Schools: Funding — House of Lords, 2018-11-29
Topic: Education
Genista Mary McIntosh (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in the gap. I thank my noble friend Lady Morris for her powerful introduction to the debate. One can be beguiled by her courteous and fair-minded approach to everything she says into momentarily not noticing how devastating the analysis she put before us was. She said, very fairly, that money is not everything. She also said, very powerfully, that it is certainly something and when there is not enough of it the impacts are obvious I wish to refer to two issues. The first has been mentioned by a number of noble Lords, including the right reverend Prelate, and that is the impact on teachers of the struggles in which they currently have to engage to keep their schools afloat and doing a good job. I am particularly concerned about school leadership because this is where the experience of, in some cases, decades of teaching comes to be used in the service of schools as whole institutions. I see in my own family the day-to-day impact of the pressures on school leaders of these struggles. Does the Minister acknowledge that this not only has an impact on the well-being and mental health of teachers but also on their families, for whom witnessing the kind of stress that many teachers are experiencing at the moment is distressing and sometimes destructive This is causing the wearing thin of the fabric of our education system, at both personal and institutional levels. The repeated denial from the Government, as my noble friend Lady Morris said so powerfully, is disrespectful of the efforts that educationalists—teachers in particular—put in to trying to make sure that our children’s future is safe and productive. Education is, as she said—not in these words—a common enterprise and we should all be concerned about it My second point is about information that has come out of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport in the past 24 hours concerning the current value of the creative industries, which has gone over £100 billion. Those industries are likely to be the source of many jobs and opportunities for the young people currently in our schools. The skills and aptitudes that they need are fed and nurtured by precisely the subjects—I will not enumerate them again because I and other people have done so many times —which are suffering as schools struggle to meet the demands of the EBacc and other curriculum subjects. They have less discretionary funding available to allow pupils to participate both academically and extracurricularly in these creative subjects Schools cannot therefore properly prepare children for the opportunities that are out there and available to them. They will not come out with the range of skills that the creative industries need and those jobs will therefore probably go to such migrants as manage to get through our increasingly difficult immigration system. As I have said many times, this is a shocking wasted opportunity and I hope, once again, that the Government will look with more imagination at the restrictions they are placing on the curriculum. This point was also powerfully made by my noble friend Lord Knight of Weymouth It is the Minister’s job, and I understand this, to defend government policy. Not for the first time I find myself feeling really quite sorry for him because he does not even have support, frankly, on his own Benches. I hope he will find the courage at least to acknowledge the problems that have been put before him in this debate, even if he cannot yet say exactly how they are to be resolved. Further denials from the Government about the crisis that education currently faces will simply lead to deeper despair, and that in turn will lead to incalculable consequences.