Education Bill

My Lords, as other noble Lords have said, we have had a very good and wide debate on this issue. I ask noble Lords to read the wording of our amendment because it is not as stark as some people would have us believe and we have tried to craft the wording carefully. It is not saying that only qualified teachers can teach in the classroom. It says that people with all sorts of skills can come into the classroom—they can be inspiring leaders, or as the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, said, they can be specialists in teaching children how to operate lathes. All those people have a role in the classroom, but the wording of our amendment is that they have to be supervised by a qualified teacher. We feel that that is vital because of the arguments that have been made around the Chamber this afternoon. You can be the best specialist in the world at maths, science or whatever, but you need to have some teaching and education in child development, behavioural issues and the different ways that people learn, adapt and interact with each other and a whole range of SEN issues. I do not think that someone who has had a professional job outside teaching would necessarily understand or know about those issues. The issue, which is carefully spelt out in our amendment, is that those people should have a role but that they should be supervised by somebody with qualified teacher status. At the moment the proposals are at the margin; we are talking only about free schools and it may apply to only a handful of teachers. What signal is that sending? As a number of noble Lords have said, if this is so wonderful—as the Minister said, let us access the greatest pool of talent—will the Government say, ““Great, let us extend that beyond free schools””? That is a very dangerous road to go down because, as people have rehearsed round the Chamber this afternoon, the issue of professionalism and driving up standards should be at the heart of what we are doing. We should not be trying to undercut and undermine the profession by deprofessionalising it. The core point that I put to the Minister, which he did not really answer, is: where is the evidence that unqualified teachers provide better education than qualified teachers? The Secretary of State has put great onus on this in a number of his speeches. He likes research and likes everything to be evidence based, but that strikes me as being a stab in the dark. There is no evidence that in the independent sector it is the fact that teachers are unqualified that drives up standards. I am not convinced from what the Minister has said that there will be sufficient monitoring. It is almost as if we are entering a wild experiment with no terms of reference, no end date and no assessment of whether the experiment has been successful. We are doing that at the expense of a generation of young people, whose education could potentially be damaged by this. For all those reasons, the proposals are going in the wrong direction. Our amendment says that there should be a qualified teacher who oversees the work of what happens in the classroom. That is a perfectly reasonable thing to request and it is in all pupils’ interests. I am not convinced by the Minister’s argument this afternoon, and I beg leave to test the opinion of the House. Division on Amendment 84A Contents 174; Not-Contents 234. Amendment 84A disagreed. Clause 55 : Academies: consultation on conversion Amendment 84B Moved by