Baroness Blackstone (Lab)

My Lords, I welcome this debate but have just one regret: it is half the length needed to allow over 30 speakers properly to address the important and complex questions it raises. I intend to focus on just one issue: the need to avoid reinventing the wheel and instead return to the Tomlinson report of 2004, which provides a brilliant approach for our curriculum and exam reforms to attacking educational disadvantage among pupils aged 14 and over. Alan Milburn reminds us in his interim report on 16 to 24 year-old NEETs that they now constitute one in eight young people. He makes it clear that it is not a new problem but is getting worse, with growing numbers demotivated from learning, absent from school and without a job later. This is a drag on economic growth and a huge loss of individual potential. The Prime Minister recognises the need to address it via vast improvements in technical and vocational education from the age of 14 to encourage those turned off by the current school curriculum and to improve their chances of employment. This is welcome, but there is a danger that his proposals will divide pupils permanently at the early age of 14 without the flexibility to move later from one to the other. We ditched the 11-plus; we must not introduce a 14-plus. Enter the Tomlinson report: it strove to integrate academic and vocational education, recognising that those opting for an academic route need skills too. They also need to acquire an ability to apply their knowledge. All young people need academic and vocational education at school after the age of 14. Those underachieving all need not just vocational study but literacy, functional maths, communication and ICT, as Tomlinson proposed. He recommended the rationalisation of qualifications into a new diploma framework, dropping both GCSEs—which, scandalously, nearly one-third of pupils fail at present—and the narrow and overspecialised A-level system. His report was backed by Education Ministers at the time but rejected by Tony Blair, who feared a fight or row about A-levels. Failing to take it forward was a wasted opportunity and, I believe, led to magnifying the NEET problem we now face. If it had been implemented then, we would have had a totally different and far better system after 10 years. I think it was Blair’s greatest mistake in domestic policy. Will the Minister and her senior colleagues, including the Prime Minister, return to the Tomlinson report and consult its author and Peter Hyman, a former special adviser under Blair, who advocates it and has thought about a few ways that are needed to update it?