Baroness Hamwee (LD)

My Lords, I too welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Mackenzie. I am really looking forward to the teach-ins that she can give us on these subjects. My starting point is that education should form the basis for a fulfilled life, not just passing exams. This is not something on which I expect any disagreement from noble Lords. I want to talk about two forms of creativity. Quite a long time ago, I was lucky enough to have the Industry and Parliament Trust arrange a creative industries fellowship for me—rather a grand term for the experience that I got just talking to a range of people and observing things. It included contact with the Royal Shakespeare Company’s education department, and I visited a couple of schools to observe their approach to teaching Shakespeare. At one secondary school, a class of 12 year-olds was studying “King Lear”, which might sound a bit unlikely. It involved a lot of physical interpretation, and noble Lords may imagine how this lent itself to the issue of sibling rivalry, for instance. I was told—and this picks up a comment made by the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty—that, for “the most challenging child in the school”, which was how they described her, this class worked wonders. She threw herself into it. The class was observed by teachers of other subjects who were enthusiastic about using similar ideas and techniques themselves. For many years, I was a trustee of the Rose Theatre in Kingston—for far too long; one should keep moving on for the good of the organisation. I managed to leave the board only by organising the recruitment of new directors. I am sure this is an experience other noble Lords have had. We had a lot of applications, and I had not expected so many from the parents of children who were or had been members of the Rose’s youth theatre. Many of them referred to how much that experience widened the child’s horizons and made working in a team more doable, and, in particular, how their confidence had been boosted—not just in specific activities such as creating sets, making props, speaking in front of other people and even improvisation, but overall and in all situations. To take another activity, art—a lot falls under that heading; my noble friend referred to the “expressive arts”, which I had not heard before, but it is a very useful term—my experience has been that creating something occupies a different part of the brain from academic work. The creativity one can discover within oneself is tremendously rewarding, even if nobody else can identify it when you produce something. Quite apart from making marks on paper, it prompts curiosity and expands your ways of looking at the world and seeing. All this is very self-indulgent, but I am convinced that the impact of creative education can last a lifetime. I am ashamed to say that all that Latin and Greek, for me, did not. In this very narrow speech, I have not attempted to address the range of issues from other noble Lords, but as the years have gone on, the more keenly I have appreciated the creative activities I have been able to experience. I congratulate my noble friend.