Teachers: Music, Drama, Art and Design, and Dance

Debate between Baroness Bousted and Baroness Smith of Malvern

Monday 17th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I am sure that the noble Lord’s wife is doing an enormously important job in developing an interest in harping in the pupils whom she teaches. We need to ensure that we have qualified teachers with access to the support for their specialisms—which, for example, the Government aim to provide through the new national centre for arts and music education—to ensure that all children, not just fortunate children, have the opportunity to benefit from arts and music. That is what this Government are putting in place.

[Baroness Bousted (Lab)]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that the recruitment of qualified teachers is clearly essential, and that the Government have made great strides in that the picture of recruitment looks much better this year than it has done in the past 10 years? Does she also agree that the retention of mid-career teachers is equally important? The report of the Teaching Commission, which I chair, entitled Shaping the Future of Education, revealed that it now takes 10 newly qualified teachers to replace every seven more experienced teachers who leave teaching before retirement. Does the Minister agree that this trend must be reversed if we are to maintain educational standards and a broad and balanced curriculum, including for the arts?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

My noble friend is absolutely right, and I thank her for the work she has done to support teachers throughout her career and continues to do now with the work to which she alluded. We need not only to get teachers into the classroom but to keep them there. I am pleased that this Government’s investment in teachers, through pay as well as broader support in the classroom, has not only brought new teachers to the profession but reduced the number of them leaving it to one of the lowest ever levels.

Curriculum and Assessment Review

Debate between Baroness Bousted and Baroness Smith of Malvern

Monday 10th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord. I do not think there is very much I need to add to that.

[Baroness Bousted (Lab)]

My Lords, I very much welcome this new curriculum and its emphasis on widening the scope to engage more pupils. Does the Minister agree with me that when the Opposition talk about dumbing down and powerful knowledge, the fact is that the current curriculum fails to engage far too many pupils? There is a 20% persistence absence that rises to 35% for disadvantaged pupils and pupils with SEND. We need a rigorous, knowledge-based curriculum but one that addresses the interests, the aspirations and the subjects of a great variety of our pupils, who can see themselves in the curriculum, see the diversity, learn about the arts, financial education and media literacy, and be provided with the skills they will need in the 21st century.

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

My noble friend is absolutely right; we need students to have the deep knowledge that is necessary to succeed in the world, but we also need them to have the skills that the modern world demands of them. This new curriculum will deliver both and, in doing that, will engage more students, as my noble friend says, to achieve success, both for themselves and for the future of the country.

Youth Unemployment

Debate between Baroness Bousted and Baroness Smith of Malvern

Thursday 16th October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I am always pleased to hear the views of the Daily Telegraph on issues around young people’s employment. I hope that the Telegraph, as well as the noble Lords opposite, will get behind this Government’s efforts on the youth guarantee and on cutting the unacceptably large number of young people who are currently neither earning nor learning. On the Employment Rights Bill, the Government aim to protect employees from arbitrary dismissal, including those early in their careers. A statutory probation period will be introduced with light-touch standards for fair dismissal based on performance and stability, and that approach appropriately balances worker protections with the need for employers to assess new hires confidently.

[Baroness Bousted (Lab)]

Does the Minister agree that a major factor in the persistence of youth unemployment is that 32% of 16 year-olds failed to achieve a grade 4 in English and Maths at GCSE in 2024? Does she also agree that the ongoing curriculum and assessment review, led by Professor Becky Francis, must reunite knowledge and skills in the school curriculum—they are two sides of the same coin—and provide routes for pupils to remain in education or training as a foundation for their future working lives?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

My noble friend is absolutely right that the opportunities that young people have throughout their lives are dependent on the standards, quality and success that they experience in schools. That is why we have already taken action to ensure that new routes are available for young people post-16—for example, through foundation apprenticeships—and why we have increased the support available to young people in colleges to get the qualifications in English and maths that are so important for them later in life. It is also why, through both Becky Francis’s curriculum and assessment review and the Government’s post-16 skills and education White Paper, we will have more to say about how we ensure that there are clear, successful routes for all our young people post-16.

Giving Every Child the Best Start in Life

Debate between Baroness Bousted and Baroness Smith of Malvern

Monday 7th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

We had a lengthy debate about this in Committee on the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. I certainly agree with the noble Lord that supporting parents to read with their children, for example, rather than simply giving them screens to look at—that is part of this initiative—and finding ways to help parents to understand the impacts of screen time, which we talked about in considering those amendments, are important. In that debate, I undertook to ensure that we continued the work we are doing on gathering evidence around the impact of screen time and making sure that we are providing strong and positive alternatives for children and support for parents.

[Baroness Bousted (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for an excellent Statement, which I really welcome. Best start, it seems to me, builds on the legacy of Sure Start. I noticed the telling research from EPI in 2016, which found that 40% of the attainment gap by 16 is created before children start school. I am glad that she did not resile from the words of the Statement: the demise of Sure Start was devastating, particularly for the poorest children. That degree of disadvantage makes it much more difficult for teachers. Sure Start was a universal entitlement. Does the Minister envisage that best start will start with the most disadvantaged but develop into a more universal entitlement for all parents and their children?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

My noble friend makes a very important point. We have seen the evidence from the Institute for Fiscal Studies and others about the long-term impact of Sure Start, which is what makes the gap in the past 14 years so distressing. That is why this Government are committed to building on Sure Start, developing the best start family hubs and providing over the course of this spending review period a trebling of the investment in them, and making sure that every local authority—not just the 88 that currently receive funding—has access to funding to develop that sort of provision.

Pupil Absenteeism

Debate between Baroness Bousted and Baroness Smith of Malvern

Wednesday 7th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bousted (Lab)]

My Lords, the Institute for Government recently published a report, Reducing School Absence, which concludes that under the last Labour Government, absence rates for secondary school pupils fell by 42%. Its key recommendation is that the most effective way to tackle absence is to bring all parties together—adolescent health, special needs, school disengagement and family support. That is what the last Labour Government did under the Every Child Matters agenda. Does my noble friend the Minister agree that this is the best way to reduce absenteeism, which under the previous Government ballooned to 1.5 million pupils being persistently absent in 2023-24?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

My noble friend is absolutely right that we have seen big increases in the number of children who are missing school, both those who are persistently absent and those who are severely absent, as I said in my earlier response. My noble friend is right that, particularly to deal with children who are severely absent, you need to bring together a range of properly resourced agencies to work on the individual plans I talked about in the previous answer. That is one of the reasons why we are investing £500 million in children’s social care and in prevention, so that we can ensure that severely absent children are routinely assessed for family help, bringing together those services in the way she outlined.