I support the amendment about specialist schools in the name of the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington. It also touches on academies. As the founder of academies, I never at any time said that all schools should be academies. In fact, when we established them as city technology colleges in the 1980s, I said that they should be beacons for other schools to follow if they wanted to—I was not prescriptive. I was asked several times whether I would support that concept and I never have. It took a huge step forward under Labour when the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, who is in his place, persuaded Tony Blair to go for 200 academies and the Labour Party accepted this.
There is no doubt that some schools improve when they become academies, but there is a geographical spread. My friend the noble Lord, Lord Storey, emphasised how many of the successful MATs are in the south-east and south-west—the Home Counties areas, as it were. In the very depressed areas of Stoke, Sandwell or Blyth in Northumberland, where youth unemployment is 20%, there is no easy switch to say that if schools there became academies, they would suddenly get better. Many of these areas have what are called sink schools, which continue to be inadequate or require improvement, again and again. There have been studies on this recently, and making these schools academies does not necessarily have any effect on them, because a fundamental change in the curriculum is needed.
A specialist school makes a fundamental change in the curriculum. When I started to promote university technical colleges over 12 years ago, they were specialist schools that did not have to follow the national curriculum of Progress 8 and EBacc; rather, local people could decide what they wanted to specialise in. That was the breakthrough.
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As a result, we focused first on engineering, construction and digital. However, as more people came to us, the local community decided. In Elstree—Elstree is next to the film studio—they decided not to do engineering or construction but to focus on film production instead. It is a now a very successful specialist school for film production. With streaming services, including Netflix, there is huge increase in the creation of original material.
The school that came to us in Salford is on Salford Quays, the heart of the television industry of the north of England. It decided that it wanted to focus on television, so it has courses specialising in television. In fact, there is a conference on Thursday of eight UTCs doing this sort of work, which is sponsored by the British Film Institute. Hundreds of students will turn up, all of whom are studying subjects which will get them jobs in the entertainment world.
There is another in Tower Hamlets in the East End of London. Our UTC there specialises in two fields: health and social care, and creative writing and the theatre. It works with the National Theatre. We had 30 leavers last year: they were mainly Bangladeshi girls who all went on to university in those two disciplines. This is an area where normally only 5.96% go to university. So there is a real need for specialist schools of a certain sort.
When I was Education Secretary, I set up a specialist school in Croydon, London called the BRIT School. Its students start at 14, and it is highly selective—after all, no one wants a mixture-quality choir, orchestra or band. It is very successful; it produces most of our pop stars, including Adele, Amy Winehouse and other singers who are presently very popular. Again, this is a specialist school; we are moving into the era of more specialist schools. As my noble friend said, he specialises in science, maths and dance. These are all areas from which someone can go into work quite easily. There is one common feature of all these specialist schools: they do not have to follow the Gove curriculum of eight academic subjects, all of which were identified word for word in 1904.
In the age in which we are now living—the digital age—we are going to need more specialist schools. The thing that will really open this up is the green agenda, which is so large that it is multicultural and multidisciplinary. At present, the education system is not geared up to it. None of our schools are really teaching this. The only way that it can be taught is through a bit in geography on climate change, and I suppose they still teach the carbon cycle in chemistry—I remember studying this when I was doing chemistry. However, there is nothing else. What we will need in a green agenda is, for example, a specialist school in hydrogen. As Teesside is going to build a very big plant dealing with hydrogen—on which we are spending only one-eighth of what France is spending—there could be a school there specialising in hydrogen. There would then need to be schools somewhere else specialising in global warming, electric vehicles and net zero.
There was a very interesting report on “Farming Today”—which I listen to every morning, because you wake up very early when you are old—about a farm somewhere in the north of England that had devised a way of reducing the noxious fumes of cow slurry. Cow
slurry makes farming one of the most harmful industries, so it is important for a way to be found of dealing with it. It was interesting because they had a very big tank, half the size of a container, and they use principally electricity to break up the cow slurry and to create nitrates, thereby turning the slurry into very useful ordinary fertiliser. However, to create the electricity, they will have their own solar panels. This shows how the green agenda will be so complicated and different that it will need more specialist schools. That is why there has to be a fundamental reform of education.
Schools across our country are now teaching the eight academic subjects that were agreed in 1904. We are not moving our schools toward what is needed in this day and age, but specialist schools are a way of doing it.