Education Bill

Baroness Perry of Southwark Excerpts

Tuesday 1st November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Perry of Southwark]

I yield to no one in recognising the importance of the right kind of training for teachers and I have spent a great deal of my life in working on trying to get the training right. It is extremely important for the vast majority of teachers that they have been trained and that they understand the things that the noble Baroness mentioned, such as child development, and have an understanding of how children learn, and so on. But I also think it extremely important that we have some flexibility for the outstanding person who brings a particular gift, talent and knowledge. I remember a case some years ago, I think in the 1990s, of a professor of mathematics, an outstanding mathematician, who had taken fairly early retirement and decided that he would like to teach younger children, in a secondary school, to pass on his passion for mathematics to young people. He discovered that because the regulations said that he had not been trained as a teacher he could not do that. It is a mistake—a mistaken idea of what is needed in a school.

As my noble friend Lady Walmsley has said, I would want the overwhelming majority of teachers to have been trained, but it is important to have flexibility to bring in the right kind of person to fill a niche in a school, someone who can bring perhaps a very special talent and range of experience, which would be exactly what the school needed and would hugely contribute to children as they go through their schooling.