Education Bill

My Lords, I have never been accused of being Maoist and believing in permanent revolution before. In response to the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, I do not come to bury marketing but to praise it. I agree with a lot of his points about marketing and why one needs to have professional marketing. I know how much he did and I know the good job that the TDA has done. That is not in dispute and I completely accept that it has played a valuable part in raising the quality of our workforce, as many noble Lords have said. Given my praise for the work that it has done, the question that may follow is: why are we proposing to bring those functions into the department? In a way, that links to the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland. It is to increase accountability. I accept the noble Lord’s point that one of the consequences of bringing things closer to home is that Ministers will have accountability. If in the new arrangements the success of recruiting teachers is less than it has been before, that will be clear to see and it is clear whose responsibility that is. That is what lies behind the move and across the piece; namely, to deliver services, to increase accountability to Parliament and, by bringing services together, to make savings with back-office functions. We are intending to transfer the key functions of the TDA, including recruitment and the promotion of teaching as a career, to the new executive agency, the Teaching Agency. It will continue to have the lead role in marketing, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, referred, the opportunities and attractions of teaching. We want to retain the expertise that exists to carry out that role. We believe and, in many cases, would want the roles and the people currently performing them to carry on at the agency. One would not want to lose that professionalism, to which the noble Lord, Lord Knight, rightly referred. The noble Lord and the noble Earl asked questions about the marketing freeze across government. As we know, there was a freeze in marketing as we tried to get on top of the huge ballooning of expenditure on marketing in recent years. We have managed to save many hundreds of millions of pounds across government by doing that, which was a necessary step. In response to the noble Earl, I am glad to say that that freeze having happened, things have picked up. We are back to where we would have wanted to be. As regards acceptances, the proportion of places filled is in line with previous years. In fact, I am told that we are doing a little better in physics and maths than we were last year, but we obviously have to keep going. The coalition Government set out in our Programme for Government our commitment to reduce the number and cost of arm’s-length bodies. The Cabinet Office set out the criteria to test when it is right to have an arm’s-length body performing functions and whether a body should continue to exist. When we made that decision, we discussed our intention with a range of interested groups, including teacher and head teacher unions. On the point raised by the noble Earl about the advisory board for the new Teaching Agency, as we said last week when we were discussing another body, we need to have arrangements in place so that the Teaching Agency can benefit from the knowledge and views of a wide range of interested parties. We want to put such arrangements in place. The Teaching Agency will be bringing in functions from four different existing organisations and we want to ensure that we get advice in relation to all the functions of the new agency. Any new group that we set up will have to ensure that it has appropriate representation across all the areas of interest of the new agency. It might be that an advisory board of the sort suggested by the noble Earl will be what we eventually decide to have, but, as regards his amendment, it would be premature to restrict ourselves to a particular mechanism before we have had a chance to develop further the way in which the new Teaching Agency will operate. However, we will look to the boards of the four existing organisations, the GTCE, the CWDC, the QCDA and the TDA, to offer their views on what may provide the best way forward. I accept the force of the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Knight, about the importance of marketing. I have given my background in this funny world. He would not expect me to be a luddite on that issue. I accept the need for the provision to continue and to be delivered professionally. By bringing it in-house, we will have a cost-effective, streamlined and professional organisation. I ask the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.