Lord Moynihan of Chelsea (Con)

My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Baroness on securing this debate. Although I did not agree with everything she said, I thought she made the most important contribution to this debate when she said that it does not really matter what kind of education you want to go on to or what kind of vocation you have: if you do not have numeracy and literacy, you are done for. Given my meagre three minutes, I will stick with that point—in particular because, apart from the noble Lord, Lord Addington, nobody has referred back to it. In this entire debate, full of good contributions, we are missing that key point. If you grow up innumerate and illiterate, you cannot use a bank account or fill in a form: you are not capable of participating in our society as a fully functioning adult. Yet one in five children in this country leaves school functionally illiterate, innumerate or both. That number is probably increasing at this time, post-Covid, rather than diminishing. Yet we know the solution. We have a real-life scientific test going on with the Gove reforms—in England, but not in Scotland and Wales. We have seen the Scotland and Wales results collapse, and the Gove reforms in England are taking us higher and higher in the PISA tables. That is despite the fact that approximately half the schools in this country have adamantly resisted imposing the Gove reforms, which are very straightforward—the imposition of phonics for literacy and Shanghai maths, or something similar, for numeracy. All over, we get people saying that those reforms have not worked. But when we see them in their perfected way, at a school such as Michaela, where they have discipline, love, high expectations and a knowledge-rich approach, almost no children leave that school innumerate or illiterate. These are not selected children—40% of them come from free school meals backgrounds. It can be done, including at the school my noble friend Lord Young founded. It is done all over this country, but in many schools, these reforms are not adopted. Why is that? Why are we allowing that? It starts here and it goes on to the colleges of education, and we have seen an appalling glimpse of it in the Jason Arday case. They are all keen on teaching about racism, white privilege and colonialism, and they never teach the knowledge-rich approach—Shanghai or phonics. Unless we all get together and face reality, we will have more children leaving school illiterate and innumerate.