Education Bill

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lady Jones. This will not be a surprise to the Minister, because when I was in his office it was my job to put together this negotiating body. I take this opportunity to remind your Lordships why we felt that that was important and why we legislated to do so. We were pleased to enjoy the support of all parties at the time, which was just a couple of years ago. First, as we have heard, support staff perform increasingly important roles in our schools. They perform their roles in the school community as caretakers, catering assistants or dinner ladies—whatever one wants to call them—in a variety of roles outside the classroom, and also, increasingly, inside the classroom as teaching assistants and higher-level teaching assistants. That latter group of support staff do some of the hardest work educationally to support those with special educational needs. They free the qualified teachers to focus on the majority. There is a fair argument to say that, at times, the deployment is the wrong way around, and perhaps the professional expertise should be used on the hardest to teach, leaving those less qualified to focus on others. As a demonstration, I will give an example of a member of staff in a school in south Wales. Her name is Bev Evans. I refer noble Lords to my entry in the declaration of interests about my work with TSL Education. Bev was a learning support assistant in a school in Pembrokeshire. As a parent of someone with cystic fibrosis, she was asked to come onto the school support staff as a learning assistant. I can inform Members of your Lordships' House who are not aware of the status of a learning support assistant that they are normally paid around £10,000 to £14,000 per year. These are very low-paid roles in schools. As a former community artist and a parent of someone with this condition, Bev looked after one child in a brilliant way, producing materials on a daily basis so that the child could be educated in a mainstream setting alongside children of her own age who did not have the condition from which she suffered. Bev was asked to publish her materials so that the whole school could use them; then so that other schools in the authority could use them; then so that schools across South Wales could use them. She then started uploading them onto TSL's TES resources site. Now 1.2 million children have benefited from downloading resources from the learning support assistant. It is a demonstration of how much qualified teachers can value individuals doing that sort of work, motivated entirely by wanting to help children. These people deserve better recognition than will be given if this negotiating body is closed down before it has had a chance to get going. The second reason why it was important to set it up was to protect schools and employers from equal pay claims. I am no employment lawyer and I certainly do not want to start getting into the ins and outs of equal pay claims, but schools were vulnerable if they were not acting fairly and using the job profiles that had been developed by the negotiating body. They were avoiding that risk around equal pay claims which was an important part of persuading employers to come to the negotiating body. My final point is that this is a negotiating body between employers and employee representatives from the trade unions. It is nothing that the Government should be scared of, although my guess is that they have an instinctive reaction against negotiating bodies, which is at the root of their proposal to close it down. Things will be agreed on a negotiating body only by employers and employee representatives through the trade unions agreeing them. If they are not in the interests of the schools or of the employers they will not be agreed. I cannot understand why, after the hard work that employer organisations and UNISON, GMB and Unite have done to get this thing up and running, and the time taken in both Houses a couple of years ago to set it up in statute, it is now being allowed to wither and die for very little gain. Instead, we could be helping people like Bev, who is now happily a qualified teacher, and many thousands of people—an extra 120,000 support staff have been working in our schools over the past 10 years. There are hundreds of thousands of people working in a very unregulated way, some of whom are paid very poorly but others who are better rewarded. It is the luck of the draw as to where they live. Many of them get a salary that does not cover them during the summer holidays; they are paid only for term time. They are some of the poorest paid people in our society doing some of the most important work to support our children, and they should be protected. The negotiating body gave that protection to them and the Government should be ashamed of themselves for proposing to withdraw it.