Vocational Education and Training

Lord Kirkham Excerpts

Monday 28th October 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kirkham (Con)]

My Lords, perhaps I may remind the House of my registered interests as chairman of the trustees of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award and deputy patron of the Outward Bound Trust. There can be no dispute about the crying need to strengthen vocational education and training in our secondary schools. In developing our obsession with widening university access, we have overly focused on academic qualifications. As a result, I believe that we have grown to seriously undervalue vocational education and training. But I must go further and point to the desperate need to ensure that our young people—all of our young people—leave school educated and trained in the basic life skills: the essential skills they need to enter the world of work and to develop into responsible citizens; to form successful relationships; to become capable mums and dads who know how to bring up their own children and help to keep our society cohesive.

I am aware that I am going a little off-piste, but this is the area on which I intend to focus. The world of work is experiencing a revolution and in order to keep pace, the way we educate and train our students needs to change too. Our young people need equipping to deal with the new challenges that they will encounter in the workplace, and we all need to recognise that there is so much more to life and to education than formulaic teaching in order to pass exams. Education should be about understanding, not just memory. Growing our wisdom and learning specific skills is clearly important, but of no greater importance than character development. So while we should undoubtedly encourage and support excellence in academia, and expand the opportunities to grow the prestige of vocational education, it is also most important to develop the key qualities and skills—essential skills, not soft skills; I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Young, about that particular term—that help to prepare our young people, whether they have followed an academic or technical route, for success and enrichment in every sense in life and in work. I am talking about the essential qualities that are vital in living a good life, but cannot be measured by academic markers: self-confidence, self-discipline, adaptability and resilience, resourcefulness, emotional intelligence and caring for others. They are all key qualities that ultimately have a much greater bearing on happiness and fulfilment than exam results.

There is little point in preparing a child for the world of work with straight A grades and a fine degree if they have the wrong attitude: no self-belief, minimal communication skills or any real understanding of the work ethic. Many secondary schools and academies strive to provide a balanced, rounded education, but there is undoubtedly a serious and important need to strengthen the focus on robust, enhanced vocational and life skills programmes in secondary schools. In order to achieve that efficiently, effectively and speedily, the future has to involve partnerships in education between businesses, local and national government, our entire educational services and, I contend, external skills providers such as Young Enterprise and the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award—and there are others. Indeed, the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award is already involved in some way with around 75% of secondary schools. These are charities with long track records of proven success and the necessary links and connections with business and industry to provide hands-on, real-life experiences. They are organisations with unparalleled expertise in preparing young people for the world of work and in developing life skills.

Our neglect in providing access to personal development has resulted in many youngsters leaving school or even university with no idea of what employers expect of them and no idea how to speak to a potential employer. They have no idea how to accept a subordinate role as a new starter in an organisation or how to interact with the mix of generations whom they will encounter as their colleagues. They have no financial acumen and little idea of how to manage the money they earn or how best to handle cash, credit cards and loans. In short, for many, the final step off the academic ladder and the transition to actual work come as a very rude shock indeed. Far too many of our young people, who may well have achieved the right exam grades, demonstrate a serious deficiency in these basic life skills.

Thankfully, a no-risk answer is at hand. To inspire, encourage, energise and involve all those necessary in actioning the process simply requires the Government to ease budgetary restraints a little and commit the necessary resources to schools to provide the reliable funding needed to enable them to choose external providers such as the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, Young Enterprise, or any other expert they prefer, to partner with business and work directly with schools to teach the right life skills and promote social competence and well-being.

I am not standing here presenting an advertisement for the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, proud as I am of all its incredible achievements over the past 64 years. Rather, it is to emphasise the skills that it teaches and the positive attitudes it encourages—subjects that should be core and standard in every school curriculum if our goal really is to shape and prepare a more rounded, confident and capable generation with the character and attitude to benefit families, community and the country alike.

Free Schools: Educational Standards

Lord Kirkham Excerpts

Thursday 10th January 2019 Grand Committee

[Lord Kirkham (Con)]

My Lords, I find it so refreshing to hear input from real-life, personal experience rather than simply a Library brief or desktop research. I congratulate my noble friend, who is my good friend.

“Uncertainty” is a word we hear constantly these days, but noble Lords will not hear it from me; I would most certainly never use it in the context of free schools. I could not be more certain and confident of the real need for free schools and their positive impact on our society. However, I recognise that there are understandably some weaknesses, faults and failures in the movement, and the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, passionately told us about them earlier. We can and must learn from them, and we ignore them at our peril.

On the topic of certainty, I am equally certain that I could have derived more benefit from my time at school. In recent years, I have come to know schools and their vital role in society rather well through my work with two charities, the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award and The Outward Bound Trust. I chair one and I am deputy patron of the other. The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, in particular, has had to respond to the squeeze on local authority funding by building direct links with schools. Today, it has more than 3,000 directly licensed organisations providing access to its life-changing awards. Most of these directly licensed organisations are schools, and they cover the full range from local authority controlled schools to free schools, academies and ancient public schools. All of these can be good schools of course—there is no doubt about that—and surely all that should matter to any of us is that as many of our children and grandchildren and the nation’s children as possible are receiving the very best education that we can provide. So on this occasion perhaps we should put ideology to one side and just ask whether free schools are helping to deliver the desired result. I think we can unequivocally say that they are. In fact, in my considered view, free schools are already shining very brightly indeed.

Disruption is critically bad news if you are running Heathrow Airport, Gatwick Airport, a railway or a logistics business, but it is always a massive positive everywhere else. I know from my pretty wide business life that competition is seldom welcomed, rarely embraced and quite often painful in the extreme but, objectively, it is a good thing. It is good news because it motivates and encourages improvements in quality and services and most certainly pushes up standards across the board in schools. That stimulus for all to do better is just one spin-off benefit of a new free school. They undoubtedly shake up and wake up the mediocre in education. They can also satisfy parental demand in areas where existing school provision is poor or standards are persistently low, and they have a proven ability to be nurturing as well as focused on high academic achievement.

A friend of mine drew my attention to an exceptional free school in one of the most deprived areas of Newcastle upon Tyne, West Newcastle Academy. It is doing an amazing job of raising standards and empowering staff, parents and pupils alike in a community where excellence and aspiration has to date been in pretty short supply. That free school is also exceptional in another respect: its geographical location. As we know, the overwhelming majority of free schools that have opened are in London and the south-east. The people of the north—that remote other country where workers make things and also voted leave in large numbers—deserve to have the same chances and opportunity as Londoners to send their children to schools that enable them to maximise their potential and flourish.

Wherever there is pressure on existing schools—and let no one underestimate the stress that oversubscribed schools can create for parents and pupils alike—or where established schools are underperforming, let us please encourage the creation of new free schools to provide choice and opportunity, particularly for those from disadvantaged backgrounds. These new openings should never be considered or seen as a threat to existing schools—any more than a new furniture store on the opposite side of the high street or retail park spelt doom for the businesses I used to own and run—rather, as a spur to work even harder to deliver the best results. By the best results, I do not mean just hearing impressive parental feedback or achieving stellar examination rates, but teaching social skills and giving kids the resilience and self-confidence they need to become employable and to be good parents and responsible citizens. If we are to fulfil the potential of our country, every single child must have the opportunity to go to a great local school. Free schools can help increase the numbers who have that opportunity, regardless of their background, where they live or their parents’ income. We should enthusiastically and unstintingly support their expansion across the country in the interest of all our children.

Education and Society

Lord Kirkham Excerpts

Friday 8th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kirkham (Con)]

My Lords, education is too good to be devoted entirely to the young, and the young are far too important to all our futures for education to be anything less than holistic. By holistic, I mean educating the whole person in every aspect: not just their brain but their heart, their hands and, in a debate initiated by the most reverend Primate, I might risk adding their soul. We should be preparing the young for the society, economy and technology of tomorrow—for tomorrow.

Trying to do that through a narrow focus on testable knowledge to the exclusion of all else is, frankly, plain wrong. The desired outcome of school education should be that children leave the process as young adults, ready and able to make the most of the gifts and talents that they enjoy and to develop them further throughout their lives, so that they can become productive members of society in the workplace and in their families and communities.

Some will become wealth creators and employers; others will join the service and caring professions, including teaching; each will contribute to the success and well-being of others. The single most important thing is that their lives should be fulfilled and happy ones. In a country which was highlighted by UNICEF 10 years ago as having the unhappiest children in the western world, we have a great opportunity. We can maximise that, above all by fostering a sense of duty and altruism, because research suggests that the happiest people are those who give.

How do we foster and develop that ethos of generosity through education? Certainly not through compartmentalised character education or personal, social and health education. The whole of education—all of it—should develop character, and families as well as schools must play their part in developing those qualities that are essential for life but cannot be measured by academic markers: self-confidence, self-discipline, resilience, resourcefulness, emotional intelligence, caring for other people. All those are key among the qualities that ultimately make for happiness.

You cannot teach these in 40-minute slots like French or history or chemistry. There needs to be space in the curriculum for all the other things—sports, drama, debating, music or completing a Duke of Edinburgh’s Award. They are all great experiences that expand minds and build character. Getting a thumping on the rugby pitch, finding yourself lost on the Brecon Beacons on an Outward Bound expedition, or working as a team to put together an amazing dramatic or musical performance will certainly teach youngsters far more about resilience and perseverance than any number of extra lessons on a Friday afternoon. What is more, those experiences will actually help them to cope better with tough maths problems in future.

So this is not an argument for diluting academic rigour; it is far from that—it is about encouraging a wider and more intelligent view of education, which will ultimately help to raise academic standards. This is what I mean by holistic education: education that is broad and all-absorbing, which requires all involved—students, teachers and parents—to understand that everything plays its part in ultimately delivering a happy, rounded individual, equipped to play a useful role in society. That means accepting that not even extra maths or English is intrinsically more important than a drama lesson or sports practice and that we need to make space for all those things.

The most important thing that I have learned as a businessman, traveller and trustee, focusing particularly on disadvantaged young people, is that we have some truly exceptional young talent in this country. Most of those, from the most unpromising of backgrounds, can achieve most remarkable things. I have seen it at first hand many times. So let us help all our young people to make the most of their lives and maximise their personal happiness as members of a flourishing and skilled society, not by setting yet more tests and benchmarks but by liberating schools, students, families and charities to work together in the common purpose of building character and happiness through a truly holistic education.