Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

My Lords, a little history might help us here. Before the 1988 Act brought in by the noble Lord, Lord Baker, there was no external body to control the curriculum. Various bodies, such as the Schools Council, could advise on, consider, discuss and launch various experimental parts of the curriculum and so on but, nevertheless, in those days the Secretary of State was the only person who could have intervened at any stage. There was no national curriculum. It was the 1988 Act—21 years ago now, so I suppose that it is celebrating its 21st birthday before it dies—that laid down a basic curriculum. I was a great admirer of the concept of having a broad and balanced curriculum and of laying down that it should include English, mathematics, a science, a social science and so on. Much though the national curriculum has become an object of criticism and dislike by many people in recent years, we tend to forget that in its original form it was simple and broad and left an enormous amount of freedom for individual schools to experiment and innovate. It ensured that young people going through their secondary education, particularly the latter half of it, did not become too narrow in what they did. Various surveys by Her Majesty’s inspectorate had found that young people might be taking five GCEs or CSEs, in the days before those were brought together, all in the same corner of the curriculum; they could all be maths and science, or all social science and history, or all English and literature and so on. That did not seem to be a very broad curriculum. The concept of the broad and balanced curriculum that came through in the 1988 Act was a simple one that could very well have stayed in the hands of the Secretary of State. It was then handed over to the first of these many bodies that have changed so many times, the National Curriculum Council, which was then separate from examinations, and it was that quango that turned it into the nightmare that it became, with 458 different assessments needing to be made and so on. My noble friends are putting forward the concept that the matter of the curriculum should ultimately be left in the hands of the Secretary of State, rather than being handed over to a quango full of people who all have axes to grind—the physicists want special kinds of physics, the historians want a particular kind of history and so on. That is where it went wrong before and I would be nervous that we were perpetuating a system that overcomplicated, overcontrolled, took away innovation and took away the professionalism of teachers in schools.