Education and Society

Lord Bird Excerpts

Friday 8th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to speak about education, which we know is the lodestone of all the prosperity of our society. I will describe a very interesting ecosystem called poverty. What it takes for it to prosper is the failure of education to be written so large that, of the 9 million children in school at the moment, we will write off 3 million. Some 37% of our schoolchildren go through school and come out the other end, and you would never know they had been to school. That is a really interesting thing, because if you then go to the A&E department across the road and talk to the doctors and the patients, you will find many people there—in fact, the vast majority of them—were people who failed at school. Look at the cheap jobs that pay £6, £7, £8 or even £10: they will be done by people who did not do very well at school. If we spend £40 billion a year on our kids, we just throw away about £13 billion every year. This is a recipe for disaster.

We can go into our prisons and find that 80% of prisoners will be people who failed at school. I know this from my own experience. I declare an interest in that I am a failed child. I had an enormous amount of money spent on me when I got nicked and put into boys’ prisons and places such as that. As I said in the House before, they spent twice the amount of money on me that they would spend on sending someone to Eton.

We have this really weird thing. After the Second World War, a kind of inept socialism came in to join the inept capitalism we run. Our capitalism is a poor, underinvesting one and our socialism is equally inept. We have these two functions going on at the same time. We have a society that is an ecosystem for social failure. We do not have a bullish capitalism. We do not invest money in new businesses. Some 87% of all money lent by banks goes into buying and selling property. We have a really perverse world where we do not educate our bosses—our ruling class, if you would like to call them that—and our property classes into taking more risks with their money. They would rather put it into property and getting thousands of people flipping hamburgers. We are in this strange, self-defeating world.

It is interesting that when we joined the European Common Market in 1973, our productivity was about 30% behind Germany’s. It is now 35%. At that time we were ahead of the French in productivity but now we are behind them. We were well behind the Italians and now we are about 10% behind. All these strange things come together to produce this really weird world where we produce underachieving children who fill up our social security halls, prisons and A&E departments. We are sitting on this ecosystem and we are talking about it, but is there a Government brave enough to stand up and say that whatever amount of experiments and projects, however we rearrange the Budget, there needs to be enormous investment in getting us out of this situation? I do not want to be too dramatic, but I am sorry, I cannot help it.

If we look at what happened between 1939 and 1945, we see that we borrowed the future. We stopped paying off for that future only in 2006, when the man signed the last cheque to the American Government over the lend-lease. We borrowed the future to have a future. Unfortunately, we now need to declare war on our lack of education and on the strange way in which we think we can leave things to market forces. The most successful economy in the past 100 years has been the German economy. That was established in the 19th century by mass investment by Governments. If we look at the United States and all the new technology, we see that it has all grown out of stuff developed by government money given to universities. We need to wake up to this bell ringing, this tocsin: if we do not grab the opportunity, we will be having this discussion in 10 or 20 years’ time and saying, “Isn’t it a pity that we have so many poor people, that we have so many people failing at school?”. The one thing that I suggest we do is to have an enormous plan for how we get out of the grief, and to look at where the problems have come up thus far and what we are going to do about them. We need some real, big strategizing, and that is what I am suggesting we do.

Schools

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 16th November 2017 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Lord Bird]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what new resources and strategies they will implement to ensure that every child has the opportunity to attend a good school and that all schools are fairly funded, as announced in the Queen’s Speech.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I have met many noble Lords and noble Baronesses in the Corridor who would love to fill these seats, because they were all very excited about the idea of talking about education. Unfortunately, they are not here because they have other things to do. But it is so interesting that everybody, whoever you talk to, is incredibly occupied with our education system. That is because it does not really do very well. It does not reach the parts we expect it to. With a fourth industrial revolution on the way, are we preparing our children and our young for tomorrow, today?

Unfortunately, we are not. The pedagogy offered in schools does not quite fit with the kind of profound shift in thinking necessary to move into this new age. For instance, when Mr Gove was Secretary of State for Education he took a personal dislike and disdain for anybody who studied media studies. Actually, if you go to the City and talk to Schroders and all that, they want people who have picked up those kinds of analytical skills from analysing films and stuff like that. They want people who can imagine a new world in which entertainment and the digital revolution have arrived. People such as Schroders are looking for the opportunity to make money out of the new industrial revolution.

We have this weird world where we are preparing our children for 1972 when we are not in 1972. That is pretty typical of our education system, because when I was at a secondary modern school down the road in Chelsea in the 1950s, they were preparing us ordinary, working-class people who had failed the cherry-picking opportunities presented by the grammar school system, for 1932. They were preparing us back then for work that was gradually disappearing. Margaret Thatcher came along and swept away all these industries, only one of which was post war, which had existed on subsidies—that was the only way they could live—since 1914. So, you had this weird world where our education system never quite fitted in with the occupational requirements of, largely, the uneducated working class, because it was necessary to educate people only to a certain level. Then, it was necessary to hope that some of them would climb on and become managers through cherry-picking.

When the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond, raises the question of the fourth industrial revolution, as he did in Oral Questions yesterday, I want to know when we are going to get the intellectual pedagogy that will enable us to embrace the new thinking. Unfortunately, whether we like it or not, there does not seem to be much evidence of that now. I would include the universities in this paucity of new thinking. We need an intellectual revolution now, or sometime. That is my first point.

My second point is on the education system. I am sorry; I have not come here to argue over whether this Government or the next Government or the previous Government are spending the right amount of money. We know darn well—sorry, we know well—that the Treasury will deal only with money and not with the effects of not spending that money. If we do not spend the money at the right time, we have to spend it at the wrong time, when it costs too much. I am an example of one of those who was educated through the present system only because a shedload of money had to be spent later, because it was not spent in the earlier stages of my life.

We know that we are controlled by the Treasury. Perhaps somebody should go along to the Treasury and ask, as the noble Lord, Lord Elton, suggested, if it has worked out the cost of not investing in our prisons and people in poverty. If noble Lords look at the education system they will see that we are failing 37% of our children—one in three. That one in three becomes 80% of the prison population; it becomes people who are caught by mental health problems and all those things. In our local hospitals, lots of people who are depressed are using the A&E department as a place to drop in. A lot of those people will have failed at school—they are part of that 37%.

If noble Lords look at the long-term unemployed they will see that this group is riddled with those who have failed at school. Look at the people on social security, who we pay to go to work—we have to top up their wages with tax credits because they earn £6 an hour. What did they do at school? They did not do very well. I have to say that I cannot get very hyperventilated about the failure of this Government to spend the right amount of money on education, because I know that the last Government failed and that the next Government will fail. I also have to ask: is it not time to alert the world that we need to reinvent the way that we govern, particularly the way that we run the education system? The system needs root-and-branch transformation. We need the intellectual tools to engage in the fourth industrial revolution. At the same time, we must find the methodology and means for a much deeper and more profoundly philosophical move toward education—one that fits the new world we live in.

There is only one way to get a person out of poverty and that is to change their relationship to the market. When you are a person who has no education and, through that lack of education, you also have a problem with how you see yourself in the world and are depressed with those feelings, and when the world looks hostile to you because you have no investment in it, there is only one way—and that is to change your relationship to the market and to ask yourself how you can sell yourself and your skills in the marketplace. This is because in the early stages of their lives such people picked up coping skills and—what is that word?—bounce-back-ability. We need to address those issues.

The reason I came into the House of Lords was to dismantle poverty. I cannot do it on my own. I do not want to be part of a system that is more of the same. I want the House of Lords, the Government and the other place to lead a revolution where we step back and ask what is or is not working. I had a brilliant meeting with the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, yesterday in which he told me about his academies in Norfolk. It was brilliant. All the answers are there. We do not have to reinvent anything, we just have to converge the energies created by all the best things. I am now going to sit down. Thank you and God bless you all.

A Manifesto to Strengthen Families

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 2nd November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, for the opportunity to talk about another magic bullet. This time it is the family but the magic bullet could have been education, or what I have been talking about since the moment I stepped into this House, which is prevention. There is a choice of magic bullets.

In 1991, I appointed myself the father of hundreds if not thousands of lost human beings, especially in the United Kingdom but then in Africa, North America and South America, and then into Asia. The most important thing, I had realised, was that the most disfranchised people who I met lacked a mum and dad, or a set of brothers or sisters. It was all the kind of things that we take for family life. So I tried to turn the Big Issue—I have to declare an interest as I am still involved in it—into a kind of loose association where people could lean on and learn from each other, and get that sense of belonging. If you can get that sense of belonging in the very early stages of your life, then in many senses you can overcome the vicissitudes.

I was unfortunately born into a family that did not really know how to act as a family. My father would beat my mother and we would often be without food and all that, largely because 42% or, let us argue, 45% of the wages disappeared into the hands of Mr Arthur Guinness on a Saturday night. When I learned to stand on my own two feet, I learned to become a family man through the prison system. I learned to make up for the things that had gone wrong in those early days because there were people who acted like mum and dad in the Catholic orphanage, the prisons and the reformatories that I was in. Let us not give up on the idea that we can all be pastoral, that we can all look to our churches and our institutions to try to iron out the difficulties that happen. I suggest we broaden the idea of the family so that we are not just talking about mum and dad and the early stages in life.

Let us also not forget that the poor have not got a monopoly on broken families. When I was a boy, if you were a member of a poor class you stuck together. It was the middle and upper classes and the aristocracy who were trading families, moving on and doing all those sorts of things. What has happened to people in poverty is that the whole system of society is breaking up with the growth of consumerism. Let us try to turn the family into a magic bullet, but I would also like the magic bullet to be prevention. If prevention was at the centre of the work we do, we could dismantle poverty and all those pressures that bear upon the lives of the poor.

English Baccalaureate: Creative and Technical Subjects

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 14th September 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I congratulate the noble Baroness on this really interesting discussion. It is one of those discussions that you think will go in one direction, but before you can turn around, it is going in all directions and covering virtually everything that we need to think about that is coming in the world in the next 10 or 20 years. Mark Carney said at the Roscoe lecture a few months ago that over the next 10 or 20 years 50% of all jobs that are now considered white-collar or middle-class jobs will disappear. But what will they be replaced with? That is why this debate is one of the most significant. I was in a debate last week about overcrowded prisons. I know the answer to the problem of overcrowded prisons: it is to do something about the education system. As Justine Greening admitted to me, given that 37% of our children fail at school and then become 80% of our prison population et cetera, we can see the importance of education. We can see that education is important not just because it will give you a good job but because it will give you a good chunk of humanity.

I have to declare that, in spite of appearances, I am a young father. I have a 10 year-old and a 12 year-old. When I realised that my children suffered some of the dyslexia that I suffer from—it was picked up a bit earlier—I took them out of the state system and put them into a Steiner school. Now, Steiner schools are very strange schools, often described as the kind of school you put your children in if you want them to grow up as hippies. I am quite happy that my children will grow up as hippies, as long as they do not harm anybody in the process. In Germany, for instance, a lot of state schools are Steiner schools, and there are many other examples. On their first day of school, my children picked corn—or wheat, or whatever—broke it down and separated it. Then what did they do? They made flour and bread—on their first day at school. On their second day at school, they were in the woods, finding out about the difference between the trees—a bit like in South America where, if you happen to be a young child up the Amazon, you will know, by the age of four, 300 or 400 different trees. We have to find a way. This is where the Government will find it very difficult because Governments are rather cumbersome thinkers and have to go on results and things that add up. But we are moving into an intellectual revolution that has to be reflected in the way we educate our children.

Maybe I should not say this because it is on the record, but my children are two of the most refined creatures I have met. They are 10 and 12 years old, and if you meet them—I hope some of your Lordships will—you will find that they know how to relate to human beings, including adults. People are astonished by this. It is because they are very good at languages, very good at chess and very good at working in teams. When they discuss history, they go to places such as Hadrian’s Wall. They take up theatre: my children are obsessed with theatre, because they use theatre to learn history, to learn medicine and to learn geography. It is absolutely incredible, and I wish we would all dump the present system that we have and adopt another.

Looking at my own education, I went to what is now quite a desirable Catholic school in Chelsea, but then it was a bit rough and I did not learn anything. When I left school, I was largely unable to read and write. I could pretend that I read books, and carried them around, but I was not very good at it. I was rescued by Her Majesty’s prisons department. It was the greatest moment of my life when, after a boy’s prison, I was put into a reformatory and given an education that cost twice the amount of Eton—where I believe my noble friend Lord Aberdare went. It cost twice that amount to educate me for a period of two years, and they had me climbing trees and learning all sorts of things. They mixed it all up—for example, the technical with the creative. We went to the Old Vic and saw Laurence Olivier or somebody—we did not know who it was—and went to see the Guildford orchestra. We read books—Thomas Hardy and all sorts of things. This was a school for naughty boys. It was a wonderful invention, and I learned all sorts of things there. For part of the day I had to go into the glasshouse and learn the difference between the abutilon megapotamicum, the squarrosa “louisae”, the aphelandra squarrosa “louisae” and the zonal pelargonium.

This is what they did to our working-class children who had erred and fallen. Unfortunately I got into a bit more trouble for the next maybe 10 or 15 years, but I got out in the end. The thing was that the redemption rate—whatever the rate is that they judge people on—was enormous: 70% or 80% of people went in bad and came out better. If we can do it for the most disfranchised, why can we not do it for those 37% of children? That is going to take a revolution in thinking from central government, making sure that when we talk about education, we talk about broadening and emphasising all sorts of things.

I am a great believer in systems. The first thing I would teach a child when they go in at the age of four or five is about their body. I am a 71 year-old man and I do not know where my pancreas is—I do not know anything. This beautiful system can be taught as a work of art, a work of technology, as a work of all sorts of things. If we start to teach our children about systems, we can move on to the weather, to the environment and to other things. Why is it that most people who hate capitalism do not know how capitalism works? It is because they do not know how money or art works. They do not know the relationship between theatre or music, and they put them into these silos and do it that way. In my opinion, this is one of the most interesting discussions and I am really glad I participated in it. Thank you very much.

Literacy in the Workforce

Lord Bird Excerpts

Tuesday 25th April 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

The noble Baroness makes a very good point and we are doing this; for instance, the Maynard report was very focused on the issue. There has in fact been a doubling of pupils who did not have their grade C in English at 16 achieving it by 19—the number of pupils who have caught up has doubled since 2010.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords, if the Government are really determined to tackle the question of literacy, can we see a more vigorous defence of our libraries as well as a more vigorous intervention in our prisons where many of our young men and women are left with deep literacy problems?

[Lord Nash]

I agree entirely about the importance of books and libraries. We have seen some library closures but this is a responsibility for local authorities, and there are many good libraries. As far as prisons are concerned, the Prison Safety and Reform White Paper has committed to assessing on entry all prisoners’ education needs, including maths and English, in order to create a personalised learning plan and to focus very much on their literacy skills. I agree it is absolutely essential that we educate prisoners so that they can gain employment after their sentence.

Social Mobility

Lord Bird Excerpts

Monday 20th February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

As my noble friend knows, we are very keen to encourage partnership arrangements between independent schools and the state sector, and we are in active discussions with them about that. We are considering all the proposals we have had—some 7,000—as a result of our consultation document, and we will react to those shortly.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Are the Government aware that not only are the professions out of kilter with regard to the socially immobile but that social immobility was a very large factor in the Brexit referendum last year?

[Lord Nash]

There is no question but that many of the social issues had a big influence on the vote last year.

Social Mobility Committee Report

Lord Bird Excerpts

Tuesday 20th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Corston, and her committee on its report. It is absolutely brilliant. I have read it. It has everything in it, including the kitchen sink. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Fraser of Corriegarth, on joining the House. I hope he has a very pleasant time. I have been in about nine months, and it has been a holiday; it has been great. Everybody has been incredibly nice, which is great.

I do not like the term “social mobility”. The only reason we use it is because we are talking about people who are not mobile. If you are mobile, you do not say so. If you go to Eton or Harrow, or Oxford or Cambridge—if you are Ed Balls, for instance—you would never talk about your social mobility, although he probably came from meaner circumstances. I would rather that we used the term “social opportunity”. Social mobility is a recognition of failure, a recognition of the fact that society is made up of certain tiers and certain people do not move up. Therefore, we have to put a label on it and bless everybody with the hope that we—Governments, social investors, trusts, charities and so on—can move on.

My problem is that we do not recognise several things which are a bit outside the report. One is that what we are trying to give a child who comes to the age of 14, 16 or 19 and moving on in life is social literacy. We want to make them literate, so that they can read and write; we want to make them socially literate so that when they go before someone who asks them, “So what do you think about the war in Syria?”, or “What do you think about the football results?”, they have a loquacity and openness. That is what you get if you go to a public school—I have not been to a public school; I have been to a prison, which is a bit like it in certain ways.

What the middle or upper-class child has been sold, what their parents have been buying for centuries, is social literacy. They go on to university or they do not, but they move on and have an ease and ability to move around society and take on a job. They may not be trained in insurance or banking, but they fit in well and very quickly they rise and assume a position of prominence. That is social literacy—it is the ability to be chummy, to be open, to take on new knowledge and be excited about life. That is what we are trying to give our young people from the age of 14 to 16. Unfortunately, we are not doing very well, which is why there is a need for us to form a committee and call it the Social Mobility Committee.

We do not seem to be dealing with the economic forces behind the fact that we have been happy for decades to produce people who do not have social mobility. When the Beatles came along and made more money than God, we all realised that the world was divided and asked: “Isn’t it strange that some people who come from the back of beyond get out of it, get a shedload of money, move on and buy big houses?”. For many centuries, we were quite happy with the fact that there was no social mobility; it was not really important. I went to a Catholic secondary modern school at the age of 11, having failed my 11-plus. I came out at 15. Nobody was particularly upset that I could not read and write, because you do not need that on a building site. You need a pair of tough hands and to be able to drink, but not at work, and to take the battering that takes place when you are loading concrete into a basement.

All that has disappeared. What is to replace it? The noble Lord, Lord Baker, has been working very hard on colleges, and he asks: why do 70% of German young people have some understanding or work experience of engineering? It is very simple. Our banks lend 87% of their money to the buying and selling of property, and put only 13% into business. In Germany, 20% of the money lent by banks is for the buying and selling of property; 80% is invested in business, new technology, infrastructure, universities and even libraries. We must reject the old system of the lack of social mobility because we know, as Mark Carney was saying the other day at John Moores University, that 15 million skilled people—people from the middle-class—will be lost. We already know that 95% of accountants will disappear in the next five to 10 years, and over the next 10 to 15 years there will be a real shedding of labour.

We are in a precarious situation yet we are, rightly, talking about social mobility. It is an expression of the fact that a child will leave school at the age of 14 and move into some form of training which will lead them to a fulfilled life, a life full of social opportunity. That is exactly what we want, but to achieve that, we will have to break out of the silos that government operates in. Do the Ministers for education, social mobility, this, that and the other ever meet people in the marketplace? We have an enormous investment crisis on our hands, so that we now cannot even afford austerity, but we seem to be going on with it. All these things come together when we are talking about social mobility.

We need to scrap the curriculum and come up with one that reflects the needs of a society which is utterly devoted to making our children, our young people, cognitive democrats. That means that they know the difference between things. What was the Brexit thing? As I said in the Moses Room the other day, all the people I met who wanted to leave did not know what they were talking about, and all the people I met who wanted to stay did not know what they were talking about. We do not live in a cognitive democracy. We are not experts and we do not train our children to be experts. The world will have to be a world of experts in the future. The world will have to be totally and utterly different if we want to make Mark Carney eat his words. That is one of the problems that we have.

I was with a group of teachers the other day. I gave a talk and did all sorts of stuff. I spoke to them afterwards and asked, “What are your biggest problems?”. They are teaching five to 11 year-olds. They said that their biggest problem was that they could not get on with teaching because they are testers. They said, “That is what we do. We keep testing, testing and testing. We want to know where the children are and are never allowed to get on with our pure role of teaching”. They also said, “We have to be policemen because there is breakdown in society. We have to be coppers. We have to be mums and dads. We have to be Big Brother and all that”.

If we are talking about social mobility, the only thing I would add to the report is a couple of hundred pages about the crisis in which we are living, which is about the marketplace. The marketplace has to be reformed. We have to make enormous investments into business so that we can grow the businesses that will need the children, and we will have to spend a shedload of money in education. We spend £19 billion a year directly on education—not all the other stuff that goes with it—but it should be twice that.

Grammar Schools

Lord Bird Excerpts

Wednesday 14th September 2016 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Bird]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to give schools the right to apply to select pupils by ability, and to allow grammar schools to expand.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Lord Nash) (Con)]

My Lords, this Government are dedicated to making Britain a country that works for everyone, not just the privileged few. Every child should have a good school place. On Monday, the Secretary of State for Education launched our consultation on how we bring greater choice and stronger capacity into the education system. Allowing both new selective schools and more expansion of existing selective schools in return for fairer access for low-income families is part of that consultation.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I thank the Minister for his comments and observations. Is the Minister aware that a large part of the business of this House is about the 20% to 30% of children who fail at school and fail their exams? Their concerns are always being kicked around in the House and being decided on—whether it is to do with law and order, prison, homelessness or the crisis of poverty. Is the Minister aware of the need to transfer some of the eggs from the grammar school basket to the children-in-need basket—the children who do not get a proper education and come out of school at the end of their time and you would never know that they have been to school?

[Lord Nash]

First, I pay tribute to the great work that the noble Lord has done over many years with the Big Issue and in helping the homeless and many other people. I am very much aware of the points the noble Lord makes, having taken the Children and Families Bill, the Childcare Bill and now the Children and Social Work Bill through your Lordships’ House. We want our education system to deliver for everyone. We have been very much focused on more disadvantaged pupils, with our pupil premium and our sponsored academies programme. We are now seeing 350,000 more children in sponsored academies that are rated good or outstanding—schools which previously were generally performing very badly. Sponsored academies do particularly well for pupils on free school meals and at narrowing the gap. However, there is more to do, which is why we have launched our consultation.