Debate on the Address

Like my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith and Fulham (Mr. Hands), I do not welcome a blanket overall percentage that has to apply to all developments over a certain size. That is neither appropriate nor helpful for getting more housing built and more people into the sort of housing that they want. Within the social component, we need to strengthen the element that gives people a ladder of opportunity to ownership. Part ownership is always better than renting, given people's preferences. The Gracious Speech tells us that the Government wish to raise the school leaving age to 18. Indeed, the Prime Minister started to say that but corrected himself and said the ““education leaving age”” because he realised that ““school leaving age”” would put off an awful lot of 16 to 18-year-olds. Many 16 to 18-year-olds would dread having to spend another two years at school. It is difficult to persuade many 14 to 16-year-olds that school is the right place for them. They do not find it relevant, interesting, exciting or worth while. If young people do not believe that something is interesting, relevant, exciting or worth while, they will not do it well and perhaps they will not do it at all. That is the reason for quite high truancy rates and poor performance in some schools in several places in the country. School is not firing young peoples' imagination and it is not what they want. I believe that the Government will rue the day that they took the line of compulsion—telling 16 to 18-year-olds what to do. I do not normally praise the BBC because I do not often have reason to do that. However, there was a cracking good programme before the Queen's Speech, which gave us the debate that it would have been nice to have here first. A 22-year-old man who left school at 16 had been invited into the studio. From memory, I think that the programme said he had already sold his first business for a large sum of money. He was invited to comment on whether it would have helped him to be told at 16 that instead of leaving school and setting up a business he had to stay on at school, or that he could set up a business but that he would need to go on a training scheme at the same time which would take him away from his business at a critical point in its fortunes. He was wonderful and said, ““No, of course it would have been absolutely disastrous.”” That young man said that between 14 and 16 he chose to take business studies at school because he always knew that he wanted to be entrepreneurial. He said that those two years of business studies were off-putting, because all he was taught was how to fill in a VAT form and how to comply with all the regulations that the Government have imposed. He wanted to know about buying and selling, serving customers, providing new products and offering new services, because he was genuinely entrepreneurial. It was all right for that young man, because he was talented and energetic and he broke free. It would be more difficult for people like him if they had to comply with regulations that said they could not concentrate on their businesses entirely but had to do other things in those two formative years between 16 and 18. That young man's testimony should also lead the Government to ask themselves whether they could improve what is currently on offer in the schools. He is but one, but I have met many young people who do not find the diet served up from 14 to 18 in schools interesting, challenging, exciting or relevant in a way that it needs to be if we are to motivate them and offer them a good future and a good career. Compulsion is not the way. The problem is that the courses do not suit, the style of teaching does not suit and the formal education does not suit. As someone who did perfectly well out of exams in my youth, I think that there are too many exams. Every summer term is written off by the need to revise, to do the exams and to relax afterwards. There are too many teachers who teach for a test, because they are under the cosh of centralised targets. They know that they have to ensure that the children and the students pass, so they teach only for the test. They no longer educate the children because there is no time for that, because they have to teach exam technique and the minimum number of things that the student needs to get through the test. Because teaching is done in that spirit, the students get wise at loading up the information before the test, downloading it in the test and, when they leave the test room, saying, ““That's done; we don't need to know that anymore. Now we go on to the next year's test.”” That is not education as it should be understood; it is a testing system based on targets and centralisation, the very thing that dogs the Government in everything that they try to do. They have to let go a bit, trust the teaching profession and the schools more, let people have more choice of school and let 16 to 18-year-olds have more choice. The Government should of course promote apprenticeships and promote the idea that going to university can make sense, but they should not force people to go and they should not set artificial targets. The Labour party will obviously want to tease out the Conservative position on whether 50 per cent. of all students should go to university. I have a simple answer to that. I would welcome it if 50 per cent. of all school students reached university level. Then I would of course want them to have a university place; but it would be stupid just to say that the top 50 per cent. are going to university anyway, whether they are prepared for it or not. There used to be a rough tariff, whereby if a student could not get two A-levels, they did not go to university. It was not that demanding a tariff—in some cases two grade Es would do it. If there is no longer any general tariff, people can turn up at a university not having mastered level 3 and so not having the intellectual equipment or knowledge that one would expect an undergraduate to have to make a success of university. I am not speaking as someone being academically picky, but as someone who cares very much about those young people, because the way to make young people unhappy is to put them into something that they are not equipped to do well at. That is why, even with well below 50 per cent. going to university, we already have such a high drop-out rate in some of our universities.