House of Commons Hansard Debates for 26 Apr 1996 (pt 21)

Mr. Gyles Brandreth (City of Chester): Not possible.

Mr. Marshall: I have come straight from the school. The answer is 75, of course--I am glad that we have an accountant as a Minister. The fact that 14-year-old children could be asked to multiply 25 by three tells a story about education in this country.

Mr. Christopher Woodhead is chief inspector of schools. If St. Christopher is the patron saint of travellers, Christopher Woodhead is the patron saint of all those who wish to be upwardly mobile in our society. He has shown that pupils achieve less than they should. Half of all primary schools and 40 per cent. of all secondary schools achieve less than they should. More than half of all 11-year-olds are below expected standards in maths and English. At 14, 45 per cent. of pupils fail to meet expected standards in English, maths and science.

On 4 January, Sir Geoffrey Holland, a former permanent secretary at the Department for Education and Employment, said that education in Britain was placed 35th in the world. The Times of that day said that the results in education were

"far lower than its funding deserves."

The figure for 16-year-olds passing GCSE in maths, the national language and one science is 27 per cent. in the United Kingdom, 62 per cent. in Germany and 66 per cent. in France.

Given a simple addition and subtraction, 4 per cent. of the bottom 40 per cent. of 13 year-olds in Britain could answer correctly, but, with a far more complicated sum, 76 per cent. of German children of the same age could do so.

Sir Geoffrey Holland said that 13-year-olds in Britain are two years behind their continental counterparts. We need a change in emphasis on standards of spelling, punctuation and arithmetic. I object most strongly to those patronising people who say that those are middle-class values. A decent education is the birthright of every child. It is especially important for those who live in our inner cities, as education is the escalator of opportunity--it gives children the chance to escape from a life of mediocrity and under-achievement.

Why have we done so badly? It is not that we do not spend enough money. There has been a failure to recognise the wide variety of talent and ability. There are the very academic, the average and the non-academic, who will be blessed with other talents. For too long, we have ignored the very academic child. I remember interviewing some teachers and asking all of them, "How do you deal with the non-average child?" They all concentrated on the below-average child. God must have loved the average child, because he made so many of them. Nevertheless, other countries deal a better hand to all children.

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When I visited Israel, I went first to a very academic school, rather like the traditional British grammar school, where the results were very good. I then went to the technical school at Ramat Gan, which taught children how to cut diamonds because that was the local industry. I then went to a school in Jerusalem that was training children to be motor mechanics and hairdressers. People said to us, "You may wonder why we are training children in these skills." They explained that it was so that all the children would have a job when they left school. Indeed, almost all the small garages in Jerusalem are owned by graduates of that school.

I have visited the curriculum centre in the London borough of Barnet, where people are trained to become bricklayers and motor mechanics. There is an enthusiasm among the teachers and the pupils that we do not always find in other schools. It is wrong to describe such training as education for failures; it is a recognition that it is an appropriate education for people with those particular skills. It is significant that, where people have been given such an education, truancy is low.

I asked the person in charge of the centre how many truants there were. He said that there was none because the pupils loved what the centre was teaching them and knew that they were being given a passport to a job when they left the school.

In our secondary schools, there should be greater selection, more training, more setting and more vocational training. However, the real problem can be found well before children go to secondary schools, because the primary schools have failed to recognise the need to push children as far as possible. I once asked the headmistress of a primary school whether she set homework. She said, "Homework--that is rather unfair to some children because they would not do it." Instead, she is unfair to all the children by giving them no homework. Their love of English was to be gained from "Neighbours" rather than reading a book. Their love of spelling was to come from the spellcheck of a computer. Their mental arithmetic was to come from pressing buttons on a calculator. That is not the way to educate children, but it is the path that we have gone down for too long.