Teachers’ Strike

Lord Grocott Excerpts

Tuesday 5th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

I entirely recognise the figure. As I have said, many schools and organisations are facing this kind of increasing on-cost—everybody is. We live in a climate of scarce resources. However, as I have attempted to explain, there are many resources available to schools to improve their budgeting. Schools are facing pressures on their budgets that, for many of them, are far greater than they have ever faced. Most school leaders have been brought up in a climate of ever-increasing income and they have never really had to go back to a bottom-up modelling of their schools. When they do that, they find significant savings and it results in money actually being spent where they want it—rather than what is often happening in a lot of schools where sometimes the budgets have grown like Topsy. We are finding much more effective financial modelling in schools now and this is resulting in a much greater focus of resources into the classroom.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

The Minister was complaining that the teachers had a democratic mandate of just 9.4%. Will he tell the House what his democratic mandate is?

[Lord Nash]

It is a lot higher than that. A turnout of 50%—as required by our new legislation—would be needed before this could be taken seriously.