Queen’s Speech

My Lords, I start by picking up on something that the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, talked about. Much of what he said about children’s homes applies equally to prisons, and given what was said by the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, and by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds, I can promise the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, an interesting time on that part of the Bill when it comes before us. The particular remark I want to pick up on is what the noble Earl said about practice in children’s homes. He said, in effect, that when a child is crying in the night the continentals reach for the child and the English reach for the form to fill in. That is something that I see in schools, and it is immensely destructive. We have done a lot in our quiet way—I am sure that it was totally unintentional—to undermine the courage of institutions and individuals involved in education. The most shattering example of that was when the Royal Society sacked Professor Michael Reiss, who had done nothing wrong. The terror of the newspapers felt by the Royal Society was such that it had to sack him. One sees that quite frequently in schools. Tim Hastie-Smith was recently sacked twice in two days and had done nothing wrong. It was purely a lack of courage in the institution that he served and the one that he was about to serve. If we are to expect individuals to have courage, it is important that institutions also have courage and learn not to be too bowled over by what appears in the press. Since Parliament has become so weak and the press has become so short of money, it has become easy for people to run headlines into the press to achieve effect, and we have all become frightened of the consequences of those headlines. A couple of noble Lords mentioned the Barnardo’s survey showing that 45 per cent of people believe that children are feral. That was not what the survey found. It found that: "““45% of people disagreed with the statement 'People refer to children as feral but I don’t think they behave this way’.””" Why was the question asked in such a strange and convoluted way? It was so that people did not understand it and so that if they even half agreed, they contributed to the 45 per cent. If the survey had asked the honest question, ““Do you think children are feral?””, it would have received a much lower percentage. More recently, we have had headlines stating that one in 10 children is sexually abused every year. That is what the Lancet allowed to go out in a press announcement. In the papers behind the announcement, the figure is 0.5 per cent. You might argue that it is actually a lot higher than that and that some studies somewhere have perhaps shown that the figures are underestimates. We have to have the courage of our understanding of the world, our morality and our convictions, stand up for them and not be cowed by the drama of what is happening in the press. In the schools Bill, we must look at how we can help schools to support teachers, who are in an exceptionally difficult position. If a teacher is accused of doing something that might be interpreted sexually, we have deprived the school of jurisdiction. The school must immediately refer that teacher to outside agencies, and the teacher is likely to be suspended for six months or more. We learnt this week that the Department for Children, Schools and Families will keep that accusation on record even if it is disproved. We are putting enormous pressure on teachers in schools not to hug that crying child. We should have the courage of our understanding that that is not how we want things to be, and we should use this Bill, and, I suspect, the Bills that follow, to try to work back a bit. It is very difficult, but we should try to get there. I wanted to concentrate on the process of change and innovation in schools. We seem to proceed in education from catharsis to catharsis. Something is proposed and worked up by the department, which is largely cut off from real education. How many senior or even half-senior civil servants in the Department for Children, Schools and Families have actually been part of a senior management team in a school? I do not know that the figure is not zero. It is certainly very small. There is no system at all for interchange between the department and schools, so the department is entirely in the dark about the likely effects of its actions in the real world in schools. Although the department comes up with something that it feels is absolutely the right thing, it will always be a cathartic process to put it into effect in schools. The QCA should be doing something to moderate this process, but it appears to be interested only in its own dogma. Moreover, the political pressures mean that these changes are dumped on schools all at once before the schools are ready. There is no sufficient system of support for schools when these changes are made. When the schools have recovered from them and are getting used to them, we put through another set of changes. That is what these annual education Bills are about. We are absolutely committed to keeping schools in a state of constant chaos. The results, when we analyse them, are not that good. We have not been making the progress that we should have been making. In fact, the only crumb of comfort that I have been able to draw out of the statistics over the past year or two is that the Scots appear to be doing worse than us, for once, which is a strange way of being cheerful. There is another way of dealing with these things, which, if the noble Lord, Lord Darzi, were here, he would recognise. If he were to step out of the Department of Health and into the Department for Children, Schools and Families, he would be stepping back to the evidence base and innovation of 25 years ago. He said in his speech that he wants front-line staff to be free to innovate. I got a report the other day from the Printed Paper Office on keeping track of innovation in schools as a result of the Bill that we passed two or three years ago. It was ridiculous. It was so thin you could have rolled it around a cigarette. Most of it was about schools faced with some kind of physical reorganisation asking permission to change their hours or the times of the terms a bit. We have suppressed innovation in schools, rather than encouraged it. If only we could learn from what this Government have done successfully in health. I am cheered by much of what the noble Lord, Lord Darzi, says about that, but if only we could transplant that into evidence-based education, that would be great. We do not have systems for spreading good practice in schools. A good teacher from here or there or one who has gone on a good course is a matter of chance. It is terribly random. However, there are examples, even in education, of innovation proceeding in the right way. When the international baccalaureate was introduced into this country, at no stage did it cause any pain to the schools into which it was introduced because they took it on as and when they wished. It has caused no disruption to the system and has happened quietly. There is a case for co-ordinated change to outward looking parts of the system, such as the admissions system or admissions regulations, which clearly ought to be changed centrally and should be uniform. However, inward looking changes, which look at how schools work and the provision of education, work much better if they are continuous self-evaluated improvement rather than just cathartic and episodic. I should like to see change, first, as a demonstration when it is initiated by schools, pressure groups or examination boards. Innovation should appear from everywhere in the system, rather than just centrally. The Government could carry out a pilot study which, having been carefully monitored, could be rolled out slowly, again being monitored. Once the process gets to a point of critical mass—perhaps when 30 per cent or 40 per cent of schools are doing it—Ofsted could start to push and encourage, and, 10 years down the road, it could become universal. In that way, schools would take on changes as and when they are ready for them. Through the whole process of developing a new system, there would be continual evaluation and improvement. There would be a continuous flow of people who are used to the new system and who could help to support it in schools. There would be an ongoing foundation of good practice. That would be much easier and more constructive. The recent interim report on the primary curriculum from Professor Rose promises, in several ways, a complete upset of the way things are taught in primary schools. If we do that in the way we are used to doing, we risk going back to the chaos of the 1960s when a whole generation was just not taught. It may work. I am a great supporter of many of Rose’s suggestions, but bits of them may not work. We should try them out to see their effects. In education, they have to be done at a level where you can afford to carry out evaluation and to provide support to make sure that things are going right. Unless you do that, you have to wait several years, by which time a whole clutch of children will have been failed. If you are engaged in intense and close evaluation and support, things going wrong can be picked up probably within a few months and certainly within a year or so. That would give a chance to adjust things or to get back on to the original track. Such a system also would be better for Ministers. It would not be the all-at-once grand creation or the big change that Ministers like, but, because changes would be starting small, they would be able to do more of them. They would get more of the headlines they want because more projects would get under way. They would not have the headaches that go with the big changes, with everyone saying, ““It’s going wrong. It hurts. It’s not happening for us””. If one looks at educational history and asks what has succeeded, a pretty good example is my noble friend’s CTCs, which started small. There were a dozen or so of them. It took some time before they got off the ground, but by then we knew how the system worked and how to make them work. Now my noble friend is at it again. He proposes to start at a sensible level with 10 to 12 of these new university technical colleges to show how they work, to have enough of a critical mass and to have a collection of people who will be able to develop them. If they work—I hope that they will because we need them—things will spread from there. That is the way to build a lasting legacy and a good education system. It is the example that we should all follow.