Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts(1 week, 5 days ago)
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Lord Deben (Con)
My Lords, this is a rather crucial amendment. The reason is that we are a nation that is inclined to talk about education as if it is always academic education. If I have criticisms of previous Governments—and I have of those from both sides—they are that we have emphasised education as if it is the only way, rather than part of a grouping of educational opportunities.
We are also rather inclined to not support technical education, and the comparison with our competitors is notable and historically of very long standing. I recently read a report about such education by a committee of the House that remarked that Prussia was much better at it than we were. The Committee will immediately see how long ago that report was produced. Curiously, we have always found this a difficulty in the way that we think about things and in many of the changes that we have made, such as the insistence that polytechnics should become universities, as if that somehow improved the circumstances and that there was something less good about having something that was aimed specifically at talking about the issues that we are discussing. We have to change the atmosphere.
I much approved of the comments just made by the noble Lord, Lord Macpherson, about what the Government could do if they did not have the money. However, there is quite a lot of money in that fund, which seems to have gone back to the Treasury rather than being used in quite the way one would have hoped. However, if they do not have the money, it is very important to make the statement that this is important, and that it is part of the way in which we help those who need it but who, once having had it, will be making a real contribution.
This is why I come back to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Layard, that the Treasury will get the money back. There is a real truth in this. We need it; we have not had it. I am not blaming any particular Government for this, because, after all, this was a pretty late decision of that Labour Government, even though it was changed afterwards by the coalition Government for reasons that I cannot now remember. However, it is important that we recognise that this is an essential part of a modern educational system. We have not got it, we ought to get it, and the Government need to come to terms with a change in the way we think.
Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)
My Lords, I would like to add one very specific but pertinent comment to the debate at this point. Obviously, we are not going redesign the whole of apprenticeships here on the Floor of the House, but I strongly support the emphasis that the noble Lord, Lord Layard, has placed on 16 to 18 year-olds, and bring to your Lordships’ attention a very strange anomaly in the way we approach this.
When a young person fails to get an apprenticeship and remains in full-time education of some sort, this is paid for automatically as part of the open-ended commitment to pay for classroom-based education, even if it is also vocational or technical education, until somebody is 18 or 19. But apprenticeships for 16 to 18 year-olds have to come out of the levy—of which there is going to be very little money left next year, by the way, but that is a whole other discussion.
At the very least, in the short term, the Government could commit to moving the funding for apprenticeships for 16 to 18 year-olds into a different budget, into the perfectly correct national commitment to fund young people’s education and training until the age of 18.
Lord Storey (LD)
Briefly, I want to reinforce what has been said. What is unspent of the apprenticeship levy gets returned to the Treasury, not to be spent on education or apprenticeships, which is bizarre. It is a double whammy, because businesses, seeing that their money has not been spent and is likely to go back to the Treasury, suddenly start putting staff on high-level courses, equivalent—
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts(2 weeks, 6 days ago)
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Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, I will attempt to sum up this very diverse group—
Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)
I apologise, that was my fault. I rise at the end of a very interesting group and look forward to the summing-up. One amendment has rather disappeared in the context of these important issues, but I strongly support it—Amendment 432B, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran. Until she tabled this amendment, I had not looked very carefully at Clause 39.
Clause 39 sets out a whole long list of things which will constitute a material change in the nature of an independent educational institution. I hope that the Minister will pay attention to this amendment because that would generate a lot of pointless work. It is also a classic example of how, in a large Bill, things slip through on the nod, on auto drive, and have certainly slipped past MHCLG. It says that there will be a material change, among other things, if there is a change of the buildings occupied by the institution and made available for student use, which the noble Baroness’s amendment would strike.
Going a little further down the page, you discover that “building” means any
“building … part of a building, or … permanent outdoor structure”,
that the circumstances where a building is “occupied” may be just
“part of a school day”,
and that it is “for student use” if it will be “routinely used by students”. I do not expect the Minister to give me a clear reply on this immediately, but it strikes me that this means that the proverbial bicycle shed, if it was changed into a building in which students kept things in lockers, would constitute a material change for that institution. That is bonkers.
I draw your Lordships’ attention to this, even though it is in a group which is dealing with much more important matters. I would be very grateful for a reply on this from the Minister, because it is easily corrected. A Government who are genuinely committed to reducing regulatory burdens and to making planning processes more easily arrived at has let something slip in a way with which we are all too familiar.
“(1A) In section 133 (requirement to be qualified), in subsection (1), after “work” insert “in relation to National Curriculum subjects only””
Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)
My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 436A. I declare an interest as a governor of King’s College London Mathematics School.
Clause 46 is intended to have important consequences for the staffing of schools. As it stands, it certainly will, but I am not sure that they will be the ones that the Government expected and intended. My concern here is with the likely impact of the Bill on the teaching of vocational and technical subjects in schools and in sixth form colleges that are academies.
I believe the current Government recognise vocational and technical subjects, which of course include computer science and engineering, as central to its skills agenda, and I am absolutely sure that the Minister does. However, this Bill threatens to undermine them, because it will make it far more difficult and far rarer for schools and many sixth form colleges to provide high-quality teaching by subject specialists in these disciplines.
Clause 46 seeks to ensure that teaching in all schools is carried out by qualified staff, meaning staff with a teaching qualification. If you ask the general public whether they think it is a good idea for teachers to be qualified, they will, obviously enough, be inclined to say yes. However, if you ask them whether they would prefer subjects to be taught by subject specialists, they will also say yes. If you tell them that quite often this is not the case, especially in maths and science, they are rightly pretty horrified. In fact, I have yet to meet anyone who thinks that a PGCE is a great substitute for having a trained chef teach catering or an IT expert deliver computer science. In an ideal world this would not be an either/or, but that is not the world we live in.
It is quite often, fortunately, possible to find highly qualified professionals who are willing and interested in part-time teaching and happy to undertake some practical, classroom-related training. But these people are mostly not interested in becoming full-time, school-based teachers, or, therefore, in undertaking an extensive teacher-training programme to gain certification that simply does not make sense for them in terms of time, cost or their future careers. The more in demand their expertise is in the labour market, and therefore the higher its priority in any skills agenda, the more this is the case. For example, finding good people to teach computer science is a nightmare, with huge gaps in availability across the country. Do we really want to make it more so?
Back in 2011, I undertook a review of vocational education for the Government, and at that time, the school system was infested with a large number of low-level supposedly vocational qualifications that were very easy to pass and counted as GCSE equivalents. These have now gone, but the relevant point here is how they were taught. Not only was their content often minimal and bizarrely paper-based, but in schools they were being taught to an overwhelming extent by people with no expertise or experience whatever in the area supposedly covered. Schools just drafted in whichever teacher had some spare time in their timetable or was volunteered for the job by their head of department, so you really might find a games teacher in front of a tourism class or an English teacher delivering health and social care. In fact, you very often did. When I asked why they could not at least bring in a vocational expert, the schools would explain to me that they could not, because there had to be a qualified teacher in the classroom all the time, at double the cost. That was not 100% true even then, but schools were just not going to take the risk.
Many noble Lords have argued strongly in the recent past for the pre-16 school curriculum to become less academically focused, and government policy for 16 to 19 year-olds includes a strong focus on T-levels. I am very aware of the controversy surrounding the delisting of some existing qualifications, including some BTECs, but I do not think I have heard a single person in this House, or indeed anywhere, argue that there should not be any post-16 courses that are technical and vocational in focus. But what is the point in spending huge amounts developing qualifications with employer input and then making it hugely unlikely that, in large numbers of our schools, anyone with direct experience of the occupations involved will be able to teach the students?
FE colleges are, and for the foreseeable future will remain, the most important providers of vocational and technical courses. This clause does not apply to them, but they are not and should not be the only providers in this area, not least because FE colleges have been financially squeezed and penalised compared with schools for many years and are finding it very hard to pay competitive salaries. I am particularly concerned about sixth-form colleges which are also academies. These institutions are often really excellent, the main destination for all 16 to 19 year-olds in their area, and offer a wide range of vocational and technical options.
When this Bill was first published, I tabled a couple of Written Questions trying to clarify the exact position of 16 to 19 academies, including such sixth-form colleges. I cannot say I was terribly reassured by the answers, which seemed to have been drafted in order to avoid giving me any very clear reply. The Minister at the Department for Education informed me that QTS
“has never been a requirement for further education”,
which I already knew and had not actually asked about. She said that Clause 46
“will apply to primary and secondary state funded schools”,
but I am afraid that the explanation of what was a school carefully said that the schools included various types of institutions and did not refer to the 16 to 19 group at all. Critically, she also said that there would be some limited exemptions set out in regulations to provide
“flexibility to employ individuals with the specialist skills and experience to support the needs of their pupils”.
That last bit sounds very encouraging and very nice but, as far as I know, we have not been given any clear indication of what those exemptions are going to be.
My experience—this is why I wanted to give some history from the vocational education review—is that schools, very reasonably and very sensibly, play safe. They are pretty paranoid, they do not have the time and energy to engage with detailed and opaque regulations, and they are really not going to take the risk that their interpretation of regulations is different from the one that DfE civil servants or Ofsted inspectors will adopt.
At Second Reading, there was some indication that university technical colleges and studio schools might be treated differently, recognising their specialist nature, but there is only a limited number of these and they are each, by design, focused and specialised. So I am worried that the current provision in the Bill will drive technical and vocational expertise out of a large section of our education system and I cannot find any evidence to suggest that this price is worth paying for the supposed defect of unqualified teachers in these classrooms.
I fully recognise that the change in QTS requirements is something to which the Government are fully committed and my amendment is therefore a probing amendment. It focuses the new requirements on national curriculum subjects. That includes any national curriculum subject being taught post 16, not just in classrooms pre 16. National curriculum subjects will normally be taught by full-time staff who are making teaching their career. My amendment would free up the vocational and technical curriculum, and also music and sport, in a way that is very simple and easy for institutions to understand and act on.
I am confident that the Government recognise the need for some flexibilities, so that schools can hire individuals with specialist skills, and it must surely be preferable to organise these flexibilities in a way that does not have DfE spending months and months drawing up and tabling complex regulations. I hope that I might be able to discuss with the Minister whether and how such flexibility might be protected. In the meantime, I beg to move.
Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)
My Lords, I was not going to intervene in this debate, because I find it quite difficult. I have some sympathy with the amendment that has just been moved, but my position is that teachers should have qualified teacher status. I have not got involved in the fringes of the debate because I think it is genuinely difficult to draw dividing lines. If I have to come down on one side or the other, I come down on the side of people having qualified teacher status. I strongly disapproved of the actions of the previous Government in taking away that requirement for either teachers in academies or for all teachers, I cannot recall.
I have always had sympathy with that range of subjects where, in my heart, I know that many people without QTS—instructor status or whatever—but with that practical experience could motivate children and deliver the curriculum, possibly to a higher standard and more effectively than other teachers. I know from experience as a teacher that very often what happens is that the teacher who is not a teacher of those subjects but who has qualified teacher status ends up teaching. I have sympathy with that and very much hope that, in the understanding that I think the Government have expressed, and in their promise to bring forward further information, some flexibility can be brought back around this arrangement of subjects. I am not talking about exceptions, because I do not want to go down that route; I am talking about an acknowledgement that we do not want to waste the talents of people who have got something to offer to our children. It would be a move that I would very much welcome.
Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)
I thank the Minister very sincerely for the clarification on 16 to 19 academies, which I had so dismally failed to obtain. It would be extremely helpful if she could write to noble Lords and generally cascade the information about current flexibilities and the position of the Government on their future, because there is a lot of both ignorance and uncertainty on that out there at the moment. Given the huge challenges of recruiting people in these areas—these are people who are not planning to make a career of teaching—that would be very helpful.
I have learned a great deal from this debate, which has been very helpful, especially because there was a great deal I did not know about initial teacher training as it now stands. It has been very helpful and I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.