Debate on the Address

My Lords, when the Prime Minister first came to power, he said that the first three priorities of his Government would be ““education, education, education””, yet his Government’s mantra has been ““legislation, legislation, legislation””. I wonder when this Government will learn the lesson about genius, which is 1 per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration. Similarly, good government is about1 per cent good legislation and 99 per cent good administration. But there is a connection between the three main themes of this gracious Speech and that early promise. The solutions to crime, terrorism and immigration that the Prime Minister seeks to address in this Session of Parliament are, in fact, education, education and education. First, on crime, all the research shows that children get involved in lawbreaking when they have a poor start in life or are disengaged either with their education or with society as a whole. The answer is to start at the very beginning—a very good place to start. I shall not sing that as I am sure that the Companion forbids me to sing in the Chamber. We must pool resources and effort into providing quality early-years settings, where children can build on their experiences at home, where parents are welcomed, where family support is available and where the individual child’s needs are analysed and appropriate provision made. It will be a very good long-term investment and it does not need to cost more. We just need to spend the money differently and with a view to the long term. If we had the equivalent of the recent Stern environment report, contrasting the benefits of investment in early years with the cost of not investing, it would attract even more media attention and public concern. Only this morning I visited a centre run by the charity I CAN, where young children with communication difficulties are being helped to overcome them so that they can benefit fully from their education. This organisation is seeking a strategic partnership with the DfES to promote speech and language development through schools and children’s centres. The problem is widespread. Your Lordships will be shocked to hear that half of all five year-olds are arriving at school without the speech and language that they need to participate fully in their education. This is partly a 21st century environmental problem. Parents who do not have time for their children or who themselves watch a lot of television, childminder television and video and computer games are turning children into solitary non-communicators in many cases. I am not sure that the Government can do much about the causes but they could certainly do more to mitigate the effects by investing even more in the early years through multi-agency working and language therapy. The latter is vital for young people in custody, many of whom are almost inarticulate, as the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, told us effectively in his debate a few weeks ago. For children who have turned to crime, education is the answer too. I am very disappointed that this Queen’s Speech has not included the youth justice Bill which many of us have wished for since the publication in September 2003 of Youth Justice—The Next Steps. Instead, more children are in custody, and the Government’s programme means more ASBOs and conditional cautioning instead of more community sentences and restorative justice. This works for adults and young people alike, and we should be doing more of what works. Of course, we should not keep most young offenders in custody at all, but the least we can do is give them full-time, high-quality education while they are there, with a proper expert analysis of their needs and drug and alcohol treatment where they need it. Then, when they are released, the National Offender Management Service should provide a seamless transition to an ongoing programme to turn around their lives. With so many young offenders reoffending, surely the fact that the current custodial regime is failing is crystal clear. How much money could we save on the criminal justice system if only we spent it on education? How much anguish could be saved for the victims of crime? How many young lives could be rescued if only we nipped offending behaviour in the bud before it became a habit? For many of these young people, school failed to be a habit long ago. Truancy is commonplace in the backgrounds of many young offenders. Why? For many of them, school was a struggle right from the start. Class sizes were too large and their special needs were not recognised or catered for, so they switched off or found something else to do. We need more school/home co-ordinators to get them back into school. As I said in our debates on the then Education and Inspections Bill, we do not support a moratorium on special-school closures while a full review of special needs occurs, because we think that that would bring to a halt a lot of good things, but we believe that the statementing system needs a major overhaul. We need to iron out inequalities between postcodes and, although they initially rejected it, I hope that the Government will look again at the idea proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, and supported by these Benches—that needs analysis should be carried out by an organisation independent of the one that finds the money. Although I welcome today’s announcement about 77 more child psychologists, I am concerned about where they will come from and who will pay for their training, as I am aware that there has been some difficulty with the training changes for educational psychologists, for whom there is currently onlyan interim arrangement. We need a multi-agency professional team to support struggling families, not just a token number from one profession. We need to ensure that the necessary money follows the pupil. The noble Lord, Lord Adonis, if he were here, would say, ““Yes, but that is what we are doing with the academies. We are replacing failing schools with shiny new schools that are well funded and with the best staff we can attract, and we are allowing schools to opt out of their local authority and become independent trust schools””. I would say hooray to that if only the academies and trust schools were to be democratically accountable to their communities. I am delighted when extra resources are targeted at the children who need them most, both for their sake and for the sake of their classmates, whose own education is disrupted if a needy child is not being properly dealt with. I am also delighted when the business community brings its expertise into schools, but we do not need to hand over our schools to them with the democratic deficit that that entails. Then there is the curriculum. Although this Session of Parliament has only one Bill on education, we will see the implementation of the Education and Inspections Act with the new national diplomas, which include vocational training alongside basic skills. While I wish that the Government had gone the whole hog and followed the recommendations of the Tomlinson report, I wish the diplomas a fair wind because that is all we are going to get by way of curriculum reform for a while. I hope that the pupils who were turned off by the old curriculum are turned on by this new one. On the issue of terrorism, schools have a major role to play in community cohesion. The young July bombers were British, but clearly did not feel British. They were alienated. No child who feels that he really matters to those around him will turn into a suicide bomber. We need inclusive schools that celebrate all children and exclude none of them. That is why I would prefer it if there were no need for faith schools in this community. If every local school was a good school, where every child matters and his family culture is respected, the faith groups may not feel the need to run schools themselves. Religious teaching could be done in the home, the church, the mosque, the temple and the synagogue. Children of all faiths and none could get to know each other as friends and classmates. This utopia is not available to us, of course. For hundreds of years the faith schools have been a valuable part of our education system and we cannot put the clock back. Although faith schools are not part of the problem of terrorism, I believe that they, as well as local authority-run community schools, can be part of the solution. In particular, I call upon all schools run by the faith communities to reach out to pupils of other faiths; admit them to your schools voluntarily; do what you can to attract them; show them tolerance by your own example; do not exclude them, I beg you. That way lies a divided society when none of us can lie easy in our beds. Now as we begin the implementation phase of the Act, we need to encourage schools to grasp with relish and commitment their new responsibility to promote social cohesion, and give them every bit of support they need. I will watch with interest to see how Ofsted copes with monitoring how well they do it. Thirdly, I mentioned immigration. Some schools struggle with numerous children with little or no English. Unless they address that, the children cannot fully benefit. The schools do a wonderful job, yet the burden of that task often leaves them languishing at the bottom of those iniquitous league tables. The most encouraging thing I have heard any Education Minister say in a long time was what the Secretary of State said last week about the need to re-evaluate what schools do in a more sophisticated way than through exam results. At last, someone has realised that exams and league tables measure only the quality of the intake. I hope that this Session of Parliament brings us a development in that direction. Of course, I point out that that is about administration, not legislation. I see I have only one more minute, so I shall skip some of what I was going to say. Finally, I repeatthe plea that I make every new Session for the Government to fully abide by its obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child; revoke its reservations about children in the services and in custody, and immigrant children; and to give children, at last, an equal right to protection from physical assaults as adults enjoy. Whatever happens in the way of Lords reform, I am not leaving your Lordships’ House until this has been achieved.