My Lords, I support what my noble friends Lady Blower and Lord Watson, and the noble Lord, Lord Storey, have said.
Among the great casualties of the pandemic over the last couple of years have been millions of schoolchildren —the consequences for them have been enormous. I know that we all agree with that; we will have seen it in our own families, among our friends and so on. To be fair about it, the resilience of children, often quite young children, in the face of really quite staggering difficulty and challenge has been amazing, and they deserve credit for that, as do their families. Alongside that, when they have returned to school, sometimes intermittently, the work of teachers and schools to support them has been phenomenal. Clearly, over the next year or two and beyond, the work of teachers and teaching staff, those supporting schools in the area of special needs, and educational psychologists and so on will be phenomenal. They are fundamental to the recovery plan of the Government.
All of us want that recovery plan to work, so I do not want to get into whether it should be this billion or that billion. But one thing that will be central to it is the status and morale of teachers, and how they feel their Government are respecting them and dealing with them.
As my noble friend Lady Blower said, we can argue whether it should be 3% or 4%, but I would have thought that a standstill, in real terms, for all teachers, is the
very least that teachers could expect as we, hopefully, come out of the pandemic. As I say, morale is important. It is those indefinable things that make such a difference. What I find incredible is that I think the Minister probably agrees, and the vast majority of the Government probably agree, yet it does not happen. To be fair, when I was a Minister I found a disconnect between the public policy outcome and the desire to deliver certain things. Sometimes it just does not seem to happen.
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The Minister will have to get up and say, “I totally agree with the regret Motion”. The regret Motion in the name of my noble friend Lord Watson is absolutely right, because her own department has written to the delegated committee saying, as my noble friend quoted, that it
“would have been ready and happy to publish much earlier than we did”
but was overruled by the Treasury and No.10. That is ridiculous. The Department for Education is saying that it should have published this earlier and that the Treasury and No. 10—the Prime Minister—turned round and said no. It beggars belief. So my noble friend Lord Watson is absolutely right: the Minister cannot do anything other than get up and say she totally agrees with the regret Motion. Or does she disagree with the evidence given by her own department to that committee? It has to be one or the other. So I say to her, “We totally agree with what the Department for Education wants to do and therefore we look forward to the Government supporting the regret Motion”.
We will join the Department for Education in taking on the Treasury and the Prime Minister and saying, as the department has, “We totally respect our teachers and understand that to have a consultation taking place within their six weeks’ holiday is absolutely ridiculous. Most of the teachers were on holiday. We want them to help us come out of the pandemic; their morale and status needs to be respected. They need a decent pay award and we’re not going to do it at a time when they’re on holiday”. Whatever the outcome, what the vast majority of people want to see is fair play. They want to see people respected and treated properly. That is what the Department for Education wanted and it was overruled.
I was not going to stay and contribute, but when I read the letter I just could not believe that something as stark as that would have been signed off by a Minister. A Minister will have signed that letter off as evidence, or somebody—a senior civil servant—would have signed it off. I have never seen it put as starkly as that. It is not the Department for Education to blame for the teachers’ pay award or the consultation process that we have seen; it is the Prime Minister and the Treasury. Unbelievably, they have overruled their own education department. I am sorry to go on about it, but it is absolutely unbelievable, shocking and disrespectful to the department. The Minister will not be able to do this but, being fair, in all honesty she will agree with the regret Motion—the second part of it, if not the first—and regret that it took place over the holiday because that is what her own department’s evidence said to the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee.