Education Bill

My Lords, I very much want to speak against Clause 18 stand part, and I will talk to the other amendments in due course. I guess that it is just an occupational hazard of being an ex-Minister that when a new Government take over you hold your head in your hands as you watch some of the things that you slaved over to create for many hours, days, weeks and months being abolished at a stroke. There were quite a few in the first few months of this Government, but this is one that I found really hard when I heard that the School Support Staff Negotiating Body was to be scrapped before it really had had a chance to get going. To some extent, that reflects a view—I am sorry to say a default view in Sanctuary Buildings—that you start thinking about schools in respect of secondary schools and secondary schools in London. You then start thinking about the workforce by thinking simply about teachers. We saw that in earlier clauses, such as Clause 13 which we discussed at some length in Committee, on false allegations being made against teachers not being extended to support staff. That reflects an attitude of mind. We heard in the excellent speech of my noble friend Lady Jones about the importance of support staff. They perform a vital range of functions in schools. An additional 130,000-plus since 1997 are working in schools, performing roles not just in classrooms as high-level teaching assistants. Many of the people in classrooms work one-to-one supporting those with special educational needs. There are also non-classroom roles, from school business managers and those assisting them in the school office, through to caretakers, crossing patrols, dinner ladies—or is it catering assistants? I cannot remember the correct term but dinner ladies will do. A really important range of roles is performed and valued by schools and those in the school community, such as parents, pupils and staff. I have taken quite an interest in reflecting back on how we should improve schools in the future and the underachievement of white working-class boys, in particular. I have visited and talked to those who are running some of the particularly successful academies doing work in that area. The Richard Rose Federation in Carlisle in Cumbria has turned round a very difficult circumstance. The North Liverpool Academy in, as the name suggests, Liverpool, is within sight of both Anfield and Goodison Park football grounds in a very tough environment for schools to succeed. What was interesting was that, in both circumstances, they are now doing really well in narrowing attainment gaps for white working-class boys. When I asked them how they did it, one of the keys was the deployment of support staff and how they were using learning assistants and others to engage the home. As I have said before, the single most important determinant of an individual child’s success in their education is the support that they get at home and the engagement of their parents in their learning. The schools that I have been visiting are finding that where they deploy their support staff to build personal relationships with parents at home—to get them more engaged, involved and interested in what is going on in school, which many of those parents did not have great experiences of in their time—they have been having really good effects. That is just one example of the importance of support staff. The abolition of their new negotiating body is a very negative signal to send them about their worth, alongside the noble Baroness’s point about not even giving them the extra money promised in the Budget. I reinforce what she said about vulnerability to equal pay claims. I had the job of trying to persuade my colleagues in government that we should set up the School Support Staff Negotiating Body, which was not an easy job. There were those—the Committee will be amazed to know that they were in the Treasury—who liked to say no and came up with all sorts of reasons why this was a bad idea. One key way in which I was able to persuade a Chief Secretary who was perhaps somewhat more amenable than her officials was on the vulnerability of equal pay claims, because we in government really did not want to see schools getting bogged down in expensive litigation. In the end, we also wanted to do the right thing on equal pay for school support staff. I laboured long hours internally within government and in meeting with the support staff, the unions—I pay particular tribute to the GMB, UNISON and Unite—and the employers in getting them all to agree that a negotiating body was a good thing. As the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, said, when this found its legislative form in the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009, there was no political opposition to it so I felt that it had a fair wind and that this was a sensible thing to do. In respect of her amendment delaying its abolition—so that it can do some really important initial work that it has been doing on job profiling and so on—I would simply say that it was such a painful process to put it together and to get that agreement. As we develop more of these non-teaching roles within our schools, we will in the end need this body. Just to give in and allow it to be abolished, even if it is being delayed a bit, is the wrong call because we will have to find the legislative route to do it all over again, sooner or later, so why not keep the perfectly fine legislation that we secured in 2009?