My Lords, I support pretty much all the amendments in the group. The one tabled by the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, is particularly helpful and casts a glow over most of the others. That is why I plead it in aid when talking about Amendment 171F, spoken to by my noble friend Lady Morris of Yardley and so strongly supported by both the noble Lords, Lord Sandhurst and Lord Macdonald of River Glaven, with both of whom I align myself.
I should like to make three points. First, almost all of us in ordinary conversation talk about the importance of the relationship and the fact that education is a team sport—schools, kids and parents are all involved.
We take it as a truth and do not question it any further. But the other thing about this team sport is that none of the bits is sealed off from another. All of us who have brought up children must have had the experience of them coming home and wanting to talk about something that has arisen in the curriculum they are being taught. If we do not have the smallest idea of what that might be, it will be a much less fruitful conversation than any parent, or the child who introduced the subject, would want to have. These points have to be fundamental and this amendment goes to the heart of the issue. If we mean that it is a team—something shared and collaborative—it must mean that we are all in the position where we can talk about what the other experiences and what the other knows. If not, it does not really mean anything. I hope that point will be taken very strongly.
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Secondly, I strongly identify with the point made with great force by the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald, about the work done in curricula in the sphere of science and scientific knowledge. By training I am a mathematician; I do not know whether that counts as a scientist but, in any event, that is what I have been trained to do. One thing that it has always seemed to me very important to stress is that in any debate it is possible to distinguish between those things which people may hold very sincerely as opinions and those things which, none the less, are not sustained by any kind of research or scientific knowledge.
A couple of examples of this have been given. My noble friend Lord Grocott’s example of class is very important, and another is religion. This may be special pleading, but I can tell noble Lords that if you come from a Jewish family and your child is in a faith school, it is not at all unusual to find the unchallenged view about the culpability of the Jews historically, without anybody making any kind of point about it at all. There are issues of that kind, which in good schools of course would not arise, but they do arise in some schools and that is important.
The extremely important example given by the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald, is the one that has become the subject of so much debate: the issue of gender. It appears to me that in schools a number of organisations have unwisely been allowed to capture the agenda, and the point is repeated ad nauseum about what you have to believe. Now, I do not mind people championing ideas—I have a go at it occasionally myself—and I do not mind everybody disagreeing with me; it happens to me all the time. But I do not like people being designated as the champion of things whose orthodoxy in those respects has to be adhered to. That is no basis for any kind of education—any kind at all. We are subject to that at the moment. It is not the sole responsibility—I shall mention an organisation—of Stonewall to tell me, my child or anybody else what the orthodoxy is about those questions. I do not think there is any case for that to be done privately in a school without the parents knowing what is happening.
That brings me to my last point. I will now stray a little from schools, but it is relevant because it has also happened in the world of education more generally. The introduction of the argument that commercial
sensitivity makes it impossible to proceed in a discussion about anything has not happened only in schools; it has happened in higher education routinely. It may be that noble Lords will not want to hear another word I say when I say that I was the Minister in part responsible for the research excellence exercise and for the ways it has been used. When we were looking at the ways in which we described what was really excellent research, and therefore where it might be sensible for funding to follow that research—it was like betting on winners rather than not—we found that, in the discipline of psychology, for example, where psychometric testing was used, it was almost all proprietary property of the people who set up the experiments. The normal notion that you would challenge the data by repeating experiments could not be done, because you had no right or access to the source material.
It does not matter to me, candidly, whether that happens in higher education or in schools. The fact is that we cannot protect pools of knowledge which people want to address from proper scrutiny and argument. If we do, we kill any scientific process. Let us not mince our words: we kill any scientific process.
For those reasons, let us not have that insidious development, which we have seen happen quite a lot, particularly in research funding, move across into the school sector by accident and not address the problem. As my noble friend Lady Morris has said, we must make sure that we do not let it slip through a crack.