Schools Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2022-06-20
Topic: Education
Michael John Storey (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, this group of amendments is extremely important and I just want to raise a number of issues arising from them. Let me remind noble Lords that in the early 1970s the only compulsory subject on the school curriculum was religious education. Anything else was left to the schools themselves to decide what to teach. Then in 1974, the William Tyndale Junior School in London had a parents’ protest outside because of the radical learning going on in that school. That resulted in a huge educational row and the Government wanting to develop a curriculum in schools that flowed down to local authorities. Then, of course, we had the national curriculum of the noble Lord, Lord Baker, which was very inclusive. People had an opportunity to say what they felt should be included in that national curriculum, which we followed, by and large, with great joy Then came the academy movement, and we said, "Do you know what? We need schools to have the freedom to choose what they want to teach". So we now have a system whereby some schools have to follow a national curriculum and some have the freedom to choose what they want to do. I will not comment on the rights and wrongs of that, but it creates real problems in our learning The amendment of the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, is absolutely stunning, but while we talk about British values, we live in a multicultural society. Our curriculum does not reflect that multicultural society, which is why Amendment 158 from the noble Baronesses, Lady Chapman and Lady Wilcox, is so important Over the last few years, in a series of Written Questions I have tried to probe the opportunities for black studies in our curriculum. They are incredibly limited and, by and large, it is left to schools themselves to say, "Do you know what? I would like to do a unit on slavery". If schools in Liverpool and Bristol, which were the centres of slavery, did not have to pull down statues but there were a historical unit on slavery, it might have been a very different situation altogether. Again, it is left to schools to decide. In her written replies, the Minister will come back to me and say, "They can do so and so". They can choose to do that but it is not mandatory, so we have a society in which it is mandatory to study the Egyptians but not other important multicultural and historical issues I turn to the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Morris. I had not thought about this at all, in the sense that when I was a head teacher I always assumed that parents had the right to know what was being taught to their children. We spent a lot of time making sure it was on the school website and, before that, they would come in and find out. This is such an important amendment that we have to get right, because I see issues that can arise. We have to road test it in our minds to make sure that it works. There is another side to it that we have not mentioned. The noble Baroness has perhaps come to it from one direction, but we have unregistered schools, which we will talk about later. They are unregistered for exactly that reason: they want to teach things that are not inspected. The curriculum and the materials they use are not inspected. Also, the only subject that parents can withdraw their children from is relationship and sex education. Maybe, if parents saw the materials used, they would feel comfortable enough to let the children come into school. It is important that it can have a very positive impact on parents and on learning.