these problems. The science dual award is a fine enough concept in its way. As a basic introduction to the sciences, it does not take up as much space as the three sciences, and you get some understanding of all of them. But in practice it has been reduced to a collection of memory tests. When my son did his science double award, he was given a pack of cards by the school and told, ““Memorise these. Understand how you parse the questions. This question wants those four facts. Those two things, if you get them right, will get you an A””. And they did. But it does not inspire science. There are some problems in the way in which the curriculum has been drawn. There is always the temptation to put too much into it and not to leave enough scope to the individual teacher to be discursive, to go off track and to inspire. The curriculum is overcrowded. However, the real problem is the forms of assessment, which are formulaic and require formulaic answers. Teaching in most schools focuses just on that, because we require schools to get A to C in science, and so the teachers get A to C in science. The way to do that is to teach to the test. We need to get away from the obsession with testing everything. My own bugbear is Shakespeare. Why analyse Shakespeare for GCSE? Shakespeare is to be experienced both in performance and doing it yourself—that is what it is intended for; that is how it lights one’s imagination; that it is why it gets under one’s skin. If your first experience of Shakespeare is sitting down and going at the sort of textual analysis which belongs in universities and not much before, it puts off far more people than it should. My wife makes a great success of teaching Shakespeare in prisons. When you allow people of the lowest educational level to experience it, they love it. We need to get away from the business of turning everything into examination questions which can be marked by a computer or some low-grade clerk who is employed because we do not have enough teachers to tick the boxes. Science double award was bad enough. We now have its replacement, whose exact name I do not know, which splits science essentially into two units. The first, which is the basic level, is what you might call science in society. It tackles questions such as whether we should have nuclear power stations. It does it on the basis of a tiny amount of knowledge. Getting students to debate these questions might be quite fun in a way, but how do you do that in a classroom and when, in any case, it is going to be examined using the same tick-box, standard-required-answer method which was used for science GCSE? So science will not be taught in an illuminating way. Most students will experience that and then they may or may not take the real science module which will cram all three sciences into the same box and which will absolutely not be the foundation either for developing a real enthusiasm for science or for acquiring the basis of understanding that one needs to tackle an individual science at A-level. It is a depressing development. I see why it is being done: there is a realisation in the QCA that most of its clients for science GCSE will never take another science exam in their life. What it wants to equip them with is something which they will find useful in later life. The basic curriculum, if you read it that way, would be fine, but the way we examine it is not. If you insist on examining it in the way in which we currently do, you diminish a high-minded and, in many ways, laudable approach to making sure that we have scientifically educated citizens who can deal with a scientific question or problem as it is presented in newspapers, and reduce students to people who have learnt just a few answers rote about a few problems, are bored by it and forget it. If we are going to teach that sort of thing, we have to find an entirely different way of examining it, and we have to go across curricula. If we branch out in that direction, why is what we teach not meshed in with citizenship, history, geography and other things? However, we should not take half the science curriculum and spread it out into something which works well with other subjects and then have debased versions of those subjects, as my noble friend quite correctly said. There is an awful GCSE called humanities. If you do that, you do not get history or geography. Some schools teach only humanities and do not offer the individual subjects. We have really got ourselves into a terrible state with GCSE. I am sure that is not what the Minister wants. We need to find a way out of it. I believe that the way out is offered by the likes of the IB and IGCSE, not because they are right for everybody but because they provide the system with the challenge it needs to sort itself out. Elements within the QCA say that it should be a green light regulator, not a red light regulator—wonderful. In my judgment those elements are not the supreme power in the QCA, but they are there. It would be wonderful if the QCA saw as its job to say, ““Let us see how we can conjure the imagination and innovation of all these exam boards and schools out there and find ways of tackling these problems and see how we can get them permitted under Section 98 and trialled in schools to see what works. Let us try different forms of assessment and approach to what the curriculum should consist of, keeping our specifications narrow, and see what effect that has on outputs. Let us have innovation and experimentation to get us away from the position we are in at the moment””. The IB will have an enormous effect on A-levels. The setting of the IB tariff by UCAS will galvanise any school with academic pretensions because it offers a way, and not necessarily for the brightest children—some schools use the IB for less bright children—to get UCAS points in a completely different environment to what has become in some cases very debased A-levels. Economics A-level is about GCSE style. It is terrible—totally uninspiring and boring. As the IB can be done in state schools, over the next five years it will offer a real challenge to A-levels, and they will have to improve to match it. I should like to see the IGCSE coming into the key stage 4 curriculum for that purpose. It is very much designed as a vehicle for getting to A-levels, so it will suit those schools that are focused on A-levels. I agree that it is not for everybody but it will also suit children who are focused on A-levels, and there are some of them in every school. By offering a real alternative it will make those responsible for GCSE respond, and ensure that their exams really suit the children who have to take them, which they absolutely do not at the moment. As my noble friend said, the IGCSE is an enormously well respected exam. Everybody understands what it is. It is now being taken up by a fast growing number of the best schools in the United Kingdom. Frankly, it is ridiculous that it should not be permitted to be taught and examined in all schools. Further, I should like to see the International Baccalaureate early years system trialled in our state schools. Again, that is well practised and well respected internationally. It does not produce examination results at 16. I suppose something might be done about that in a gentle way, or it might be trialled in the earlier years. It has a very good and successful pedigree. When we are looking at an examination system that does not produce what we as a nation need, we ought to go out there, see what we can find and try it.