Educational Opportunities: Working Classes

Lord Lingfield Excerpts

Thursday 5th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lingfield (Con)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, for this important debate, and remind your Lordships of my education interests. She spoke mostly about schools, but there are of course educational opportunities for young people from working-class backgrounds outside of schools, and I want to consider a major one this afternoon.

I am the chairman of a charity called CVQO, the Cadet Vocational Qualifications Organisation. Its whole reason for existence is to provide opportunities for teenagers—who often could be failing at school—to take BTEC levels 1, 2 and 3, in a variety of subjects, in their spare time and with the assistance of volunteer cadet officers and instructors. Most of these qualifications lead to greater employability. Each year there are about 11,000 young people on our books; most qualify for free school meals and many are from areas of multiple deprivation. Each July, I bring to the House of Lords, for lunch in the Cholmondeley Room and a presentation, the dozen most successful of these young people, smartly dressed in their uniforms, with their parents and the commandants of their cadet forces. In the past six years, these have come not just from armed services cadet forces, but from the police and fire service cadets and St John Ambulance Cadets. We arrange for this group to go, a month after coming to Westminster, to Africa to have a wonderful experience there, working together to help in a village school.

It is worth recounting the story of just one of our past winners, who had spent years in care, after his father had been stabbed by his mother. He was encouraged by the police to join the cadets. A misfit at school, he blossomed in the Army Cadet Force and took the qualifications I have described. He was entirely successful, and now proudly holds down a good job in the NHS.

One of our qualifications applies especially to music. Each year, some 500 young people attend cadet music courses, each lasting a week away from home. These are run by the Colonel Cadet Music and enable talented but poor youngsters to learn an instrument in a disciplined but fun environment. The tuition and the loan of the instrument are at no cost to them. Our research shows that only 5% of these children have the opportunity to play an instrument at school. Of course, many schools have to charge for music lessons nowadays, and inevitably a large number of homes simply cannot afford this. Additionally, evidence suggests that the number of school orchestras has fallen dramatically over the past few years. Our courses enable young people to play together in a large number of bands, some of which cater for beginners and others for the most accomplished, who may go on to study at one of the colleges of music.

I am pleased to say that all these activities receive funds from government sources. Close observation during the decade in which I have been involved shows that this money is extremely well spent and goes a long way, because the teachers and instructors we use are volunteers who give up a great deal of time on behalf of the young people we serve.

It is hugely important that the work of these organisations continues to receive support. For many children from backgrounds of the kind that the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, described to us so well, they are a route away from impoverishment and to social mobility. I commend them all to your Lordships.