Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill

Debate between Baroness Blower and Lord Allan of Hallam

Committee stage
Thursday 9th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blower (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Mann, in many respects. I began teaching in 1973 and I can count on the fingers of both hands—probably not even using them all—the number of times that I have been on strike. One of the reasons why I was not on strike in the early phases of my career was because we had sectoral collective bargaining: we could make an impact on what was happening with our pay and conditions. I very much regret the loss of collective bargaining in education because it has had a material impact on the way in which teachers are able to pursue issues with their own pay and conditions.

However, let us move on to what the Bill would do. The noble Lords, Lord Mann and Lord Fox, are of course right: there is a very serious situation with regard to recruitment and retention of teachers. That is one of the reasons why there is such a high rate of parental and carers’ support for the action that teachers are taking. To take just one example, one in eight maths lessons in schools in England is taught by someone who has no qualification in mathematics. What chance do we have of providing coherent maths teaching to the age of 18 or 19, as the Prime Minister would like, if we cannot provide it for all the children who have it at the moment?

I cannot tell you how many emails, messages and phone calls I had after people read the WhatsApp messages. The notion that a Secretary of State would say that all teachers were work-shy and did not like or want to go to work beggars belief, to be honest. For anyone who has never been a teacher, I can tell you that teaching is not for everybody, and there are people who voluntarily leave teaching because going into a classroom every day and not being successful is devastating. That is why lots of people leave the profession—because they cannot manage the stress of not just the teaching but all the accountability measures. We really need to hang on to the teachers we have, who are still going to school every day and, for the most part, enjoying their jobs, notwithstanding the terrible levels of pressure that they face. We really need to make sure that we have a proper retention system.

It seems to me that threatening those teachers with the possibility that they will be sacked if they have legitimately voted for and taken industrial action, very much as a last resort—as I am sure everybody in this Chamber knows and as has been said by Kevin Courtney and Mary Bousted, the joint general secretaries of the NEU—will not only risk the possibility of more people leaving teaching, but I cannot imagine that anyone is going to want to come into teaching when there are so many difficulties and challenges that we have at the moment.

On the other issue about cogs and wheels, I am not in favour of the fragmentation that we have seen in our education service, but fragmentation we have. The idea that we can have a minimum service level across 26,000 or 28,000 schools, not accounting for alternative provision and so on, simply is not workable. Much more importantly for me, it is not desirable. It conveys exactly the wrong impression to teachers, and we need to be talking up teaching—I am very prepared to do it—because even on a slightly bad day it is a wonderful job when you are actually in there with the children. It is not so great when you are dealing with Ofsted, and when you look at your pay at the end of the month, but it is fantastic when you are actually dealing with children and young people.

This is absolutely the wrong place to be going. I oppose this Bill in its totality, but I certainly oppose what is being said about education in this.

[Lord Allan of Hallam (LD)]

My Lords, I just wanted to rise briefly to follow up on a couple of points we made in the previous group that I think are applicable here. In some ways, we are dealing with apples and pears; the Health Minister talked about the legislation as being essential because of life and death situations, and I do not think that any of us, however much we value education, would argue that we are in the same game here. But on another level it is apples and apples, because the problem with both the framings in the Bill is that they just say “health services” or “education services” in this incredibly vague way. I think that some of the same criticisms about foreseeability and predictability apply here, as they did with the previous group.

Specifically in the context of education, I am keen to hear from the Education Minister a similar assurance to that we were given by the Health Minister that these are permissive powers: that affected entities may give work orders, but that they will never be forced by the Government to do so. Even if a minimum service level is established in education, I hope we are going to hear that no school, college or university would be made to give work orders; they are simply empowered to do so. I hope that will be the Government’s position; that would be consistent with the previous group. Even if they agree that this is the case, I still have concerns about the effect in practice, as I did with the previous group.

I have children who are, at the moment, in a school affected by strikes. The school is managing incredibly well; it is keeping the children in exam years in school and finding ways to safeguard the others. The principal writes to us and explains why he supports his striking staff and why they deserve a better deal. That principal is never going to implement these work orders if the Government put them in place, except in two circumstances. I think we need to explore that in the context of all the powers in this Bill.

The first circumstance is that the Government in some way try to make the principal give work orders that he does not want to give to his staff. They can do that through funding mechanisms—“You don’t have to give the work orders but, if you don’t, we’ll kick your windows in”. That is not really a free choice, yet we have to worry that this is the intention of the Government. Certainly if this Government stay in power, that is the way they would handle future disputes: “Now we’ve done the minimum service levels, there is no excuse for any school not to implement it and issue work orders, whether they like it or not”.

The second mechanism was again raised on the health trust situation, and I think it is also relevant here. It is that an educational institution feels legally vulnerable if it does not implement the minimum service levels. It could be the case for schools, but it is particularly a concern for universities. We already see universities being sued by students for alleged failures to deliver the service that they signed up for. I will not go into the rights and wrongs of those cases, but again you can imagine a situation in which a university says, “Our industrial relations are good. Yes, there is a strike. Yes, we can manage it. Yes, there is a government regulation that talks about minimum service levels, but we don’t want to give work orders to our staff because we think that will worsen the situation, not improve it”, and then find itself subject to legal action. With that threat hanging over them, the leadership of our education institutions ends up doing things it does not want to do and has not chosen to do.

The word “may” sits in the Bill and is at the heart of everything. I think this Minister will say, as the previous Minister said, “This is all optional—a backstop power—and we are not going to force anyone”. That only works if the Government can give us assurances that they are not going to run a protection racket—“Issue the work orders or we kick the window in”, name and shame, or whatever mechanism they want to use—and that they have taken the advice that says that even if they have implemented the regulations, our institutions are not required to implement them and cannot be sued through civil claims simply for failing to implement a minimum service level in a regulation under this legislation.