My Lords, I am very pleased to be able to introduce this debate today. I think this is one of the most important issues facing the nation and I am delighted that so many people have volunteered to speak and to stay late on a Thursday.
I suspect that many noble Lords are going to be quite critical of the Government’s performance as regards the opportunities available to working-class children—I know I am—so I want to say at the start that there are very many working-class children who now occupy places in our professions and in business. They are leaders and campaigners, they contribute to all areas of the economy and they contribute to society in full; indeed, they are Members of the House of Commons and they are Members of the House of Lords. There is nothing inevitable about being born into a working-class family and not having the opportunity to succeed in life. This is a complex issue.
We could spend the whole debate defining “working-class”, but I hope we are not going to do that. I am conscious that it is not only about money and income: it is about the support you get from your family and the neighbouring community; it is about the attitude and the aspiration that you have; it is about whether you meet a teacher, at some point in your life, who believes in you and gives you the extra push; it is about whether you yourself decide to seize the opportunities and run with them; and, at the end of the day, it is about working hard as well. Sometimes, though, young people from working-class backgrounds say that if they have succeeded because of those things—because of a teacher or a parent or because they seized the opportunity—they feel that they have done so in spite of the system, not because of it.
We know that at every stage of our education system there is a correlation between parental income and educational attainment, and that the gap gets wider the older a child gets. At age five, 50% of children from this sort of background will go into early years education with a language deficit. At year 1, the gap between them and the wealthier pupils in their class will be 14%, rising to 18% at the end of key stage 1, 22% at the end of key stage 2 and 28% at the end of key stage 4. These children are less likely to stay on at school in the sixth form. They are less likely to go to university and, if they do, they earn less after graduation, and 80% are less likely to enter a profession.
When you put the regional, gender and ethnic differences in attainment on top of that, what is stark—and this must be our agreed starting point—is that our education system has an unacceptable and unenviable link between the income of your parents at the time of your birth and your life chances throughout life. We know that it need not be like that: it is not like that in other developed countries; they manage to succeed. That is the kernel of this debate, and I hope that today we will hear suggestions as to how we could change things.
My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Baroness. I do not know if I agree with everything she said, but I agree with a lot of it. I volunteered to speak in this debate because it follows one yesterday—I remind the House of my declared interests—in which I talked special educational needs. I did not have a chance to raise how the parents have to take on a huge responsibility for this group, because the school system seems to be failing them. Teachers are not trained to deal with most of the commonly occurring special educational needs—I have already referred to my interest in dyslexia—and parents traditionally have to step in. They normally step in to get the diagnosis in the first place. They have to notice that the child is underachieving or not achieving in certain ways. That means they need to know what the norm and the expectation are. If you do not have a background in education, you are less likely to know that. Then, once you have done that, you have to take on the system, to an extent. You need to start putting pressure on the teacher and the structures around you to say, “Why are you not doing it?” This means writing letters. Good literacy helps. Knowing how to access forms and look things up are all part of it. The tiger parent gets results.
Then look at straightforward cash. It costs £500, maybe £600, to get, privately, a diagnosis for these hidden disabilities. Other situations may vary. That is a big chunk. It is more than you would get from one week on the national minimum wage. Then, it is reckoned to cost about £1,000 a year to keep the pressure on and make sure you get the support for that child and the things they are missing at school. The people I have been speaking to reckon that, if you have to go to appeal, it costs over £6,000. At least 15% of the population have special educational needs according to the Government, and virtually everybody agrees that that is an underdiagnosis. It is reckoned that 80% of those with dyslexia are undiagnosed through the school system.
My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, for securing this debate and for the way in which she introduced it. I absolutely agree that education is the most powerful lever for change, but I did not always appreciate that. I grew up in Gateshead, when it was one of the poorest communities in the country. I attended a typical inner-city comprehensive school, where our most famous alumnus was Paul Gascoigne. The only remarkable thing about my O-level grades was that they spelled out “FUDGE” when I got them.
In later life, however, with the encouragement of my noble friend Lord Baker, the then Secretary of State, and the inspirational local businessman Sir Peter Vardy, I was part of a team that founded a city technology college in Gateshead. Over the past 30 years, it has transformed the academic opportunities of more than 10,000 children from working-class backgrounds. It did this by raising expectations among students and parents. The school instilled in students personal pride and self-belief, along with beliefs in self-discipline and ambition. Later in life, I was to have the opportunity of graduating from Oxford University as a mature student. What has all this taught me about the subject before us?
There are a few things. I am absolutely convinced that education is the surest path out of poverty ever discovered. I believe that investment in the early years of a child’s life will yield the greatest socioeconomic return it is possible to get. I believe in the dignity of hard work, and in celebrating excellence wherever it is found: in academia, the arts, sport, public service or enterprise. I believe in levelling up, not levelling down, and that the person who has the greatest responsibility for achieving your life goals is you. I failed my O-levels not because the system failed me but because I did not put in the work necessary to pass them. I believe that people born anywhere in the United Kingdom have won the biggest prize in the lottery of life. It is, without doubt, the best country to grow up in. I believe it offers some of the best schools and universities, and the best opportunities available anywhere in the world at this time. The British education system is the most admired in the world, judging by the fact that last year the UK overtook the United States as the number one destination for foreign students.
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for securing this debate. I would like to use the few minutes I have in what I see as a critical debate to focus on those areas that are rarely spoken about, much less understood in these discussions. I first declare my interests as chair of the advisory group for the Government’s race disparity unit, director of Operation Black Vote and board director for Youth Futures Foundation.
The importance of this debate must not be underplayed: as an extremely wealthy nation, we should be ashamed that children from poorer backgrounds are now less likely to have job security, and possibly social mobility, than when I left school 40-odd years ago. A decent and more level playing field in education, from early years to university, has to be the goal. We are talking about not dumbing down, but rather investing to raise up. It is in the top universities’ self-interest to acknowledge that a student with all the socioeconomic disadvantages who still gets two As and a B is probably as bright as a privileged student who has gained three As.
My second point is on the growing and misleading narrative that seeks to pit white working-class students against working-class black and minority ethnic students. First, black and minority students, particularly those from Roma, Gypsy and Traveller, African, Caribbean, Bangladeshi and Pakistani families, are more likely to live in poverty and disadvantage, as are their families. So why are they doing better than some disadvantaged white students? I would argue there are two fundamental reasons.
First, particularly outside big cities—for example, for some in the north, in Wales, in the south-west and in other places—there is a bottom-up lack of investment in good jobs, or in schools. This can contribute to certain sections of their communities having expectations and aspirations that are not as high as they could be.
My Lords, given the number of reports and studies on this issue, I think we all recognise the importance of educational attainment to social mobility, and indeed to social justice. It is therefore all the more important to be reminded that inequalities continue to exist within the education sector between disadvantaged children and their more advantaged peers. We start, of course, at the beginning. In the first five years of their lives, children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds often suffer disadvantages compared to their more affluent peers. In its most recent state of the nation report, the Social Mobility Commission found that 43% of children entitled to free school meals did not reach the “good” level of development at age 5, compared to 26% of more advantaged children.
Disadvantaged pupils start school behind their peers in terms of attainment, and the gap persists throughout the school years. By age seven, their attainment gap is 18 percentage points in reading and mathematics, and 20 percentage points in writing. By age 11, less than half of pupils entitled to free school meals reach the expected standards in reading, writing and maths, compared to 68% of all other pupils. Research shows us that high-quality early education is one of the most important determinants of every child’s life chances. Children who receive early years education start primary school at a cognitive advantage, and the longer children have been in preschool, the greater that advantage.
The excellent debate in this House last week, brought by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester, drew attention to the need for improved early years interventions to support children and families facing a range of disadvantages. Over the last decade we have seen a plethora of policies aimed at addressing the attainment gap. In early years, we have seen the introduction of a number of hours of free early education or childcare for qualifying two, three and four-year olds, and an Early Years Pupil Premium aimed at helping disadvantaged three and four-year olds. In schools, the pupil premium was introduced for pupils eligible for free school meals, and for looked-after children. There is a national schools breakfast programme, and an essential life skills grant, aimed at supporting disadvantaged children in the most disadvantaged parts of the country—the 12 so-called “opportunity areas” that include Blackpool, Derby and my hometown of Bradford.
My Lords, I warmly congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, on putting down for debate a subject in which the words “working class” and “education” are in the same sentence. For the past 10 years, I have promoted schools—university technical colleges—for the working class of our country, and I am proud to do so.
The youngsters whom we recruit at 14 are disengaged, disheartened, disobedient and entirely fed up with their schools; they are looking for a fresh start. We give it to them. First, we treat them, at age 14, as adults—that is simply not done in normal schools. They decide what uniform they want to wear—they invariably elect for business dress—and they usually call their teachers by their Christian names. It is a totally different relationship. Secondly, from day one, they make things with wood, metal and plastics and using 3D printers, and they realise that this is something quite different. When I speak to those classes, I say, “This is the first day of your working life, because you start at 8.30 am and go on until 5 pm.” These schools are transformational. We are proud of the record of our students. Frankly, 30% to 40% of our intake is challenging, but our principals do not give up, and they are very reluctant to expel the pupil. They work at it; we give the pupils additional training classes to catch up, and they do.
The destination data is quite striking. Every July, August, September and October, our heads have to determine what happens to each of their students. If you ask the head of a normal school, “What’s happened to your students?”, I guarantee that they will tell you how many went to university, and then there will be silence. They are not really very interested in what happens to the other students. But we track down each one. Last year, we found that 27% of our students became apprentices; a normal school has about 6% or 7%. Some 43% went to universities, which is similar but slightly better than for many schools. What we found striking was that 75% of them did STEM courses—double the national average. Those courses are where the skill gap is in our country. The rest either get a job or go on to other forms of education. When it comes to NEETS—unemployed—we had only 3% last July, whereas a normal school would have 8% or 9%. Undoubtedly, then, we have transformed the life chances of those many youngsters who joined us two or three years early.
I will finish in a moment; do not worry. The success of the Government in education over the next five years will depend on whether they manage to transform technical education fundamentally in our country and make it better. Remember: every attempt to improve technical education since 1870 has failed apart from UTCs, so they have a great task. That is the task on which they will be judged: not on the EBacc or Progress 8, but on whether technical education is better in five years’ time.
My Lords, I praise my noble friend Lady Morris for her inspiring speech and for the debate, and I remind the House of my interests as the chief officer at TES Global and as chair of Whole Education.
I believe that education is failing working-class communities in this country. Many of those places were formed to serve an industrial economy that has since moved on. Our education system emerged as those places became established and has yet to move on with the economy, as the noble Lord, Lord Baker, has told your Lordships on a number of occasions.
Our current system is a sift, and academic exams are the sifting mechanism. You go to school, work hard and get good grades. If your grades are good enough, you go to university and get a great career; if not, get some skills and get a job. Policy-makers have been delegating more to schools in exchange for more accountability, in the hope that it will generate more improvement so that more young people from more backgrounds can access the higher aspiration university route. Yet, the Sutton Trust tells us that the eight top schools in this country send as many pupils to Oxbridge as three-quarters of all schools. Working-class children are being failed. Teach First research in 2018 revealed that poorer pupils are more likely to be excluded than to pass the English Baccalaureate.
The most the current model can do is work for two-thirds of young people. For working-class kids, we would be lucky to get to half, however hard we drive the current system. There simply are not enough teachers and leaders to make the system work, and academic learning is not for everyone. For working-class communities, it is not just about learning and exams. On Saturday, I met the job-sharing head teachers from an all-through school in Portland, Dorset, where I used to be the Member of Parliament. They asked me to tell you this:
20 of 60 shown
There have been some successes; it is not all failures. I think that these are my successes from my time both in politics and in education: a national curriculum—not necessarily the national curriculum we have, although that of the noble Lord, Lord Baker, was very successful—the London Challenge, Sure Start, literacy and numeracy strategies, the pupil premium and of course the Open University. All of those were sustainable initiatives. They were comprehensive, well-funded and ambitious, they involved taking risks, and they are still with us in the shape of the people who benefited from them.
However, littered among all that are the many small initiatives over the years that have been more about a press release and a headline than they have ever been about sustained and important change, or improvement in opportunities for working-class children. We have had breakfast clubs, after-school clubs, holiday clubs and catch-up clubs; we have had this zone, that zone and the other zone; we have had tsars. Every initiative that the Government launch has a paragraph at the end saying, “You must take extra care to target this at children from deprived backgrounds”. I am not critical of that—at least it shows intent—but the questions for us now are these. Have we learned from what has gone on in the past? Can what we have learned be seen in the policies before us at the moment? Are those policies likely to improve the situation?
We should be clear: in every stage of our education system, from early years right through to employment, there are problems. I want to look at three areas in particular that I think are important. The first is early years education. When you hear the statistics about the growing social-class gap as children move through school, you can conclude only one thing: once a child falls behind, it is very difficult for them to catch up. That is not because they get the poorest teachers or go to the worst schools or because no one tries; it is because it is damned tough to catch up if you have fallen behind at the age of five. The only conclusion can be that early years ought to be our prime focus; it ought to be where we put our resources if ever we have the chance. Yet when we look at that area, we see staff who are less qualified. Some 45% of childcare workers claim benefits or tax credits; it is essentially a low-skilled workforce. You have to have a PhD to teach a university student but you do not even have to have a level 3 qualification to teach the nought to fives. So we have learned what is needed but failed to take action.
I have to say that Michael Gove’s action in abolishing Sure Start was nothing short of politically criminal. I hope he has lived to rue the day, when he sees that nothing has been done—in fact, the gap at age five is growing, not closing. I believe that there is a review of the future of children’s centres, and it would be helpful if the Minister could give us some reassurance about what is happening. This is not just about the child; institutions such as Sure Start and children’s centres work with the parents. If you are going to get it right at aged five, that is the opportunity to bind together that most important of educational partnerships, not between teacher and pupil but between parents and children. We are wasting opportunities there.
Secondly, I want to look at schools. Again, I would say that the many schools that succeed do so against the odds, in the most extraordinarily challenging circumstances and working harder than many of us can imagine. Many individuals will talk about how they owe their life chances to the school that they went to and the teacher who taught them. But there is a danger in this debate that we pick out individuals or groups and say that it worked for them, but forget to look at the overall picture. Schools are still struggling to close the gap between social class and educational attainment.
The figures and statistics belie the actuality of what is happening because the biggest difference in attainment is within schools, not between them. We measure the difference between schools, saying, “This school got that and that school got the other”, but, no matter how affluent the catchment area of the school or where it is situated, poor children in those schools do worse. If poor children make up 1% of children in a middle-class school, guess who does the worst in that high-achieving middle-class school—the 1% of poor children. I worry about the Ofsted figures in this respect as well. When you look at the Ofsted gradings for outstanding schools, you see that they correlate to schools in middle-class areas taking middle-class children. It is not an exact fit, but a school is far more likely to be in special measures or to require improvement if a number of its children are on free school meals.
That means that we are not asking the right questions. You cannot just look at the performance statistics and say what is right or wrong. The reality is that even in high-performing schools, working-class children are not doing well. That means that our approach to failing schools and schools that have a lot of working-class children should sometimes be more empathetic than I fear it is. To be honest, there is little incentive for schools to tackle long-term inequality: you do not get many badges for it and you run the risk of ruining your overall performance, with all the consequences that that has.
I want to bring up one more important item in relation to schools. I do not mind the emphasis on literacy and numeracy—indeed, my time in office as a Minister, during the first term, was focused on the literacy and numeracy strategies—but I worry about, and am pretty cross about, the narrowing of the curriculum. If you want to help children from working-class backgrounds, you have to teach them to read and write to prepare them for secondary school and for life, but you also have to give them access to that wider, richer curriculum. That is what will give them the foundations to be brave enough to make decisions, and confident enough to visit places that they may not otherwise have gone to. If we have schools where is there is no creativity—no art, no music, no band or orchestra—but there is an awful lot of phonics teaching, we are not going to build children up. They might be able to pass the phonics test, but they will not have the confidence that is essential to get on in life.
I turn to a topic that for me is a tragedy equal to that of abolishing Sure Start. Since 2010, the Government’s priority on the schools agenda has been to try to force every school in this country to become an academy or a free school. I am not making a judgment—there are many such schools that are good—but I am absolutely confident that the amount of time, resource, leadership and effort that successive Ministers in the Department for Education have put into forcing schools to academise could have been spent on tackling the problem that we are discussing today. It is a tragedy that that has not been the case.
My third area is post-16 education. I will be honest: I was not quite as up to date on the statistics as I thought I was, before leading on this debate. I had not realised what a segregated system post-16 has become. Quite simply, twice as many young people from disadvantaged backgrounds go on to further education than stay at school. At post-16 we now have working-class children taking one path and middle-class children taking another. But which is the most underfunded sector of our whole education system? It is further education. Which sector has taken a 20% reduction in funding, compared to 8% in schools? It is FE. The salary of college lecturers is, on average, £2,500 less than that in schools—no wonder the average college had 16 vacancies at the start of the 2017-18 academic year. That cannot be right. I am not making a judgment about where children choose to go, but if they choose to go to further education, and if we are serious about closing the attainment gap, that is where our priority must be and where investment ought to be made.
I finish on this: education is the most powerful lever for change that we have. I stand second to none in believing in the power of education to change lives, and I pay tribute to everybody who chooses to spend their life in this sector. But I also believe that they cannot do it by themselves. Too often, our response is to blame them, because they have not got our policies right. They cannot do it by themselves; it is our responsibility to make sure that there are things around them to help them do their job better. It is difficult to close a social-class gap during a time of austerity. If being poor means that you are more likely to do badly at school, why do we make more children poor, as we have done since 2010? If we believe that a broader co-ordinated service is important, why do we cut social services, the probation service and the numbers of health visitors who go into schools?
What is happening in schools? Teachers know that if they are going to do the best for their children, they have to not just teach them but help them overcome the barriers to learning. These barriers are not necessarily educational: they are domestic, social and aspirational. Teachers do it because there is no one else to. We have a situation in which teachers are taking time out from teaching to help a parent who comes in with a money problem, or a child who comes in dirty because there is no bath at home to wash in, or a child who needs fed because they have had no breakfast. When Labour was in Government, we moved away from that. It is far more challenging to close that social-class gap during a time of austerity than at any other, and I lay that at this Government’s door.
This remains one of our biggest challenges. If our education system and our politicians want us to be the sort of society we say we want, we should put our hands up and volunteer to be judged by how much we can close the gap between the poor and the rich. We are not without successes and some evidence of how it can be done, and we are not without the wish and the will to do it. But I fear that, at the moment, we are without the ability to look at what has happened and seize the evidence of what works, and to turn that into policies that could shape a different future.
There is another, small element that goes into the bigger cocktail the noble Baroness has identified, and which may ensure that your chances of success are that bit lower. Everything is on a downward multiplier. You are being pressured to do things that you just cannot do if you do not have the resources or understand the education system that well. I do not know how many times I have had a conversation with a parent who said, “I have a dyslexic child and, by the way, I think I am dyslexic as well.” The same is true of dyspraxia and autism. With that sort of pressure, we will not get out of this until we start to have better education for teachers and make the system slightly friendlier to enable them to implement those changes. All these small changes will help but unless we keep an eye on them and how they fit together, we will miss out. Please can we hear how the Government are going to make sure that parents with lower educational attainment know how to access the help that the middle- classes are clearly getting?
Over the past six years, we have seen the proportion of children achieving good development by the age of five rise from 55% to 74%. I am proud that the number of people being taught in good or outstanding schools has increased by over 2 million since 2010; this will pay dividends in future. I am pleased that the proportion of children who were on free school meals entering higher education in England has increased every single year since 2005. I am pleased that the scourge of mass unemployment, which I knew in my youth, has given way to the highest employment levels in our history and some of the lowest unemployment rates for 50 years. I am proud that we now have the lowest ever number of low-paid jobs, as a proportion of the working population.
The message I would send from places such as this to the working-class communities from which I hail is: you are special; there are opportunities open to you today which are unparalleled in our history; you have incredible potential; and it matters not where you start but where you finish. Be inspired, work hard, aim high and persevere. Above all, when you get there remember to invest back in the lives of the young, so that they might grow taller than we did.
In contrast, the black and minority ethnic, and the migrant, mentality towards education has been: “It’s your way out of poverty and disadvantage, and it will lessen race inequality.” In spite of their educational aspirations, BAME working-class students and youths face a disadvantage that their white counterparts do not: the race penalty. Just a few days ago, Operation Black Vote, alongside the Carnegie Trust and University College London, launched a research paper entitled Race Inequality in the Workforce. The data showed that black and ethnic minority young people
“are 58% more likely to be unemployed”
and
“47% more likely to have a zero-hours contract”.
In education, we are more likely to be expelled from school and have lower degrees, even though students start at the same level. But for me, the clearest factor, which we have witnessed, is that when student papers are marked blindly, without the student’s identity being revealed, lo and behold, black and minority ethnic students do that much better.
Let us bring this back to finding solutions. First, we must understand class that and racial disadvantage are not the same and stop pitting one community against the other. On race, I call upon the Government to have the biggest recruitment drive for black and ethnic minority teachers and role models ever seen. Funding our universities must be linked to them adopting the race equality charter—as they did for gender with Athena SWAN, which dramatically moved the gender inequality dial. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, as a nation, in a scary post-Brexit world, we must have the political will to properly invest in our children’s future. That is looking after our own self-interest.
Although I welcome the ambition behind these schemes, the sheer range of policies and schemes is questionable. In her passionate opening speech, my noble friend starkly highlighted this. Over the years, we have seen many initiatives come and go without being properly evaluated, or without being given a chance to prove themselves before being scrapped. I think of the life chances strategy that was never published, and the disappointing decision not to carry out an early workforce feasibility study. Can the Minister reassure us that the Government will reconsider, or develop, a workforce strategy for early years as a priority? Although the commissioning of research on family hubs is well-intentioned, do we really need yet more reviews? Surely, we already know the benefits of children’s centres from the documented success of Sure Start and its basis of listening to parents and working with local communities.
The Government’s levelling-up ambitions include a commitment to education and skills, and to addressing inequalities in the regions, particularly the north, where I have seen for myself multiple inequalities. A report by the End Child Poverty coalition last year showed that child poverty is rising. The deep-rooted problems it highlighted emphasise the need to get consensus for long-term policy changes that will be kept to, over time, across the parties. If social mobility is indeed a “top priority across government”, will the Minister acknowledge that there are no quick fixes and urge the need for long-term commitment and investment, and joined-up, cross-government approaches?
The other thing is that, on the whole, there has not been much encouragement for these schools from the previous four Secretaries of State. Michael Gove did not like them, tried to close them down and cut our money, and the other three Secretaries of State had passing relationships with education. However, the present Secretary of State is very enthusiastic about UTCs. He did not go to a public or private school—he went to an ordinary school and then college—and I found out that his daughter is at one of the city technology colleges that I founded back in the 1980s in Telford. Therefore, I have high hopes of the Secretary of State. He has visited a UTC and likes it, and said that we can expand, so we have put in applications for three new ones, in Salford, Carlisle and Birmingham, and we hope to have that approved in the summer of this year. Another will open in Doncaster this September.
More than anything else, these schools show that you can transform the life chances of many of the youngsters we have. Your Lordships might like to know of a striking example, because it is the sort of thing you might remember. We have a UTC in Liverpool, which is right on the border of Croxteth, the area for the black community. If you were born in Croxteth in the black community, you have a 15% chance of going to university. Three or four years ago, we took in several students from that black community, and it is striking that 85% of them gained university places. That is very strong social mobility, and it will be technical education—
“We have felt that things have become even harder over the last few years. Students starting school with us have vast gaps in their education, not just academically. We support that well, and are proud to say we’re in the top 10% of schools in the country for progress, both at secondary and primary. However, the social and emotional needs of our students are challenging. The support Sure Start centres used to offer families had a vast impact on parenting skills and abilities. Now, there is very little early intervention for families who struggle or need assistance. The threshold for children who are at risk appears to be unknown. We leave students to go home on occasion unsafe to homes that are not suitable for them, and hope to see them the next day. Social care simply cannot support the needs of families like ours.”
We need a national debate about a new system. There can be no change in working-class communities without regeneration through education. That system must be designed for a long life of continuous reskilling—one that prepares people for a working life of 60 years, multiple careers, being great at interacting with machines as well as humans, but also out-competing machines at being human. It must be one that accepts that analytics will replace qualifications and that universities will have to innovate to deliver lifelong learning rather than a debt-loaded rite of passage, as at present. It will have more grow your own: across a lifetime, someone with a higher apprenticeship has higher average earnings than a graduate from a non-Russell Group university. Employers are increasingly growing their own talent rather than relying on graduate entry schemes. Schools should be growing and qualifying their own teachers from their own working-class communities, with less high-stakes testing and more trust in those teachers. We need a curriculum, not unlike that of some of the UTCs, that balances knowledge and skills, and is designed to nurture a love of learning, curiosity and skills for self-directed learning. This needs cross-party consensus, and what better place to start than in your Lordships’ House?