Baroness Gill (Lab)

My Lords, I add my own congratulations to the chorus to the noble Baroness, Lady Featherstone, on securing this debate. We are standing at a dangerous crossroads for our children’s imaginations. As we have heard, art, music, drama and dance have been treated as optional subjects for far too long. The principle behind the Bill challenges this head-on, reminding us that every single child, regardless of their background or where they live, deserves a rich and meaningful creative education. The importance of this principle is not something I need to be persuaded of. I experienced its transformative potential myself as a secondary school pupil. I attended a state school, like many others, in one of the more challenging parts of my neighbourhood. When the school got its first purpose-built music room, announcements were made at an assembly inviting pupils to take up an instrument. For a young girl who otherwise would have been standing around in a cold playground, that offer was too tempting to resist, and I signed up at once to learn the clarinet. It opened up horizons that I could scarcely have imagined. I soon joined the school orchestra and before too long became part of the small group that our music teacher, Mrs Fellows, took to concerts and even to watch operas at the Royal Opera House and Sadler’s Wells. Those experiences introduced me to a world well beyond the immediate environment of my neighbourhood and my school. I am still, to this day, enormously grateful to Mrs Fellows, and to Mr Baldwin, my English teacher, who both played an important part in shaping my education and, ultimately, much of what I have achieved in life. My experience is a powerful reminder that, as many noble Lords have said, creative education is not an optional extra. It can and does expand a child’s horizons, builds confidence, and opens doors, as I said, to possibilities that might otherwise never be encountered. When we look at our peers on the global stage, we see that embedding culture into education is standard practice for high-performing societies. Look at South Korea, which built a modern economic superpower by deliberately dedicating nearly 10% of overall school time to creative projects. Look at our European neighbours. Finland seamlessly integrates arts into everyday learning to cultivate flexible, highly capable minds. In Germany, extensive regional networks link cultural institutions directly into the school week, while Austria focuses deeply on multidisciplinary, imagination-led pedagogy. Yet here in Britain, we are sitting on a goldmine that we are failing to replenish. The noble Baroness, Lady Featherstone, rightly pointed out that our creative industries generate a staggering £125 billion annually for our economy and account for one in every 14 UK jobs. From the sound stages of Pinewood to the West End, British talent is our greatest export, but we cannot expect to remain a global leader if we stop feeding the pipeline. We cannot harvest the crops if we refuse to sow the seeds in our state schools. It is precisely because I believe so strongly in that principle that I have some reservations about the mechanisms proposed in the Bill. I believe that we need to properly consult the teaching profession, and I do not believe in imposing reforms on a sector which could struggle on the ground. It is important that we do not have top-down statutory mandates without, as we have heard already, consulting on the supply of specialist teachers, the ability to timetable and the resources that are available. I welcome that this Government have already made a clear commitment to improving access to creative education and are actively pursuing wider systemic reforms to the curriculum. Finally, I too welcome my noble friend Lady Mackenzie to her place and look forward to her maiden speech.