Education: Contribution to Economic Growth

Lord Mawson Excerpts

Thursday 5th December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, for introducing this important debate. It has particular relevance for me at the moment, given the practical projects that I am working on in east London that are focused on education, enterprise and economic growth. One of the great strengths of this House is that it allows those of us who have a life outside the corridors of Westminster to make a contribution from what some would call the real world.

With that thought in mind, I thought it helpful to share with noble Lords two practical projects that I am working on in east London that are seeking to make the link between high quality education and economic growth. The first is the St Paul’s Way Transformation Project. Here, I must declare an interest as director. Seven years ago the CEO of Tower Hamlets Council, the health service and the social housing company asked me to intervene in St Paul’s Way. There had been a murder and considerable violence in a housing estate 800 yards to the north of Canary Wharf.

Arriving at St Paul’s Way for the first time, I was not surprised to find that the school was failing and in special measures, with only 35 families applying per year. Police cars, angry black youths with dogs and a frightened head teacher hiding behind a large fence greeted me. The school was defined by a silo culture. It had no relationship with the two warring housing estates around its perimeter, nor with the health centre next door and its 11,000 patients. Some school staff, among them Oxbridge graduates, actively fostered an agenda of isolationism, convinced that the school stood separate from the world of business. Few pupils had walked 800 yards down the road to visit Canary Wharf.

Over the past six years I have worked with partners to create an entrepreneurial narrative for this street. The lead directors in each key public body, their middle managers and the leaders on the street have all embraced it. The results speak for themselves. A new £40 million school now sits on the demolished 1960s school site, complete with the first Faraday science centre in the country. This year, over 1,000 families applied for a place at the school. Exam results continue to rise year on year; the 2013 Ofsted inspection rated the school outstanding in every category; 60% of the sixth form this year gained a place at a Russell Group university; and a bridge programme provides pathways for the most talented students into Oxford.

However, rising exam results are not enough to secure a future for these students. Reading Latin at an Oxbridge college will not guarantee these students a job at the end of an expensive degree; reading engineering will. Professor Brian Cox, a patron at the school, reminds us that we are short of 1 million engineers in the United Kingdom. With that in mind, I have worked over the past two years with Brian to run an annual science summer school at St Paul’s Way. This year, 250 students attended the school for two days in their summer holidays to listen to presentations by leading scientists, engineers and medics from across the world. Speakers included those working on the Higgs boson at CERN, the commercial director from Virgin Galactic, the engineer designing the next Mars Rover and the vice president of the Royal College of Physicians, Professor John Wass, who is also a patron of the school. The event was sponsored and part-hosted by Siemens, which opened its Crystal building in the Royal Docks to participating students and staff.

The theme of the science summer school was how to ensure that Britain becomes the best place to do science and engineering in the world. The answer lies in St Paul’s Way and places like it. A new campus is growing there that connects education, science, enterprise, business and research through practical activity. An example of this is the Wellcome Trust sponsored licence, recently won by the school, which will engage its science students in undertaking real DNA research into diabetes, focused on the 11,000 local patients. The only fly in the ointment is that those same patients are currently being prevented from moving into a new £16 million health centre that currently stands empty across the road from the school because of an NHS bureaucratic impasse.

Without doubt, high quality education has changed the lives of the students of St Paul’s Way Trust School and it is essential for our economic growth to further this country’s reputation for academic excellence. Education, however, must not stand alone from business and enterprise. Education is not just about reading books; it is about translating theory into practical activity.

Following my experience of working with the education sector for the past 30 years, I have a few observations. First, education must step outside text books and the classroom into the street and engage with the real world. Secondly, high exam results do not automatically equip students with relevant life skills. Like the noble Lord, Lord Sugar, and many other members of this House, I left school at 16 and developed successful businesses and organisations. School children desperately need to learn life skills, and often these cannot be taught in a classroom.

Thirdly, the often unconscious bias against business in the classroom needs to be addressed. Teachers are uncomfortable with their students trading and earning money in school. They are uneasy when you speak to them about profit margins and exploiting market opportunities. Unless this is addressed, the contribution of education to economic growth will be muted. Fourthly, an over-academic approach can be antithetical to the risk-taking involved in business and entrepreneurship. Too often, especially in government, we risk paralysis by analysis. Fifthly, practical experience and a track record of achievement should complement academic qualifications both in school and in the workplace.

As new science and technology businesses follow Tech City, BT, iCITY and Siemens on to the Olympic Park and across the Lower Lea Valley after the Olympics, there is a real opportunity to link high quality educational achievement with the development of practical skills that are needed there. The announcement yesterday that UCL and the V&A are moving into the park is a major piece of this jigsaw, and we thank the Government for supporting it. In the Royal Docks I am, with partners, starting to build a new secondary free school. This school, through a massive regeneration project, will explicitly link an isolated local community with the employment and enterprise opportunities present in ExCeL, the forthcoming Chinese ABP development, the new India Centre, City Airport and the Silvertown partnership, and here I must declare an interest. However, this will be successful only if the young people involved see that education is about innovation, enterprise and business as well as about reading, writing, and arithmetic.

I ask the Minister: what practical steps should be taken to navigate the blockages at the new health centre across the road from the school in St Paul’s Way? An educational opportunity, with significant economic implications, is being lost because of a bureaucratic impasse. I would be happy to meet the Minister to explain both the opportunity and the difficulties. In my experience, innovation needs both engagement and leadership, not bureaucracy.