Baroness Cass (CB)

I will be brief, given the time. I will talk about only two things and try to keep noble Lords awake with them: academic passion and the gut microbiome. That will keep noble Lords on their toes. On academic passion, when I was president of the paediatric college, we thought we did not have enough female professors of paediatrics. I adhered to that view until, one day, two of them were in my office at the same time, tearing strips out of each other so aggressively that I thought: “Yes, we need more of these people, but we should never let two be in one room at the same time”. I saw similar passion at an educational conference; the passion of those educational academics was quite something. There were arguments about whether assessment drives learning, between those who believe in it and those who do not. Similarly, there was an equally colourful argument about teaching children to read with phonics versus other methods. The striking thing about these academics is that, while years have gone into academic research and there are all sorts of controversies, the point is that everyone who is in this field is interested in educational outcomes, not commercial incomes. That is the difference with what we are seeing in the technology we are serving up to our children.