Further Education (Initial Teacher Training) Regulations 2026

Debate between Baroness Garden of Frognal and Lord Addington

Tuesday 17th March 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, as the noble Baroness, Lady Blake, has just said, this statutory instrument is probably well overdue. It is something that we have not looked at, because Governments of whatever colour or combination really just did not get around to it. So, I congratulate the current Government on having taken this first step.

Being as fair as I possibly can be, they are starting on a process that may not get the standards we want consistently for something like a decade. There are existing staff structures going through and there is the institution of training. Every standard will take time to bed in and normalise, and it will take time to find out where it has have worked and where it has not. This is not so much a criticism as an observation of what is obvious. It will take time.

Having said that, I do not have any objection to the SI, but it would be interesting to hear some of the things that will be needed to speed up the process of guaranteeing the quality. One is continuing professional development and how we are going to bring up the standards of those teachers already in place, who may be below the standard of what we would want. What is going to be done to intervene to do that? This will vary across the board.

We are dealing with a huge number of students here, every bit as wide as the school system. Their degree of success or failure has probably meant they have ended up in the further education system. Let us face it: as both the previous and current Government have said, even with improved career information and guidance, people are ending up there because they have not succeeded or have not been perceived to be succeeding to the highest level. How are we getting through to these students who may not have succeeded very well?

This brings me on to the subject—which I am sure the noble Baroness would have been disappointed if I had not raised—of special education needs. The new White Paper talks of early identification. The fact that it is being said that this needs to be improved means that people going through this system stand a very good chance of not having their needs identified or having the support structures there. It is a historical problem, and this Government just happen to have been brave enough to hit the wave and go through with it. So, what will they do to improve that structure to get these students through?

A high percentage of people on level 1 or 2 courses will almost certainly have special educational needs. What are we doing to identify these and make sure their teacher has the access to both the knowledge and in some cases the technology—I remind the Grand Committee of my interest with Microlink—so they use the right stuff and identify the right assistive technology to get their students through? Recognising there is a problem and not giving them more of the same is very important for these groups, because they have failed with more of the same already—so you need to work smarter to deliver.

Making sure that is done will mean we stand a better chance of getting people who are in the training phase of their lives, getting ready to go out and earn a living, to actually benefit from this. It would be normal to expect those providing this training to be able to identify whether people can do this. It also means that other support provided in adult life to enable people to do this can be identified through jobcentres et cetera. Whatever people are doing out there, it has to be identified, and they need to be accessed.

We are dealing with a historical problem here; it has been recognised by the previous Government, and we have started taking steps, but what is going to be done? In other words, we thank the Government for this, but what are we going to do to bring the rest of the staff up to the standard? When it comes to special educational needs provision, what are you going to do to identify those on the margin in particular, who are failing—often just failing—because they are not getting that little bit of help?

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, further to what my noble friend has just said, can I say that there used to be a very highly regarded City & Guilds qualification for teachers in further education, which virtually all of them held? Of course, teachers in FE are nearly always also practitioners, so they spend time actually doing the thing that they are teaching about. It is really important that that is reviewed as well.

I agree with what the Government are doing, but the biggest worry about FE is with the scale of pay. FE teachers are paid considerably below schoolteachers; they often have a bigger burden to bear—they have a very wide variety of students of different ages, and they get landed with things like the resits for GCSE maths and English, which is just iniquitous. What are the Government doing to address the pay of FE teachers, who are fundamental if we want to upgrade the skills of the country?