Schools Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2022-06-15
Topic: Education
James Philip Knight (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Deben, partly because he may be supportive, given his expertise in climate change, of my amendment, which I will speak to. I agree with the thrust of what he said. I am a former Rural Affairs Minister and a former Schools Minister; one of the very few things I managed to do for school funding, apart from announce a lot of it, was to introduce a small element in the formula on pockets of rural deprivation. I would hate to see that recognition lost in a national funding formula, so I support this I will mostly speak to my Amendment 97ZA, which is about a pupil fund for sustainability. This is probably the first of a whole set of hobby-horse amendments which we will hear more of through the rest of this evening. I will probably duck out at the end of this group and not hear some of it; in particular, I regret that I will not be around for the debate on Amendment 168 from the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, who I am delighted to see in his place. I introduced a Private Member’s Bill in the last Session, the Education (Environment and Sustainable Citizenship) Bill, which very much attempted to do what the noble and right reverend Lord seeks to do with his amendment Instead of using the curriculum to persuade the Government that we need to do more on a more mandated basis on the study of climate change and sustainability in our schools, my amendment uses funding—one of the other great levers Ministers have at their disposal to try to encourage behaviour. In the measures I proposed on curriculum, I was inspired by my friend Lorenzo Fioramonti, the former Education Minister in Italy. Given the Mediterranean climate, I have stayed with the warmer climes for my inspiration on this and gone to Portugal, where Minister Rodrigues introduced a very simple mechanism of pupil empowerment. He agreed that every pupil in Portugal would be entitled to €1 for their school, on condition that the pupils would decide how it would be spent. It was a simple mechanism, initially spent simplistically by pupils, but they have gradually matured as they have got used to this very modest sum of money that, as a pupil body, they have been required to decide how to spend on a school-by-school basis. As a result, they have become much more engaged in the running of the school and the empowerment has worked extremely well in that country My amendment proposes an extremely modest £1 per pupil in the pupil formula for pupils to be able to spend, on the condition that they spend it on sustainability measures in their school and community. It is a start in trying to empower pupils around this issue In thinking about that, I commend to your Lordships the Times Education Commission report which was published today. What I have managed to read so far is an extremely good read. There are some gems in it, such as the commission’s finding that the system is "failing on every measure", or that the schools White Paper is a "tidying up exercise that shows a staggering lack of ambition" But, more pertinent to my amendment, I was interested to read that: "Young people are more socially aware, independent and intellectually engaged than perhaps any previous generation. Yet, pupils who are used to organising climate change campaigns, curating their own Spotify playlists, creating their own eBay businesses and researching their own interests on YouTube are treated in school as passive recipients of knowledge rather than active learners." That goes right to the heart of what I am trying to encourage with this amendment. There were Members of your Lordships’ House on the commission: the noble Lords, Lord Bilimoria, Lord Johnson of Marylebone and Lord Rees, the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, and Robert Halfon, the chair of the Education Select Committee in the other place. It is a commendable piece of work The commission talks also about employability, and that is part of what I am trying to achieve by encouraging young people in schools to work collaboratively to problem solve and to spend this money in projects round and about the school. That in itself is going to contribute to exactly the kind of employability skills that employers are asking for. Sir Charlie Mayfield, the former chairman of John Lewis and the UK Commission for Employment and Skills, who is now the Head of Training and Apprenticeships at QA, is quoted in the Times report. He said: "We’ve ended up in a situation where the world of education and the world of work are almost more separate than they’ve ever been. It’s crazy and very unfortunate for a lot of people." He suggested that "the failure to address the skills gap could cost the UK £140 billion in lost GDP by 2028" He also said: "Standards in education have always been measured by exams, assessment and grades, so it’s not surprising that this has been the focus. However, this is increasingly at the expense of what employers really value: resilience, communication and problem solving." That is what I want to achieve with this fund The other thing I wish to address, apart from the employability of young people, is the levels of anxiety, including climate anxiety, they are suffering, and there are other amendments around mental health that will be discussed today. The evidence is pretty clear that one of the ways you can help any of us deal with some of our anxieties is to empower us and trust us. That is what this fund would seek to do. We also know, categorically—and here it is tempting to say yet again how wonderful my time in Orkney is, to the delight of the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, but I will resist the temptation—that contact with the natural environment and spending time with nature is fantastic for well-being. I confess I measure my blood pressure every day, and my blood pressure certainly goes down when I am in Orkney; I am happy to say it has remained lowered since my last trip there With this amendment, I am not choosing on this occasion to ask the Government to impose this on the curriculum. I am supportive of their sustainability and climate change strategy, in so far as it goes, but I do think there is more to be done to activate our young people and to give them a sense of responsibility and power. If the Treasury is listening, it needs about £9 million—not a lot. If the Government choose to do more, we would be very happy about that. It is flexible, it can work for any and every school, and I hope your Lordships like the sound of it.