Education (Values of British Citizenship) Bill [HL]

Second Reading

Moved by

That the Bill be now read a second time.

My Lords, fundamental British values were first introduced in 2011 as part of the Government’s Prevent strategy. In November 2014, the Department for Education published guidance on how they should be promoted in schools. These fundamental British values, as at present defined, are: democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs.

I am absolutely committed to the teaching of fundamental British values in schools. The purpose of my Bill is to make these values clearer and more holistic, and thereby to strengthen the teaching of citizenship in schools. The introduction of these values aroused opposition at the time on two grounds. First, some in the Muslim community felt that their introduction was directed at them in particular. Then there were those who felt that they were asserting British values as somehow superior to those of other cultures. More than 10 years have passed since their introduction, and now is exactly the right time to consider whether the original formulation was adequate and, in particular, whether it is possible to find a form of wording that is more rounded and is independent of the aims of the Prevent strategy.

An influential interfaith committee was set up by the Woolf Institute in Cambridge and chaired by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss. Its report, Living with Difference, published in December 2015, strongly advocated the teaching of British values in schools but regretted that they were brought in as part of the Prevent strategy. In paragraphs 3.13 and 3.14 it looked forward to a more holistic understanding, independent of that strategy.

In fact, thought has already been given to these values in a House of Lords Select Committee report, The Ties that Bind: Citizenship and Civic Engagement in the 21st Century. The committee was chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, and it reported in April 2018. He regrets that he cannot be here this morning but wants it to be known that he supports the Bill. I declare an interest, having been a member of that committee and of that which produced Living with Difference. The whole of chapter 2 of The Ties that Bind is given over to a discussion of fundamental values. What I am putting forward in this Private Member’s Bill is based in particular on the recommendations in paragraphs 46 and 58 of that report.

As mentioned, I believe passionately that fundamental values should be taught in schools. At a time when the world has a growing number of dictatorships, autocracies and managed democracies, it is vital that pupils in our schools should understand the fundamental political values on which our society is founded. A first change suggested in my Bill is that these values should formally be termed the “values of British citizenship”. This was recommended in paragraph 46 of The Ties that Bind. This wording avoids the implication that they are superior to the values of any other culture or country; it just states that they are, as a matter of fact, the values of being a British citizen, whether by birth or naturalisation. Being British commits you to these values. They might still be known as British values for short, but tying them explicitly to British citizenship would not only answer one of the original objections but give the concept more legal precision.

My Lords, I congratulate the noble and right reverend Lord on bringing forward this Bill and on his contribution to the Select Committee he mentioned. I was proud to serve with him on it, under the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson.

There is a lot to be said in three minutes, but this is a timely moment—timely because there is a curriculum review now initiated under the chairmanship of Becky Francis; because, sadly, we saw over the summer the riots taking place across our country; and because, of course, we see the most enormous threats both from distortion on social media and from the re-emergence of the far right across the world. This is the moment to reinforce the importance of those values that hold us together—the ties that bind.

British values are not exclusive to Britain, but they are about our country. We debated this at great length in the committee and came to the conclusion that of course other people will share those values in their own context, but to reinforce them is really important, as former Prime Minister Gordon Brown endeavoured to do in the debate he initiated just under 20 years ago.

I was proud to introduce the idea of citizenship and democracy teaching in the curriculum over 20 years ago. Sadly, many of those who have the power to ensure that it works never had citizenship and democracy taught to them when they were at school, so they do not really get the message. That applies right across the most powerful elements within our education system. So if we are to make this work—and to detach it from the Prevent strategy, mentioned by the noble and right reverend Lord in terms of what happened in 2011, which I think is the right thing to do—we need to move quickly.

I could go on and on, but I do not have the time this morning, about how my old tutor, Professor Bernard Crick, who chaired the working group that led to the curriculum on citizenship and democracy, used to ask, “How can you tolerate the intolerant?”. Tolerance is a very odd phrase, because if you have to tolerate something, your dislike of it is such that you do not accept that you can respect and hold it on common terms.

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble and right reverend Lord and the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett. I congratulate the noble and right reverend Lord on his Bill, which seeks to update and clarify the principles underlying the teaching of fundamental British values in our schools, within the national curriculum’s citizenship programme.

We all understand that sensitive issues are involved. One is the use of the term “fundamental British values”, which, when it was introduced as part of the Prevent strategy in 2011, met with opposition from some communities where people felt that the term was directed at them. Others felt the term suggested that British values were somehow superior to other nations’ values. The Bill meets these criticisms head-on by referring instead to the “values of British citizenship”. There are other textual but very important changes in the Bill, and the extremely interesting addition of “respect for the environment”—but there are questions about the current teaching of citizenship in our schools.

I turn to the Minister, whom I warmly welcome to her post. She will know that, in 2013, Ofsted reported positively on the teaching in schools of citizenship education. It said that

“headteachers had recognised the rich contribution the subject makes to pupils’ learning … and to the ethos of a school”.

But by 2018, a Lords Select Committee report entitled The Ties that Bind found that

“citizenship education is being subsumed”

into PHSE and was focusing on the personal development of young people rather than teaching them about their role in society, ignoring the political element of being a citizen. Rather alarmingly, the Lords Liaison Committee heard in 2022 from the Association for Citizenship Teaching that

My Lords, I declare an interest as president of Young Citizens, formerly the Citizenship Foundation. Teaching citizenship has a relatively short history in the UK, certainly when compared with other European countries. Its formal inclusion in the national curriculum began only in 2002. At this time, citizenship education had become compulsory and a GCSE in citizenship studies was introduced. However, this early promise was not maintained and in 2014, a government review resulted in a weaker programme that stressed constitutional history and volunteerism rather than active citizenship. Furthermore, the requirement for most schools to teach the national curriculum was removed, resulting in a significant decrease in citizenship teaching and, indeed, teachers.

Yet young people today face an extremely complex world, from riots and food poverty in the UK to wars and environmental degradation, but they also feel distanced from a democratic system that might address their concerns. The distrust of politicians, institutions and the democratic process has never been greater: 44% of young people surveyed had little or no confidence in their ability to participate and 63% did not believe that their voice was ever heard or had any impact.

The Bill goes some way to redress the balance. It restates and changes the current set of values, emphasising freedom of thought, speech, religion and assembly, individual worth and respect for the environment. In reframing the fundamental British values, it gives schools the opportunity to focus on cultivating the new values and introduces new connections with human rights, government and policy. In this sense, citizenship education is both a subject in itself and provides a framework for perceiving and relating to society more generally.

Values and attitudes need to be actively taught; in other words, we need to bring citizenship to life. This can be achieved by means of interactive and practical learning. As always, the real test will lie in the implementation. There are many steps that need to be taken, starting with providing teachers with training and resources. The next step is a firm commitment on the part of all schools to incorporate the values of British citizenship within the curriculum. Thereafter, the task will be to evaluate the impact of such courses, hopefully armed with positive results, and to continue to encourage policymakers to recognise the importance of values and support their long-term inclusion in national curricula.

My Lords, I very much welcome the Bill. I hope that the Government are sympathetic to it and, whether or not it manages to complete its passage through both Houses, will take up the issue of citizenship education as a very important element.

We face a collapse in public trust in our democratic institutions. Surveys show that public trust in Westminster politics is lower than it has ever been since surveys began. We had the lowest turnout for a century in the most recent election. We should not regard our democratic institutions and respect for the rule of law as entirely secure. We see populism in the United States threatening to undermine the entire structure of the American constitution, democracy and the rule of law, and in three or four weeks, we may be watching with some horror what might be the contested outcome of the American election. We need to make sure that populism does not begin to get a stronger hold here. That requires us to engage our citizens and teach them the values of mutual respect, freedom of expression and the value of our institutions as such.

There is very little respect for Westminster politics at all in the public at the moment and many of us are worried about the decline among our young in the willingness to tolerate and have mutual respect for alternative opinions, which is part of the current freedom of speech debate, and where the limits of freedom of speech are. So we do need this Bill, or we need the Government to take it on board. We know the obstacles. I read the Telegraph from time to time, which tells me that all teachers are left-wing and that university teachers are systemically left-wing and indoctrinate their pupils. We know all those things, but actually, it is possible to teach citizenship in a relatively neutral way and to challenge people. I used to have Chinese and Singaporean students at the London School of Economics and I had to work very hard to explain to them that disagreeing with me, as their teacher, was a good idea—but that is part of what one has to do.

My Lords, I too congratulate the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, on bringing forward this Private Member’s Bill, and indeed on the many years of thinking and hard work which have brought the Bill to this point. I welcome the Bill, support its aims and heartily welcome the five specific headings, which together give some definition of what is meant by “British values” in an educational context.

Especially in an educational context, it will be vital to foster a culture in which these headline categories are inhabited in a meaningful way. This kind of culture is capable of being fostered as much in the teaching of maths and science as through the teaching of citizenship, PSHE or RE, but these latter subjects provide an opportunity for values to be addressed directly and explicitly. I shall say something further about RE in particular, but the list of values identified in the Bill includes respect for the environment, and I would also like to say something about the potential for a natural history GSCE.

I will address RE first. The statutory inspection process for Anglican and Methodist schools and their teaching of RE means that church schools can confidently guarantee a high-quality, diverse religious education that supports children to develop the skills and knowledge they need to grow into global citizens and to navigate the nuances of a secular, multi-religious society. However, both citizenship and RE subjects have fallen foul of the English baccalaureate system. Since its introduction in 2017, uptake of RE at GCSE has fallen sharply and social studies uptake has consistently remained below 10%. It is my sincere hope that, through the Bill and through the current government curriculum and assessment review, timetables and curriculum frameworks will be structured to prioritise and value the crucial learning currently taking place under the banners of citizenship and religious education.

My Lords, today is Wear Red Day, the annual fundraising day for Show Racism the Red Card, of which I am the national vice-president. It is an educational charity specifically working in schools and increasingly in workplaces on anti-racist education and anti-racism. It also helps to train teachers, specifically in Wales, but we hope in England too.

Individual worth, as envisaged in the Bill, must mean the promotion in schools of anti-racism—of challenging racism of all types. Prejudice, or ignorance-based behaviour, as my noble friend Lord Mann sometimes describes it, is not acceptable. Show Racism the Red Card has programmes to challenge the background to racism as well as its contemporary manifestations, and to look at hate crime and how to challenge it.

A report out this week, A Portrait of Modern Britain, paints a somewhat rosier picture of the state of our country than some might recognise, but it rightly asserts that racism and discrimination have not been eliminated. I think we are all well aware of that. If the Bill provides an opportunity to look again at the curriculum and how we challenge islamophobia, anti-Semitism and all forms of racism—to be explicit, how we teach anti-racism—it would be a very good thing. It seems to me that individual worth adequately covers the notion that we should be teaching anti-racism.

Finally, I would like to say a word about the Prevent strategy. I was still engaged in education full time at the time of its introduction, and I am all too well aware that there were very big problems with it. The National Education Union, then the NUT—my union—believed that we should be taking a child protection approach to the issue of children being groomed into extremism. That is all the more true because according to Amnesty International, 87% of referrals of under-15 year-olds through the Prevent strategy do not meet the criteria for an intervention. It seems to me that there is something not helpful about the Prevent strategy. Certainly, decoupling it from the teaching of values and citizenship would be a profoundly good idea.

My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak in this debate. I congratulate the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, on the introduction of the Education (Values of British Citizenship) Bill. I refer noble Lords to my entry in the register of interests.

It is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Blower, and I congratulate her on the important work she is doing on Show Racism the Red Card. I also agree with the decoupling of the Prevent strategy—I will say something about that later—although it is nevertheless important.

The changes that this small Bill brings about are few, but they are important. They are largely but not exclusively based on the work of the House of Lords Citizenship and Civic Engagement Committee, which reported in April 2018—some time ago—and was so ably chaired by my noble friend Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts.

Broadening out British values as shared values of British citizenship seems wise; it strengthens those values, recognising they are both international and essentially British. It is absolutely true that we cannot take democratic institutions and their survival for granted. They are being challenged, and it is important that we seek to protect them. I see the Bill as doing just that.

The Bill also substitutes respect for the inherent worth and autonomy of every person in place of the existing mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs. I support that too; that is important.

I quite understand the rationale behind breaking the link between the curriculum and the counter-extremism policy, Prevent. It is right to break that link, but of course, a massive number of incidents involve not just some religious fanatics but also the far right. The link should be broken, but that does not mean that the strategy is not very important. Breaking the link strengthens both the strategy and the curriculum.