That the Grand Committee takes note of the Report from the Liaison Committee The Ties that Bind: Citizenship and Civic Engagement in the 21st Century Follow-up Report.
My Lords, it has been nearly six years since the Select Committee was first constituted to look into issues of citizenship and civic engagement, and I was asked to take the chair. We published our initial report, and the Government gave their response in June 2018. As a committee, we were very disappointed with what the Government had to say and in particular when we had a follow-up meeting with Ofsted which seemed to have very little grasp of the issues and a lack of understanding of what the report had said. We were able to return to the fray using the new Liaison Committee procedures which enable follow-up inquiries to take place. Our follow-up report was published about a year ago and the Government response—which we are debating this afternoon—came out shortly thereafter, towards the end of May. This report will enable us to put the pink ribbon around the file after nearly six years.
It is important, therefore, that I place on record my thanks to all members of the committee who have kept the faith, in particular those who are speaking today, namely the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, and a bevy of Baronesses—if hope that is still a word that I can use—my noble friends Lady Eaton and Lady Redfern, the noble Baronesses, Lady Morris of Yardley and Lady Barker, and not overlooking the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Needham Market, who joined in for the second round, which we also enjoyed. I need also to record my thanks to our clerk, Lucy Molloy, who has been a tower of strength. Members of the committee and of the House will probably not be aware that Lucy will be moving on, leaving Parliament and going to pastures new in May. I am sure that she will be sadly missed. Equally, and probably more importantly, Lucy has also recently got engaged. I am sure that I speak for the committee and indeed the whole House when I say that we wish her every happiness in her future career and future life.
What has our committee achieved in these six years? I think that the candid and truthful answer is not a lot, certainly not enough. I fear that we have not been able to convince the Government—we certainly have not been able to convince Ofsted—that citizenship represents a discrete policy area, moreover, a policy area that carries with it significant implications for the future social cohesion of our country. Let me repeat the truism that our world is undergoing an unprecedentedly rapid rate of change from which our society is not immune. In particular, the impact of globalisation has meant that many areas of the UK have lost the economic activities that underpinned our communities, which has led to a degree of disillusionment with our society. At the same time, rapid population growth means that 28%—more than one-quarter—of the children born in this country last year were born to mothers who were not themselves born here.
Against this background, it must be more important than ever that young people learn what it means to be a British citizen, the rights and responsibilities that go with it and, last but not least, the various ways that individuals can make their voices heard. You do not learn this by osmosis; it has to be taught, and taught well, not just theoretically but with practical explanations and examples.
My Lords, as a starting point, and on behalf of all those involved, I thank my noble friend Lord Hodgson for his diligence and determination in making sure that the findings of both the original and follow-up report are not rotting somewhere on a shelf, having died a death all that time ago. This is far too serious a subject to allow that to happen, and here we have a stalwart Member who has made sure that it has not happened in that way.
In a 21st-century country, a successful democratic nation will be one whose citizens feel secure, engaged and fulfilled, where everyone feels that they belong and can make a contribution. Those are not my words but were some of the opening comments in the first committee report from the Committee on Citizenship and Civic Engagement. I am sure that they are words that we all agree with. The report tried to identify barriers that prevent people contributing and feeling part of our society, and we also looked at actions that can be taken to remove those barriers. As my noble friend Lord Hodgson said, it was very disappointing that the Government appeared to take little action from the recommendations, although the pressures of events such as the Covid-19 pandemic have understandably received time-consuming focus.
There were many valuable suggestions in the original report which could have, and still can have, great value for the citizen experience. The follow-up report that we are discussing today focuses on three areas, which my noble friend Lord Hodgson has covered eloquently already. These three strands could be, and should be, supportive strands for the Government’s ambitions for levelling up.
Cross-government co-ordination is critical if policies on citizenship are to be in any way successful. The committee felt strongly that a Minister with responsibility for citizenship and civic engagement should be appointed in the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities or the Cabinet Office. That Minister should have membership of the domestic and economic levelling-up committee. Unfortunately, that committee no longer exists. However, there are two committees entitled “Domestic and Economic Affairs”. One has the remit to consider matters relating to the economy and to Home Office matters. The second committee may consider matters relating to citizenship and civic engagement, and its remit is to consider matters relating to the union of the United Kingdom. The Secretary of State for DLUHC is a member of both.
My Lords, I am pleased to be able to speak at this stage of the consideration of our report. I join the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, for his leadership. I think he said in his opening remarks that this is the bit where we tie the pink ribbon around the report, giving the impression that it is our last go at it, but I give the Minister a friendly warning that I do not think for a minute that the noble Lord will give up, and I am sure he will find another way of getting back—as he should do, because this is an important issue. It is a very good report, and hardly any of the recommendations have been accepted, and that is a problem. That is not Parliament doing well, and it is not the Government taking the right decisions.
I want to spend most of my time of the education part of the recommendations, but I shall briefly talk about the first area of cross-government co-ordination and strategy. This is a debate about whether it is better to have a Minister responsible for citizenship and civic engagement or an interministerial group. We have had these debates about a range of issues. My experience, personally and from observing Governments, is that interministerial groups do not have a record for delivering radical change. They are rarely successful. I am hard put to think of a major initiative that has achieved a great deal that has been brought about by an interministerial group. There are changes in the structure of government, Ministers change, and usually the only Minister thinking about it is the chair, and not the other Ministers who have been told to go along to represent their department. It is better to have a Minister who is charged with and accountable for this area. The Government know that—because, if we look down the list of Ministers in this Government, we find that there are Ministers responsible for net zero, veterans, artificial intelligence, building safety, social mobility and well-being, and we all know the circumstances that have brought those ministerial posts about. Those subjects are important; people worry about them. We want to do them better, and the Government’s response has been to put a Minister in charge. That was the right decision, and they should do that with citizenship, because citizenship is as important as those other areas.
My Lords, following a speech such as we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, is the nightmare slot, so I am just very pleased that we had the Division.
This is the fifth follow-up that has been carried out by the Liaison Committee since the new system was introduced in 2019. As a new member of the Liaison Committee when this follow-up inquiry was agreed and held, I was really pleased to be involved, partly because it is a topic that interests me but also because I was keen to get a sense of how well this process works. It feels to me that, given the resource, in all senses, that goes into producing a committee report, it is absolutely right that we do not just leave behind what we have done. To take an updated look at the committee’s excellent initial report and how the Government have responded, the second would not have taken us very long; it is bitterly disappointing. I absolutely agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Morris: I found the evidence session with Ofsted one of the most unsatisfying witness sessions I have undertaken in more than 20 years in the House.
I was just having a look at the evidence we took in February last year for the follow-up inquiry, and it was striking how many witnesses referred to the levelling-up White Paper—
As I was saying, when we were taking evidence for the follow-up inquiry, the levelling up White Paper had fairly recently been published. It was clear from the evidence that we took that a lot of people saw this policy intent, this drive for levelling up, as a vehicle for citizenship and, the other way around, that citizenship would be driven by notions of levelling up. There was a lot of good will and aspiration for levelling up, and most of us had a lot of sympathy with the policy intentions in the White Paper. It well described social capital as,
“the strength of communities, relationships and trust”.
It described institutional capital as,
“local leadership, capacity and capability”.
I think that we would agree that all these are intrinsically linked with notions of citizenship, as it is set out in the original report of the committee to this House. These themes were picked up by witnesses to the follow-up report.
Yet as the levelling up Bill is grinding through your Lordships’ House, there is no sense of any of these ideas and policy intents in the Bill. Somehow, it has become a morass of technicalities and legal argument, in which the essence of levelling up seems to have disappeared. I understand that between policy intent and legislation there is quite often a gulf, but it ought to be there somewhere. We ought to have in the Bill a sense of what levelling up means to citizens. I think that the revolving door of Ministers last year has something to do with the lack of coherence in the Bill, which points up the recommendation of the original committee report that the Government need to appoint a Minister with responsibility for citizenship and civic engagement. It really feels as though this coherence is missing from the levelling up Bill.
My Lords, I join others in commending my noble friend Lord Hodgson on introducing this important debate. I also commend the Committee on Citizenship and Civic Engagement, which he chaired, for producing the report, and the Liaison Committee for its follow-up report. I agree very much with the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, about the role of the Liaison Committee in producing such reports. They are an invaluable exercise.
Like the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, I will focus on the recommendations of the Committee on Citizenship and Civic Engagement on citizenship education. In chapter 3, it makes a compelling case for citizenship education and for greater resources to be devoted to ensuring its delivery. It produced several valuable recommendations, but nothing has happened. I quote from paragraph 162 of the report:
“The Government has allowed citizenship education in England to degrade to a parlous state. The decline of the subject must be addressed in its totality as a matter of urgency”.
Here we are, almost five years to the day since the report was published, and the situation, if anything, is more parlous. The Liaison Committee pursued recommendations made by the committee, but they have fallen on barren ground. The problem is not just one of government but, as has been reiterated this afternoon, of the inspection regime. As the committee made clear, Ofsted’s approach is inadequate and fails to understand the distinct significance of citizenship education. The committee argued the case for Ofsted to stop assessing citizenship education through personal development and for it instead to form part of the quality of education. This was taken up by the Liaison Committee which, at paragraph 72, addressed
“Ofsted’s disregard for citizenship as a statutory curriculum subject and its insistence on assessing it through personal development”.
My Lords, I begin by paying tribute not only to the Liaison Committee for a very thorough job of work, but to our parliamentary system which provides for such committee. Its very existence and the reports that it produces make it more likely that important recommendations are put into effect, for it can show whether a Government have taken them on board—or not, as the case may be. Sadly, in the case of the recommendations of The Ties that Bind, it is the latter. What our Select Committee originally revealed—a very unsatisfactory situation—is shown by the Liaison Committee still to be highly unsatisfactory and very far indeed from what our committee thought it should be.
I believe that the need for citizenship and civic education highlighted in our 2018 report is even more pressing now than it was then, for we live in a world where there are not only dictatorships but managed democracies, democracies where human rights are not observed, and democracies where the rule of law is made subservient to political expediency. It is more important than ever that pupils coming out of our schools should have some grasp of the political system in which we live, its strengths as well as its weaknesses, and a sense of responsibility to live as an active citizen. That is, for the most part, simply not happening at the moment. Our report showed why, and the Liaison Committee’s report discloses the same fundamental failures.
The first issue, of course, concerns someone to take responsibility for this area. The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, put it so powerfully: there must be a Minister in overall charge. It is only when someone such as that is in place that things happen—when there is someone who is accountable. Our original recommendation was that this person should be located in the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, but it has a very broad remit. Of course, so much of citizenship education is actually academic education, so if the Government continue to be very resistant to the idea of putting somebody in charge in that department, perhaps they would reconsider and see whether the Minister of Education themselves should be responsible for this area, with particular responsibility to relate to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities for that aspect of the work.
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There are two leading actors in this play: the Government and Ofsted. I turn first to the Government. To redress the increasing neglect of this subject, they need to give sustained, consistent support to citizenship education. In particular, that means a stable policy framework. Too often, our committee found evidence of what we called “initiativeitis”—individual, unconnected policy ideas set in train by a particular Minister, many of which were not tracked or followed up to assess relative success or failure. Therefore, a key recommendation of our first report was the need to create this stable framework to give consistent support to this subject. To date, I am afraid, I do not think that our committee is clear that this has been achieved or accepted by the Government.
The Inter-Ministerial Group on Safe and Integrated Communities, which had citizenship as one of its core purposes, met rarely and, after 2019, never met again. By the time of our follow-up report, another set of responsibilities had been established and now, a year later, these have all been swept away as part of the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill. When she comes to reply, can the Minister explain to the committee how this Bill can provide reassurance about the future provision of citizenship education?
In particular, I draw the Minister’s attention to the paragraph on page 6 of the government response to recommendations 1 to 6 of our follow-up report, which states:
“We are reflecting on the best practical ways to deliver citizenship and civic engagement policy across Government. We will share an update on this work with the committee in due course”.
I am not sure that the committee has yet to receive that promised update. Do we have a date by which we can expect its delivery?
The second major cause of concern about the Government’s commitment is the downgrading of the role of specific training of teachers in this subject. It is generally recognised that the number of teachers in this area has halved in the past few years. The Government no longer give the numbers in training, and citizenship education bursaries are no longer available.
The second major player is Ofsted. To cut to the chase, 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. As has been made clear in a very telling way by the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, who I am glad to see is here now, PSHE is about “me” and how I am developing as a person, and a very important issue that is, but citizenship education is about “we”—how our society works, how we all benefit from it and how we must contribute to it—and therefore has a completely different focus. Ofsted’s disregard for citizenship education is further evidenced by the fact that it does not undertake any deep dives in this subject, as it does with other policy areas.
The only other area that I wish to deal with before I finish is the Life in the UK Test, which is a mirage that never gets any closer. Since 2013, we have been promised that it will be updated, and it has not yet happened.
To conclude, of course our committee understands the need for our education system to focus on practical skills. However, unless we all learn about our joint stake in our society and our responsibility for it, we risk the emergence of an increasingly atomised, unconnected and disgruntled population.
Dr Mycock, reader at the Department of Behavioural and Social Sciences at Huddersfield University, told the committee that government departments have sought to better integrate citizenship and civic engagement into policy-making, but the overall picture is one where work across government still lacks coherence, co-ordination and connectivity.
The government White Paper on levelling up refers to civic institutions frequently throughout. Cross-government co-ordination and long-term planning are cited as critical aspects of the levelling-up strategy. I ask my noble friend the Minister what progress has been made in those recommendations and how those objectives have been fulfilled with the Cabinet committees. The Government’s response to the committee stated that they were reflecting on best practice for ways to deliver citizenship and civil engagement across government, and that their thinking would be shared with the committee. Like my noble friend Lord Hodgson, I have not become aware of any update. I ask my noble friend the Minister to tell us how well these reflections are proceeding.
The committee’s 2018 report found that the education system has a pivotal role in developing active citizens. Witnesses to the committee stated that citizenship education could lead to greater social cohesion, greater resilience and aspiration among young people. The committee made nine recommendations regarding the delivery, funding and assessment of citizenship education but, disappointingly, both the Government and Ofsted broadly rejected them.
As a result of the impact of Covid-19, the Government have made a commitment that they would not make any changes to the national curriculum for the remainder of this Parliament. In the education White Paper Opportunity for All, the Government said:
“We will build on our high-quality citizenship education by supporting the National Youth Guarantee, promoting volunteering and expanding access to the Duke of Edinburgh Award and Cadet Schemes”.
Interestingly, that was the only reference to citizenship in the White Paper. The national youth guarantee appears to deal with volunteering aspects of civic engagement, but could my noble friend the Minister give the Committee information to illustrate how well that is working out in practice? Also, could she please inform us how the core knowledge in citizenship education, such as how government works and how laws are made and upheld, is being delivered?
The national youth guarantee is designed so that young people in the most deprived areas have access to many new activities, social action projects and the National Citizen Service. Some £387 million has been allocated for the national youth guarantee. What proportion of funding is going to citizenship-related activities?
As we have heard, of major concern to the committee is the role of Ofsted in the citizenship agenda. It was alarming to find a general lack of knowledge and understanding about citizenship by inspectors, and to note the lack of seriousness that inspectors appeared to give the subject.
The committee came to the conclusion that Ofsted is misinterpreting the Government’s policy and assessment criteria for citizenship. Ofsted does not use quality of education when assessing citizenship education. Citizenship should not be conflated with PSHE. We heard the excellent and simple explanation that “PHSE is about me, and citizenship is about us”. In the Ofsted handbook and framework, it is clear that the framework is to look at the quality of education based on the national curriculum which clearly includes citizenship. This implies that the same rigour is not being applied to citizenship as to other curriculum subjects. The committee heard that, in many schools, citizenship is regarded as a low-status subject and in many cases is not taught at all. The Government should outline what steps they will take to ensure that citizenship education is not sidelined. It would be helpful if the Minister could explain why the Government support Ofsted’s practice of assessing citizenship with the incorrect metric.
Life in the United Kingdom has received much criticism over time. It has been described as inadequate for its intended purpose and simply a tick-box exercise. In reply to a Written Question in December 2022, it was stated that the Government intended to review the handbook in the first half of 2023. I was going to say that, surprisingly, nothing seems to have happened, but I can note that this morning I received an email, as I am sure other noble Lords did, inviting us to a briefing on the update to the Life in the UK policy. I am hoping it will be helpful to all of us. Can the Minister inform us of the progress being made on it?
I want to talk mainly about citizenship education. There is a huge dilemma in the Government having mixed up PSHE and citizenship education. They are not the same, but there is a bit of history to this. I am not critical of this but, when the Minister’s predecessors in the coalition Government came to power, they really pushed resilience, perseverance, personal fulfilment and doing your best. I agree with all that, I think it is great, but it overtook citizenship and pushed it out. No one during that time was advocating for citizenship—but we and the Government should be able to do more than one thing at once. Over that period, the two things got conflated, because no one was flying the banner for citizenship.
I am in favour of teaching pupils about keeping healthy, keeping themselves safe, online safety, good relationships, being resilient, being a volunteer and all of that, but it is not citizenship. That is not what citizenship is in the national curriculum. It says in our national curriculum that citizenship is about acquiring
“a sound knowledge and understanding of how the United Kingdom is governed, its political system and how citizens participate actively in its democratic systems of government”.
It teaches
“skills to think critically and debate political questions”.
It is totally different, and the two have been confused. Of course, one can contribute to the other, but at the moment everything is secondary to a heading of PSHE. No one is flying the flag, and it gets left out. There is a problem to be solved.
James Weinberg—I hope I have pronounced his name correctly—in our report said that
“those in the top quintile for household income are five times more likely to participate in political activities than those in the lowest”.
This is a bigger gap than in any other area of our activities in school. If we had that gap in teaching literacy, numeracy or science, in getting kids to university, in running, skipping, painting, drawing or doing sculpture—in whatever—we would be worried, and we would have a strategy to overcome it. It would be top of our agenda. However, we do not seem to know about it in this case; it is not talked about, and we do not do anything about it.
There is no one in this building who does not believe that democracy is important, has to be preserved, cherished and that we have to work hard to keep it going because there are threats to it. But when we look at what we are doing in schools, we can see that we are not giving our children the best chance of growing up to be fulfilled citizens who can take part in democracy. We cannot expect them to vote and be politically engaged as adults if we do not give them skills, opportunities and experiences when they are children. The school system just does not do that.
Citizenship is optional in primary schools; you do not have to do it. It is taught badly, if it is taught at all, in secondary schools where they are meant to do it. The primary school curriculum has not been reviewed since 2001, when it was introduced. There is no incentive for recruitment of citizenship teachers and no ambition that I know of to build and develop leadership in citizenship education. As far as I can see, there is little engagement with the profession about citizenship. All of that is a problem.
The consequences of this can be seen in what is happening in schools. It is second best and slips by. Schools have not got the message that it is important and that they need to address it, nor have they had help to do that. Both previous speakers have said that Ofsted is a problem here. Whatever noble Lords feel about Ofsted, they should put it to one side for a minute. We all know that its behaviour and words have an impact on schools and, if it does not know the difference between PSHE and citizenship education, we have a problem, and it is a huge blockage.
I was not able to attend the meeting at which Ofsted gave evidence, which I was quite cross about, but I read what was said, and that was not its glory day. As far as I could see, it did not shine on that occasion. The evidence of that is the criteria it uses. Its own report has two sets of criteria: one for national curriculum subjects and the other for personal development. I will not read them out because we all have them in front of us to read if we want to, but it does not assess impact. It says of its personal development criteria, “We know that we can’t assess impact because the impact will be later on in life”. As a teacher, you always hope that the results will be there in later life, but it does not stop you looking at the results—the impact of what has happened.
The fact that Ofsted used the wrong set of criteria to evaluate a national curriculum subject is a problem. Is there any other subject on the national curriculum that is assessed by Ofsted using the personal development criteria, rather than the quality of education criteria? If there is, I do not know about it; I have never heard it mentioned.
That is a problem but, to tell the truth, what is more of a problem—and no one is perfect—is that, having had the time to engage with the Liaison Committee and to read the evidence and what good citizenship teachers said, Ofsted has made no change. It has given not an inch. No wonder people get fed up with Ofsted; not an inch has it given towards that strong bank of evidence. That is the problem: it is not necessarily that we do not always agree on the way forward but that nothing has been done to look at these recommendations. We know that things are not well, and when things are not well and there are some good recommendations, I cannot for the life of me see why you would reject them all.
Lastly, the Government have promised not to review the national curriculum until the next general election. I am really glad that our debate is taking place on the day the Prime Minister announced his review of mathematics. If you want an example of how best to get a subject to the top of the agenda, we have seen it today in the Prime Minister’s words on mathematics.
I also feel that the lack of a Minister with that sort of clout, that sort of responsibility, is also playing a part in the very real problems that are being felt by the charity, volunteering and community sector. Volunteering is something that the NCVO described as a “powerful expression of citizenship”, and I think that we all would agree with that. Here, I declare an interest as a member of the advisory board for the Institute for Volunteering Research and as a trustee of Community Action Suffolk, which supports the charity and voluntary sector in Suffolk.
Charities and volunteering have never in my mind found a natural home in government, and they very rarely have a real champion at the centre of government. This is not a debate about charities, but we all know that this is a sector which is facing some very real challenges at the moment. Most charitable organisations are reporting a significant fall-off in volunteers. Many older volunteers left during the pandemic, and they are not going to come back. Younger retirees are helping adult children with the costs of childcare. Others have gone back to work. People are working longer hours to make ends meet, and others are reporting that they can no longer afford bus fares or petrol to get to their volunteering opportunities. I am sure that there are things which government could do. However, and this is not a party-political point, successive Administrations have not understood the charity and voluntary sector. We have these big national campaigns, which can be effective at generating interest in volunteering, but they consistently fall flat because the skills needed for the next stages—matching volunteers with the right role, managing them when they get there—are often non-existent. Volunteers can be permanently deterred by a bad experience of their first time in volunteering. We saw this a decade ago with the Do IT campaign, and again during the pandemic. I fear that we are making the same mistake with the Big Help Out.
In Suffolk, we have decided that we want to do it better. We know that a lot of good will is being generated by the Coronation and that we have many leaders in communities, and many causes in the county, which collectively come together enthusiastically to pledge something not just for one day but for the longer term, really to promote the concept of volunteering. Therefore, we are running a campaign which will last several weeks. Organisations right across the county, including the county council, the high sheriff, the lord-lieutenant, voluntary organisations and the business sector, are coming together to create something which will add to the civic life of the county.
The key here is the existence of an effective infrastructure body in Community Action Suffolk, which uses its unique position to act as a catalyst, co-ordinator and champion. If aspirations of levelling up are ever to be met, this sort of organisation needs to exist throughout the country. Returning to the theme of the report, if we had a government champion for the sector in the form of a Minister, this sort of thing could perhaps become a reality.
It continued:
“Citizenship is an academic subject and when taught properly should involve the development of knowledge, skills and understanding that pupils need to become active and responsible citizens. Citizenship should not be treated solely as part of pupils’ personal development. To do so is to misunderstand the nature of the subject in its entirety”.
In the next paragraph, the committee goes on to state that, based on the evidence it had received,
“Ofsted is misinterpreting the Government’s policy and assessment criteria for Citizenship”.
Among its other recommendations, it says at paragraph 77 that:
“Ofsted should review the support and training given to their inspectors and should ensure that the inspectors are able to understand and effectively assess citizenship as a curriculum subject”.
Ofsted cannot do that effectively if it fails to understand the nature and significance of citizenship education.
The evidence that Ofsted gave to the Liaison Committee demonstrates the nature of the problem and Ofsted’s inability to grasp what is required. It is clear from Robert Jenrick’s response to the letter from the then chair of the Liaison Committee, the noble Lord, Lord McFall, that this remains the case. I would be grateful if my noble friend Lady Barran can tell us what action is actually being taken to ensure compliance with the recommendations of both committees.
Unless there are incentives for schools to take teaching citizenship seriously, it will be neglected. Until citizenship education feeds into league tables, schools will not take it seriously. Whenever there are budget cuts, the trained citizenship teacher is the first to go. This matters for the health of our political system. Core to a healthy democracy, as the report argues, is active citizenship, but that rests on citizens having an understanding—indeed, an appreciation—of the system of government, how it works, what it can do for them and how they can engage with it. The problem is compounded by a growing lack of trust in government; survey evidence is that this lack of trust in now severe.
Politicians are part of the problem, but they are also part of the solution. Recent surveys have shown a dramatic lack of trust, not so much in our political structures as in the people who occupy them. Remarkably, in an Ipsos survey in February, lack of faith in politics/politicians/government ranked fourth in the list of issues seen as the most important facing Britain today, after the economy, inflation and the NHS. A YouGov poll last year also found that the problem was more with politicians than political structures. As a response to lack of trust in the system of government, some politicians rush to advocate constitutional change. As with the recent report authored by Gordon Brown, the arguments for change are muddled and constitute a form of displacement activity. The problem is with those rushing to advocate change. This is something that I will develop in a debate next week; for the moment, my point is that politicians need to address not only their own behaviour—we need a major strengthening of standards of behaviour—but also the lack of knowledge about our system of government.
Ensuring that citizenship education is embedded in our schools is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for restoring trust. Parliament gets a bad press, one that it does not necessarily deserve. It suffers from what I would term the arrogance of ignorance. People pontificate about Parliament and parliamentarians with a self-assuredness that is not grounded in any serious knowledge of the subject. There is a tendency to generalise from an N of one or two. We need to address the behaviour of politicians to ensure that there is not one or two—or more—from which people can generalise, but there also needs to be wider public awareness of the structures, processes and behaviour and of what Parliament can do for them and how they can have some input into what it is doing. This is becoming more and more of an uphill task because of the unwillingness of politicians to acknowledge and address it. For the past few years, there has been a bunker mentality. Parliamentarians need to come out of the bunker and proactively take steps to address the problem, otherwise it is not going to go away.
The stance taken by the Government is self-defeating. It is in their own interest to take this seriously. I would like to hear from my noble friend not only a recognition of the seriousness of the problem, but a commitment to ensuring that citizenship education is embedded and that schools are incentivised to take it seriously. Some years ago, the House resolved that Select Committee reports should be debated in the House, ideally in prime time. Debating this report in Grand Committee does not do justice to the seriousness of the issue. We are debating a subject that is crucial to the health of our political system. It is a false economy on the part of Government not to recognise that and to act upon it. What the Prime Minister has said today about maths applies also to citizenship education. An anti-maths mindset may be damaging the economy. A failure to educate citizens about our system of government is damaging to the health of the British polity.
Secondly, as so many of your Lordships have emphasised, the situation as far as education itself is concerned is absolutely appalling. In so many schools, citizenship is taught only tangentially and in so many it is simply subsumed into PSHE. I will not repeat what has already been put so powerfully by other noble Lords, but imagine a school giving a wrong answer—as wrong as the answer we have disclosed—to Ofsted. Our recommendation is worth repeating:
“Citizenship should not be treated solely as part of pupils’ personal development. To do so is to misunderstand the nature of the subject in its entirety.”
Suppose a school gave an answer that totally misunderstood what it meant. What would Ofsted do about it? There would be black marks all over from any kind of examination system that gets that kind of report.
One aspect of democracy, and therefore of citizenship education, has to do with values—what has been termed fundamental British values. In its original report, the committee expressed concern about the wording of “fundamental British values” as originally conceived and suggested an alternative. Since then, I have tried to press this issue with a Private Member’s Bill, which sadly was not selected, and with amendments to the Schools Bill, which the Government sadly were unwilling to accept. The purpose of what I proposed was to give a much clearer definition of what should be taught under this subject. I will briefly repeat what I put forward:
“British values
(1) In any statement relating to British values for education purposes in England and Wales, the Secretary of State, OFSTED and any other public authority must include—
(a) democracy,
(b) the rule of law,
(c) freedom,
(d) individual worth, and
(e) respect for the environment.
(2) Any statement in subsection (1) must refer to British values as ‘values of British citizenship’.
(3) In subsection (1 )(c) ‘freedom’ includes—
(a) freedom of thought, conscience and religion,
(b) freedom of expression, and
(c) freedom of assembly and association.
(4) In subsection (1)(d) ‘individual worth’ means respect for the equal worth and dignity of every person.
(5) In subsection (l)(e) ‘respect for the environment’ means taking into account the systemic effect of human actions on the health and sustainability of the environment both within the United Kingdom and the planet as a whole, for present and future generations”.
I will continue to look for a legislative opportunity to bring about this change. If achieved, this will help give a much clearer notion of the nature of the democracy in which we live. The word “democracy” means everything and nothing. The majority of countries claim in some sense to be democratic, so it is necessary to state what we mean by the word; otherwise, pupils will grow up with an extremely vague and sometimes misleading idea of what it means, such as it meaning only elections. It means a great deal more than that.
As noble Lords have pointed out, it is not only important that Ofsted has a clear understanding of this subject and distinguishes it from PHSE; if the subject is going to be taught, it needs enough properly trained teachers. As we pointed out in our original report, and as the Liaison Committee emphasised and we mentioned again today, the Government have been unwilling to collect statistics on the number of trainee teachers in the subject or to put forward bursaries, as they are for other subjects, to attract teachers. That is another essential failure.
The Liaison Committee’s report several times looks forward to the then proposed White Paper on schools, in which it expected these serious concerns to be addressed. But there has been no White Paper, so where do we go from here? Who will address these concerns? Will the present Government do so? I am afraid the situation is lamentable. Major failings were exposed by our committee and the Liaison Committee has forcefully shown that the Government have not faced up to them. They are still glaringly obvious.
The noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, began by saying that he thought we had failed. We may have failed to achieve our immediate objectives but I hope we will not think that we have failed totally. I mean no disrespect to the present Government but, with an election coming up in a limited period of time, there will be a new Government—speaking as a Cross-Bencher, it may be either Conservative or Labour—coming in with fresh ideas. Already, people are beavering away, writing their manifestos and putting into their party documents the kinds of achievements they want in future. I hope those noble Lords with political influence are already working with the people devising manifestos and future programmes for government to ensure that these absolutely valid recommendations are not lost. They must be carried forward and, somehow, within the next one, two or three years, we must bring them into effect.