- Question for Short Debate
- 2:47 pm
- Asked by
- To ask His Majesty’s Government what plans they have to ensure that life skills and citizenship are taught in primary and secondary schools.
- My Lords, I am very pleased to have the opportunity to introduce this debate. I thank all who are taking part and apologise that they have only two minutes to speak. I also bring apologies from the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, that he is unavoidably unable to be with us on a topic where he has great expertise.It is widely recognised that personal and social development are key aims of education at all levels. However, there are only minimal requirements on schools and funding pressures mean that these areas do not get the priority they deserve. DfE advice for education providers is that they should include“other non-qualification activity to develop students’ character, broader skills, attitudes and confidence, and support progression”.This might include their ability to travel independently, to cook and eat healthily, to stay safe and to understand their all-important personal finances. This should be at the heart of education. Employers tend not to prioritise academic qualifications. They look for resilience, problem-solving, contributions to the community—life skills that impact on young people, our communities and our country.I am currently on a committee chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, to look at education for 11 to 16 year-olds. As we take evidence, it is becoming increasingly clear that our current school priorities are not fit for purpose, whatever the Schools Minister, Nick Gibb, may think. The EBacc and other programmes are directed to academic achievements, with GCSE, A-level and university being the main drivers. Young people whose interests and talents lie in more practical directions are largely overlooked, their motivation declining with every year when “Hamlet” and calculus are deemed more important than engineering, catering, music, the arts—indeed, all forms of creativity. Preparation for adult life is given minimal attention.There are some brilliant citizenship programmes where young people learn the key skills of working with others, communication and self-management. They are taught about democracy; the importance of voting; human, moral, legal and political rights and duties; tolerance and diversity; and the invaluable contributions that can be made by volunteers. They are advised of financial literacy to enable them to manage their future incomes; of course, this is particularly important in these times of hardship and so much more relevant than algebra. When did noble Lords last use quadratic equations? They were fun while they lasted—I thoroughly enjoyed them—but by golly were they transient. Pupils are pointed to sex and health education although citizenship is not the same as PSHE, important as that is. They learn about ways in which they can play their part in the community, such as caring for others, old and young, disabled or sick, who may need help in everyday life, and the satisfaction that comes from activities that earn them money but help the world to be a better place.
- 2:57 pm
- My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, for obtaining this important debate and for such an excellent introductory speech. Schools do not single-handedly teach life skills and citizenship but only supplement what is taught and mainly caught in families. Of course, that can be far from ideal but, particularly in how sex and relationships education is taught, schools can contradict good values parents seek to instil in their children, which are often faith-based. Parents have found their children learning to be “sex positive” in their attitudes to relationships, which means“stepping away from monogamy-based assumptions”.Sex education used to be based on evidenced human biology; now it imposes gender and coercive liberal ideology, which is causing unnecessary confusion and stress. Will the Minister confirm when much-needed guidance in this area will be published by the Government?Similarly, citizenship education that teaches critical race theory and other forms of cultural Marxism as fact is indoctrinating young people and denying them the skills to evaluate critically current strands of thought. The pervasiveness of these ideologies highlights that everyone needs a belief system to live by. By ignoring faith-based beliefs, schools are in fact promoting atheism—the belief that there is nothing. On what grounds do I say this? Teaching against committed family relationships contradicts tenets particularly those of Christianity, which is predicated completely on our status as children of God through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Flimsy manmade ideologies that insist there is nothing of the divine beg the question that if there is nothing how come there is something? It is impossible to have something from nothing. All human beings face these existential questions, so what is the Government’s attitude towards this de facto teaching of atheism in state schools?
- 2:59 pm
- My Lords, I start by reminding noble Lords of my education interests in the register, in particular as chair of the E-ACT multi-academy trust and as a director of Suklaa Ltd. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, for how she opened the debate, although I say to the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, that I think I disagreed with pretty much everything that he said.We must start by recognising the capacity limits in the time that children spend in classrooms. The curriculum is already overwhelming for teachers and learners and, if we are to add more to it, it has to be at the expense of something that we are willing to take away. The conundrum, however, is that children are leaving school ill prepared to prosper in a complex, dynamic world—surely, then, we should make more room for life skills and citizenship education. Some argue for adding it to PSHE, which is too often where citizenship is also taught now. When I was Schools Minister, I added financial literacy to the subject, and I welcome the inclusion of relationship and sex education, but that part of the timetable is now full.I argue that the conundrum can be resolved through rebalancing the curriculum. Our “knowledge-rich” curriculum, the EBacc and the nature of Ofsted inspections combine to deliver a highly academic diet in primary and secondary schools. There is so much detailed content crammed in that, as the Institute of Physics told your Lordships’ Education for 11–16 Year Olds Committee, there is no space to teach “the big ideas”. If we stripped out a lot of the minutiae of the curriculum, we could free teachers to be more relevant and engaging and include life skills and citizenship across the curriculum. This was the vision of my Private Member’s Bill in the last Session. I wanted a new aim for the national curriculum, instilling“an ethos and ability to care for oneself, others and the natural environment, for present and future generations”.
- 3:02 pm
- My Lords, as a state secondary school teacher myself, I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, and thank her for this opportunity. The teaching of these subjects is part of a more fundamental discussion—as the noble Lord, Lord Knight, just said—about our whole curriculum.The Skills Builder Partnership and Edge Foundation recently published a report that estimated that the lack of vital skills, such as problem-solving, teamwork and leadership, cost the UK economy £22 billion pounds last year. These skills, like the creative skills that contribute to the UK’s vital creative industry, are not passed on genetically or by osmosis; for most children, they are mainly learned at school. If we can enrich children with these skills, we can improve not only their life chances but the chances of those around them.We should be teaching life skills and citizenship all day every day to our students as an embedded part of every subject, not as a separate subject. Problem-solving, both mental and practical, should have a much larger share of the curriculum. Teamwork, critical thinking and analysis, physical activity, manual dexterity and personal health and well-being would be far more useful than the rote learning that still clings to much of our national curriculum.We should not be educating children so that they can go on to university; we should be educating children so that they can go into life. University should be a choice, not an inevitability and, whether they choose to go or not, our school leavers should be robust, practical, critical thinkers who are better prepared for a life as healthy, compassionate, ambitious, self-aware, resilient and employable citizens.
- 3:04 pm
- My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, for securing this important debate, and I thank her and all noble Lords who preceded me. I, too, want young people to be educated to take their full place as citizens, educated in this country’s history, cultural heritage and traditions, which are characterised by its protection of freedoms—economic, political and, over time, religious—and its thriving voluntarism, with the state kept in its place by an informed democracy and the ballot box.The question is: how can this best be achieved? Should—or, indeed, can—it be done by designating teachers and lesson time to potted citizenship classes, recruiting a cadre of teachers trained in what officials believe to be the fashionable subjects of citizenship today? At the very best, this can do little more than skim the surface but, at worst, it could end up undermining beliefs, traditions and aims that we all seek.Today’s national curriculum already requires pupils in secondary schools to be taught specific citizenship programmes for 11 to 16 year-olds. For instance, GCSE headings cover such things as the development of the political system of democratic government; the role of citizens, Parliament and the monarch; the nature of the rules and laws of our justice system; voluntary bodies; and, of course, as has been mentioned, the management of finances, to mention but a few. Teaching these can best be achieved as a by-product of learning important subjects such as history, literature, classics, religion and mathematics, with teachers educated to degree level in their subjects. It is good, confident teachers who engage their pupils and can illustrate and make comparisons with today, imparting the skills needed and the aptitude to develop, whatever path in life is taken, be it professional or vocational.I urge the Government to focus on recruiting able, academically qualified and committed teachers for all schools—primary as well as secondary—in the central subjects. This is the surest way to understand a culture characterised by parliamentary democracy, the rule of law and individual freedom.
- 3:07 pm
- My Lords, I welcome today’s debate, and I commend the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, for introducing it in such a marvellous autobiographical way. In my short contribution, I will say something about the citizenship element of this debate. When you look around the world, you see that democracy is in a very fragile state. In many countries, including our closest allies, it is under real attack, if not violent attack. We have a great duty to help to preserve our democracy for the future, and our education system will be a key part of our success.The broad issues of citizenship should start early on, at the primary school stage, in an appropriate way. Sometimes, I look up at the Gallery and see a group of primary school children—in fact, I can see one there now, watching our debate. It is a pleasure to see them. We have had several groups here since this debate started. I remember coming to this House when I was the age of some of the people here now, and I sat in the side gallery—it must have been about 1957 or 1958. I no longer remember the subject of the debate, and these children may not remember it either, but they will remember the sense of occasion and something of the experience.I am not saying that citizenship education amounts solely to a visit to this House or another place, but it is an important part—and our education department does a wonderful job of bringing in students and young people to learn about this place. I am one of those Members who welcomes the chance to see schools and colleges, and I hope to do so more. I find that there is a great deal of interest in how things work and in democracy. When I last met a group of sixth-form students, they asked some pretty pertinent questions about this place.My time is up. I sometimes feel that, in a debate like this, we should have the Minister’s speech first, so we can better understand what is in the Government’s mind. I look forward to hearing what she has to say. We cannot take anything for granted—and an active programme of citizenship can help to preserve the very democracy that we value so highly.
- 3:09 pm
- My Lords, I was lucky enough to be a member of the committee that looked at this issue, so ably chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts. In our report, The Ties That Bind, we found that citizenship education, which should be the first great opportunity for instilling our values and encouraging social cohesion, was often being subsumed into individual development. This is undoubtedly important, but it is not the same as learning about the political and social structure of the country, how it is governed, how laws are made and how they are enforced by an independent judiciary. It also does not offer an opportunity for practising civic engagement in schools, local communities and beyond. We said then that the Government should reprioritise the subject by enabling a target for every secondary school in the country to have a dedicated, qualified teacher.The Government’s main instrument for delivering citizenship programmes is the National Citizen Service. I am a long-standing critic of this organisation. It was born with a huge endowment of political will from the Conservative Party, and it was given the status of a royal charter body, which it neither needed nor merited. It receives £63 million—the lion’s share of government funding for youth services. Its website lists eight things that it does: everything from health and well-being to working together for success and employability. Deep down, in the middle of that list, is citizenship and British values. There is no detail about any of the work it does with schools, other than statistics about the number of people and places that have been engaged on short programmes that last for six weeks in the summer. It has a new chair and a new strategy for the next five years. Will the Minister agree that now is the time to have a proper comparative analysis of the effectiveness and cost effectiveness of the National Citizen Service, as opposed to that of other organisations that have a long history of working in this field?
- 3:11 pm
- My Lords, I was a member of the Select Committee that produced the report, The Ties That Bind: Citizenship and Civic Engagement in the 21st Century. It exposed major failings in the teaching of citizenship in schools. The Government’s response did nothing to suggest that these failings were being addressed. The Liaison Committee’s follow-up report, which was debated in April this year, again pointed out continuing failures in this area. All this is well set out in the excellent Library briefing.The noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, the chair of the original committee, much regrets that he is not able to be part of today’s debate because of an operation. In April, he said that“our follow-up report made a number of recommendations at paragraphs 72 to 77 about Ofsted’s work. It is no exaggeration to say that Ofsted rejected the lot. It persistently mixes up citizenship education with PSHE—personal, social, health and economic education. In truth, they are completely different”.—Official Report, 17/4/23; col. GC 178.]Is the Minister satisfied that Ofsted now distinguishes citizenship education from PSHE, or is the former still too often subsumed in the latter?I will again raise two of the many concerns from the earlier reports. First, is a record now being kept of the number of trainee teachers in citizenship education? If not, why not? Secondly, are bursaries now available for those who want to teach the subject, as there are in other subjects where teachers are in short supply?When we look around the world today, we see far too many oppressive dictatorships, military coups, managed democracies and elective autocracies. Of the 195 countries in the world, only 72 are democracies or flawed democracies. Democracy is a precious historical achievement, but it is fragile, as the noble Viscount just emphasised. There is no guarantee that it can survive. Young people should be taught why democracy matters and how to be a responsible citizen in democracy. Too often, at the moment, this is not being done at all, or only very inadequately.
- 3:14 pm