Education Bill

My Lords, I also support this amendment, on which there is a fair degree of unanimity across the Chamber. My position is approximately the same as that of the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland. We do not want schools where everybody has the same qualification. Over the past 10 to 15 years, we have very much moved to having different qualifications in schools. Clearly, what we want is for someone to be qualified to do the job that we are asking them to do, and for people to know what they are qualified to do and what their training is. We have never had that in the past. We have been a one-qualification profession. We ought to be more like medicine and move away from that, to having a number of different qualifications. We have a record of getting this right. The movement of bursars into the maintained sector has been hugely successful, as have the teaching assistants and higher-level teaching assistants to which the noble Lord, Lord Storey, just referred. Therefore, we are on a journey of trying to get this right. The issue that faces us now is: where do we go next? I should have thought that where we go next is to look at the evidence of what has worked so far, the skills that are needed in the school and what training is needed. I absolutely accept that there will be some individuals who have experiences and a skill set that teachers and head teachers will want to use in schools. Some of them, as the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, said, will be absolutely excellent in their field. They may have a skill set that teaching would go alongside. There is a fair degree of unanimity across the Chamber over our vision of what we want schools to be like. Therefore, the question is whether the legislation that the Government are putting forward will arrive at that end. I do not think that it will. I cannot see why this big debate about how we get a qualified workforce—whatever the qualification may be—is being squashed into free schools. I would have thought the debate was bigger than yet another freedom that we can give to free schools. The debate is about the qualifications we need for all our schools, whether they be maintained schools, community academies or free schools. The Minister must address in his reply what this has to do with free schools. It has to do with all schools. I am not sure why he has cornered and corralled this debate into free schools. It is bigger than that. My second point is that the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, did not go on to answer the really difficult question about her own solution: how do we guarantee that only those people who are expert, brilliant and have the teaching skills as well get into our schools? There is no mechanism in the legislation as it is put forward to guarantee that. Our job as legislators is twofold, as a number of Members have said. It is to allow our children to benefit from people with different qualifications, but it is also to put some safeguards in, so that those who neither have those brilliant qualifications nor have a QTS are kept out of schools. Whereas the Government’s amendment does not do this, the amendment that has been put forward by noble friend begins to do that. It acknowledges in the proposed new subsection (7) in the amendment that there will be people without QTS who can bring something to this business of education, but it offers a safeguard that even those people should be, in some form, under the supervision of somebody with a qualified teacher status. The noble Lord, Lord Storey, said that he managed this in his school last year, but the system and structure need to be managed. My plea to the Minister is to acknowledge the great progress that has been made on teacher workforce reform and to go along that road and not corral it into free schools in the name of extra freedoms for one group in schools. Our children deserve better than that.