My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Luke, for enabling us to debate this important subject. Christianity is often described as an historical religion, but I am prompted to speak more because I owe a great deal to some fine history teachers at my grammar school 40 years ago. The excitement that they conveyed about the significance of the past as a living reality in the present caused me to read history at university. Their teaching gave me a sense of belonging to this country and of valuing the continuities and the discontinuities between the past and the present. It was the experience of living history that helped me to recognise that Christianity could be both historical and contemporary. That commitment gave me an enlarged sense of common humanity.

I take seriously all that the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, said in his speech, and I am very conscious of how a nurse from a Norfolk vicarage, Edith Cavell—who must have been nurtured in a very patriotic way having nursed prisoners of war—when facing the firing squad in 1915, said: "Patriotism is not enough". And of course it is not.

I want to make one modest suggestion, ask a question and make an observation. The Government seem very keen on encouraging or teaching citizenship, but that often sounds a rather woolly concept to me. I cannot but think that a stronger place in the national curriculum and increased resources for the teaching of history in our schools might produce more informed citizens in the next generation without having to invent some strange new discipline cut loose from the historical moorings that it needs. Does the Minister recognise the strong connection between the place of history in the curriculum, taught well and properly, and a lively sense of citizenship? I suggest that, instead of thrashing around to find out what Britishness is all about, often reduced to a vague belief in tolerance and the importance of queuing, we already have in the teaching of history—its darker side as well as its better side—a vehicle for a better informed future electorate, one that might understand that our legal, religious, social and economic life is grounded in historical development; it is not something that stands still at all.

Teaching values without any sense of where they might have come from is often fruitless, so I would love to see us nourishing our collective memory as a means of consolidating a collective identity, which includes every citizen in this country. Like many bishops, I am a frequent visitor to schools and I have also had children at home who, until relatively recently, were studying history for GCSEs and at A-level. I observe that today's school pupils seem to know a great deal about relatively short historical periods. I have lived in a home where there once appeared to be almost continuous study of the Tudors and Hitler and Stalin, but nothing much in between. That makes the learning of history episodic. Perhaps that is because we are liable to concentrate not on grand movements in history but on the great personalities of the past, which is a sort of reflection back of our celebrity culture today. I suspect that that is why we do it.

I know that the answer, "That's not my period", is given by many historians to any question about 10 years outside their specialism, but am I correct in thinking that specialism now starts very early and that the broader sweep of history is suspect? If the broader sweep of history is suspect, where does that leave us? Does it matter? I think that it might, if learning becomes disconnected.

My observation comes from living next door to Norwich Cathedral, which has a fine education department. Some 13,000 school pupils of different ages and backgrounds and from different contexts came to the cathedral last year, many using the cathedral to complete projects not simply in religious education—which is rather a minority subject in this use of the cathedral—but in science, history and other disciplines as part of their studies. Getting to know this historical building, which is such a vibrant living centre of daily life, worship and other activities, proves immensely appealing. Many children and young people come expecting to be bored and find that they are fascinated. That is because of the imagination of our education officers and what they offer.

But I observe that schools now seem to find it much more demanding to bring pupils for this sort of experience. It is the scale of supervision required and the assessment of the risks involved that make them cautious. I sometimes wonder whether the regulatory frameworks that we have created limit imagination and risk in some areas of our learning. I also observe that sources of funding for the development of this work are much less plentiful from statutory sources than one might think given that our cathedrals and parish churches are the great carriers of living history. We see that as part of our mission in our cathedral, but sometimes we still face suspicions that it is some narrowly proselytising endeavour. That is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature and character of Christian faith in the context of the history of this country.

Ours is a society so rich in history and historical artefacts that I suspect that we can take history and its teaching for granted and that many people simply think that we absorb it somehow. Again I thank the noble Lord, Lord Luke, for initiating the debate and for drawing attention to such an important subject for the country's future.