Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

2nd reading & Lords Hansard - Part one
Monday 23rd May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Baker. I listened to what my noble friend Lady Morris said about following our noble friend Lord Blunkett and, very strangely, I find myself in exactly the same position with the noble Lord, Lord Baker. It is quite odd.

I should remind the House of my interests in the register as an owner of Suklaa, which is an education consultancy, and in particular as chair of the trust board for E-ACT, a multi-academy trust of 28 schools around the country.

I say at the outset that I am happy with the measures in the Bill around attendance, the regulation of independent educational institutions, teacher misconduct and the home-school register. I join noble Lords who paid tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Soley, who unfortunately could not be with us today. I may be persuaded on the national funding formula as well. I remember, as a Dorset MP, consistent concern about how my political opponents in county hall were not passing on through the schools forum the amount of money that the more deprived schools in my consistency needed because they were spreading it evenly across the shire county.

However, like other noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Baker, I have real concerns about Part 1 in respect of academy standards and regulation. The Government are trying to solve the right problem: the problem around academy agreements and the multitude of contracts between the Secretary of State and the academies and how confusing that is, the inability of Parliament to be able to easily legislate around what happens in academies, and the use of the academy handbook. For that to be regularised is the right problem for us to solve. However, the solution is jaw-dropping: making the Secretary of State effectively the chief education officer for 25,000 schools, and what is being proposed around standards, intervention and termination.

I understand that, if you are in the centre, you see when there are failures and you want to be able to use all those powers, but the problem—I say this quietly as far as my Front Bench is concerned but ask government Ministers to listen—is that, even if they think they will use these powers only when they need to and in the best possible taste, what about future Secretaries of State? They will not be in office for ever. Do they really want to give future Secretaries of State the power to do what on earth they like to schools in this country? That is what this Bill allows them to do. I do not think they really want that, or that the system that will implement this has the capacity to do so well.

The reality is that regional schools commissioners will have teams of officials who in the end will be going out to multi-academy trusts and telling them what to do. I like to think that they will all be of the calibre needed to be able to do that but, in the end, I am afraid that I do not believe it. Unfortunately, when the Bill talks about academy proprietors, it is silent on the difference between members and trustees. I want to be able to explore that in Committee because there are some real differences, for example around termination.

I did a bit of rough maths. If every school were to become part of a MAT, with 10 schools in a MAT and 10 trustees in each MAT, that would mean 25,000 trustees you have to be able to recruit. We have to work out whether a system in which you are dictated to on everything you have to do is the right environment for people to want to be trustees; I would question that. I see this as potentially the end of innovation in schools and the end of academy freedom. In particular, I ask the Minister whether this is the end of the curriculum freedoms that academies want to be able to enjoy.

This Bill doubles down on the direction of travel of the last 12 years, as my noble friend Lady Morris said. It is not empathetic. Will it help to recruit more and better MAT trustees? Will it help to get us more and better school leaders and teachers? It is understandable from the centre, but not in terms of incentivising us to be involved in the system. As others have said, we need a Bill that sets out a different vision for schools. There is a growing consensus for change in this country. The Government’s targets for education by 2030 will not be met unless we do things differently.

The noble Lord, Lord Altrincham, talked about mental health and well-being, as others have done. I read this weekend that 420,000 children are being treated every month in this country for mental health issues. That is a crisis. Josh MacAlister’s report on children’s social care and the need for a family health service in schools is out today. We need to be putting children first and designing a school system. It is a universal service for children that should think properly about how we help children, especially the most vulnerable, to have the breadth of knowledge, of skills and of behaviours that they need to thrive, emotionally, socially, environmentally and economically. Then, with that vision, I think we can all go forward together in this House.

Education (Environment and Sustainable Citizenship) Bill [HL]

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

3rd reading
Friday 4th March 2022 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

That the Bill do now pass.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill do now pass, and in doing so I thank noble Lords on all sides, Jamie Agombar from Teach the Future, Ann Finlayson from SEEd and members of Peers for the Planet for their support. There are many outside organisations, both environmental and educational, which have met with me, discussed this and given great encouragement. Finally, I thank Darren Jones MP, who has agreed to take this forward in the other place.

I hope that the Bill encourages the Government to build on the consultation the Secretary of State launched at COP 26 on 5 November, and to firm up on the direction of travel set out in that strategy by moving from a voluntarist approach to something that has rather more teeth. I hope they can embrace that as this is debated in the other place.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, can I just say a word before my own Front Bench responds? I congratulate my noble friend on this legislative endeavour and, crucially, the debate it has initiated both in this House and across the education sector. Citizenship education would be enhanced if we were able to add to the existing curriculum, as my noble friend Lord Knight indicated, this critical issue for the future.

Given the geopolitics of the moment—the crisis facing Ukraine, the energy issues that reverberate from that conflict and the Russian action against a sovereign country—it is absolutely crucial that we have in our schools and colleges the necessary education, enthusiasm and commitment to ensure that we get this right for the future.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Baroness Barran) (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, for highlighting this very important issue. While the Government agree with the sentiment of the Bill, as the noble Lord, Lord Watson, just suggested, they do not believe that amending the curriculum is the right way to encourage pupils to learn about a sustainable environment. The subjects of citizenship, science and geography all include content on sustainability and the environment, and schools have the autonomy to go into as much depth on these subjects as they see fit.

We are taking action to support schools to develop further pupil knowledge and skills in relation to these very important issues. Our draft sustainability and climate change strategy, which we announced at COP 26, set out two new initiatives: the national education nature park and the climate leaders award. Together, these schemes will build on knowledge gained in the classroom to provide practical opportunities for all pupils to learn more about nature and biodiversity, develop key digital skills that are essential components to solving climate change and be empowered to take positive action. Alongside this, teachers will have access to improved training in climate education, including a primary science module curriculum, science CPD and free access to high-quality resources. We have engaged widely and plan to publish the final strategy in April.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friends Lord Blunkett and Lord Watson—particularly my noble friend Lord Blunkett, who is the father of citizenship in our schools. I think my noble friend Lord Watson’s comments about the views of young people that autonomy is not delivering are shared by teachers. If the Minister, or her colleague Robin Walker, had the appetite and the time to meet with me and Darren Jones before the Bill goes to the other place, we would be very grateful.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

Either I or, even better, my honourable friend in the other place would be delighted to meet with the noble Lord.

Education (Environment and Sustainable Citizenship) Bill [HL]

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Committee stage
Friday 3rd December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to move the little amendment in my name and, since the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, has also signed up to it, I can cut my speech down from one hour to no more than 45 minutes. I hope that I will not be too patronising in delivering it. This is a simple amendment. Clause 1(4) of the Bill—which I support—as it stands at the moment, states:

“The Secretary of State must give guidance about the provision of education”.


After “must”, I wish to insert the words “by regulations” —because, if one looks slightly further on, the proposed subsection (3) in Clause 1(4) says:

“The governing body of a maintained secondary school must have regard to guidance under this section.”


I am moving this amendment in a private capacity but—for the next couple of weeks, in any case—I am the chair of the Delegated Powers Committee, which looked at the Bill, as it looks at all Private Members’ Bills. We do not change our guidance for private Members any more than we do for the Government. When we look at Bills, our normal rule is that, where guidance is advisory, we suggest that it should be laid before Parliament but does not have to be debated—it does not need the negative or the affirmative procedure. But when it is guidance that one “must have regard to”—as we increasingly see from government these days—we say that, in effect, it is almost mandatory, and there are legal consequences for the person or body if they do not have regard to it.

In our report, we say:

“Although a duty to have regard to statutory guidance does not imply a duty to follow it in … all respects, we have in recent years observed that a person or body required by statute to have regard to guidance will normally be expected to follow it and will in practice normally do so unless there are cogent reasons for not doing so. And yet this guidance is subject to no parliamentary scrutiny at all.”


We are therefore suggesting that the Secretary of State makes the guidance by way of regulations that are subject to the negative procedure. That is not a heavy burden on the Secretary of State or the department. As we know, most negative-procedure SIs go through on the nod; they are very seldom debated or prayed against. I cannot imagine any side of the House wishing to pray against guidance in this regard, but the power exists there, if the House wishes to exercise it in certain circumstances.

I will give noble Lords one more minute of technical stuff. How would this actually take effect, when I am only inserting the words “by regulations”? I am advised by our lawyers that the guidance would in fact be covered by Section 210 of the Education Act 2002, which provides that:

“Subject to subsections (5) and (6), a statutory instrument which contains any order or regulations made under this Act by the Secretary of State and is not subject to the requirement … that a draft of the instrument be laid before and approved by a resolution of each House … is subject to annulment in pursuance of a resolution of either House of Parliament.”


Merely putting in the words “by regulations” would mean that any guidance that the Secretary of State produces on this measure in future would be caught by that provision and subject to the negative procedure. In essence, that is it.

I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, for signing up to the amendment. I do not think that we will have a highly contentious debate for the rest of the afternoon.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, although it is my Bill, I thought that I could probably take advantage of Committee and speak twice. But I take this advantage to outline why I am in support of the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, in his very helpful amendment. When I put together the original wording, I stole it from the Act that he quoted, and I perhaps could have paid more close attention to Parliament’s role. I am very grateful to the Delegated Powers Committee for its report and consideration.

The noble Lord was kind enough to send me an email on Wednesday. When I received it, it was with a little trepidation as to what he might have to say about how he would proceed today. It was of huge reassurance when he said that his amendment is not a re-emergence of the old Eric Forth and David Maclean “wreck a Private Member’s Bill on a Friday” scenario. I am grateful for the noble Lord’s support for the Bill and for the way in which he has gone about this.

One reason for wanting to speak early in the discussion of this amendment is to have an opportunity to ask the Minister a couple of things for her to consider in her response. I think the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, agrees that there is sometimes a danger of it feeling as though the Department for Education, because it makes a lot of regulations, is reluctant to go down the road of guidance being in the regulatory form. My question to the Minister is: is there a good reason why we should not have this sort of guidance in regulation, as opposed to a good reason why, because it is important?

This is also an opportunity for me to ask the Minister whether the announcement made by the Secretary of State on 5 November, in the context of COP 26 in Glasgow, changes the Government’s position as we heard it at Second Reading. We had a different set of Ministers then and a slightly different situation. The Secretary of State made his announcement in the foreword to the document that he has then consulted upon. He said:

“Education is critical to fighting climate change. We have both the responsibility and privilege of educating and preparing young people for a changing world—ensuring they are equipped with the right knowledge, understanding and skills to meet their biggest challenge head on.”


It was almost as if he had been listening to the Second Reading debate. I was so encouraged to read the consultation document and hear what he had to say, and to see that there is an emphasis on climate education, green skills, the education estate and the supply chain. Indeed, I loved the idea of the national education nature park and the climate leaders awards, which are part of what Secretary of State is proposing.

Can we push the department that little bit further on the climate education side of things, so that we get this guidance and ensure that there is more than just a voluntary approach from our schools to delivering climate and sustainability education, which is what the Bill would do? Also recently—I think it was last week or the week before—we had Nadia Whittome introducing her own Private Member’s Bill on this subject. The subject is not going to go away, so I strongly encourage the new ministerial team to give it their own encouragement. It might not be now; I would be really delighted to meet the Minister to discuss whether we can do anything with this Bill to get it into the national curriculum. However, I want to hear from her whether there has been any slight shift in her position.

[Baroness Blower (Lab)]

My Lords, this is a short, precise and extremely welcome Bill, improved by the helpful amendment presented today. I am pleased to tell noble Lords that the National Education Union—the largest education union in Europe, with 450,000 members —welcomes the Bill and the amendment.

The climate emergency is of course the existential threat to the future of all our children and young people. It is certainly the case that educators have a role to play in helping children address the threat by enabling them, as was said at Second Reading, to understand the climate emergency and ecological issues, and to think critically about how they can play their part as we seek a more sustainable way of life.

To demonstrate enthusiasm for teaching about the climate emergency and sustainability, the National Education Union worked with other organisations, including Teach the Future, to promote Climate Learning Month, which overlaps October and November, ahead of COP 26. Despite the high-quality resources produced, not all schools, and therefore not all children and young people, accessed them.

The Bill, particularly with the amendment, would ensure that all those educated in maintained schools would have access to this important area of learning. Alas, those educated in academies and free schools are not required to follow the national curriculum. However, Robin Walker, the Schools Minister, speaking on this in another place, said that

“I want us to do more to educate our children about the costs of environmental degradation and what we are doing to solve that, both now and in the future. Not only do our children deserve to inherit a healthy world, but they also need to be educated so that they are … prepared to live in a world affected by climate change, so that they may live sustainably and continue to fight the effects of climate change.”—[Official Report, Commons, 27/10/21; col. 146WH.]

I therefore hope that Her Majesty’s Government will not only support the Bill but press upon all schools the benefit of this aspect of learning. Of course, I hope that the Government will will the means to ensure that educators are themselves properly educated and trained to ensure high-quality teaching on this important issue.

Finally, it is the case that climate and sustainability issues are covered in the current curriculum—as has been said, they are covered in science and geography—but the magnitude of the climate emergency requires the holistic approach to content and skills development outlined in my noble friend Lord Knight’s Bill. The brevity of this speech should not be taken to imply anything less than my wholehearted support for the Bill and this amendment.

Initial Teacher Training

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I start by paying tribute to the excellent opening by my noble friend Lady Donaghy and commending my noble friend Lady Morris on her excellent contribution, joined by the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, and others: it was a really good start to the debate. I remind your Lordships of my education interests as recorded in the register. In particular, I chair the E-ACT multi-academy trust board, I am an adviser to Nord Anglia Education, and an occasional client is my former employer Tes Global, where I co-founded the Tes Institute, now the fifth largest qualifier of teachers in England. I also recently led the inquiry into initial teacher training by the All-Party Parliamentary Group for the Teaching Profession, of which I am vice-chair.

The inquiry was triggered by the market review chaired by Ian Bauckham. We received evidence from teacher training providers, both school-centred and universities, from schools, the College of Teachers and the teaching unions. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Kirkham, that I do not totally agree with his view on teaching unions; my experience is that when you work with teaching unions as proper stakeholders, you can achieve quite a lot alongside them. We titled the report of the all-party group, If It Ain’t Broke, Handle with Care. This reflected the lack of evidence to support the assertion from the then schools minister, Nick Gibb, that there was an urgent problem that needed solving. In fact, the biggest problem was the threat to teacher supply created if the outcome of this review were implemented.

I spent the first three days of this week in long meetings reviewing the performance of the 28 schools in the E-ACT group. Across the board, one of the biggest challenges we face is recruiting enough teachers, especially in shortage subjects such as maths. The majority of schools are not fully staffed, meaning more use of agency staff than we want and some roles having to be re-advertised because of a poor response. This is important context for the suggestion that we can just jettison a number of ITT providers in pursuit of the clear agenda of centralised control, dressed up as re-accreditation. The very idea that universities such as Oxford and Cambridge might follow through with the threat to walk away from training teachers if these proposals are implemented demonstrates what a pickle the department has got itself into. And it is not just the elite universities: the MillionPlus group is just as animated, as are the school-centred ITT providers. Some of these may be small in scale, but they provide important training opportunities in remote areas that universities struggle to reach.

The combined effect of some of these providers being excluded by re-accreditation, or walking away because of the threat to academic freedom and an uneconomic model, could be catastrophic. This country is short of teachers. The spike in numbers applying to train at the beginning of the pandemic was short-lived. If transitioning to a new system disrupts the supply of new trainees, then there are serious consequences for our schools and for the life chances of our children. I remind your Lordships that this is not just about the delivery of training: as others have said, there are problems now with there not being enough placements for trainees in schools. Losing existing providers means losing established partnerships and their school placements.

The new two-year induction that started nationally this September in the form of the early career framework is delivering some good quality—that is the feedback from the schools I am accountable for. However, it is resource-hungry for schools, particularly in mentoring capacity. This, in turn, makes it harder for ITT placement, because of capacity constraint, particularly if the review’s understandable emphasis on mentoring is implemented. I met the chair of the market review a couple of times and respect him and his view. I understand his desire to collect the best evidence of what works in ITT and to impose that on everyone. However, I believe that it leads us into standardised, uniform approaches to training that imply that teaching is a craft skill and, if everyone did the same thing, it would work for all types of teachers working with all types of pupils.

That goes to the heart of the problem. These proposed changes are not about building teacher professionalism. They are not showing trust in the profession—just the opposite. If we want better, more experienced teachers, we need to recruit more into teaching and then retain them. That means leaning in to their intrinsic motivation to be teachers. If my friend Sharath Jeevan is right in his new book, that means focusing on purpose, autonomy and expertise. If we erode professional autonomy, we erode motivation. Successive Governments have done that—I hold up my hand—but it is now time to reverse that.

We should be working with a diversity of providers of ITT. The Government should abandon the market review and the unnecessary expense of the Institute of Teaching. We should respect the training providers’ professionalism and let them decide how best to train teachers. Then we should use Ofsted to regulate the quality against the agreed standards for qualified teacher status—regulate the outcome, not the input. We should then properly resource teachers, at every stage of their careers, to have time to observe each other and engage in professional dialogue and development. Perhaps those that are crammed into teaching through successful schemes such as Teach First should be given time, relatively early in their careers, to have a sabbatical period in universities reflecting on practice and acquiring the academic, theoretical underpinning they missed due to their acceleration into the classroom. In doing so, we may retain more of those excellent teachers in our schools.

Teaching is the most important of professions; it shapes our future. We should nurture it, respect it as a profession and resist those who seek to use a Whitehall sledgehammer to crack a problem that does not really exist. Please, handle with care.

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 12th October 2021 Lords Chamber

The noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, raised points regarding the role of independent training providers. I would like to reassure him that the Government absolutely recognise the importance of an inclusive and collaborative relationship with ITPs. Placing duties on them, alongside colleges and higher education institutions, recognises absolutely that they are an important provider, and we hope this will support greater collaborative working.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

What the Minister said about the net-zero strategy and the Skills and Productivity Board was really reassuring, but how does that work connect directly to local skills improvement plans, so that we can be sure that there is join-up?

Schools: Funding

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Thursday 29th November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, let me start by reminding your Lordships of my education interests in the register, particularly as one of the chief officers of TES. I thank my noble friend Lady Morris not only for instigating this debate, but for the passion and clarity with which she opened it.

Our schools are struggling, particularly our secondary schools. Four statistics tell the story. We have heard the Institute for Fiscal Studies statistic about an 8% real-terms cut over the last eight years. At TES we have done the calculations as a result of the surge in pupil numbers coming through secondary, and predict that in 2024, this country will be 47,000 secondary school teachers short of what it needs to maintain current pupil-teacher ratios. This week, NHS Digital published statistics which tell us that one in five of 17 to 19 year-old girls in this country self-harm or attempt suicide. An Opinium survey for the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Inclusive Growth found that 56% of teachers believe that our school system is no longer fit for purpose. I happen to agree.

What is going on? I commend to your Lordships the BBC2 series “School”, which you can catch up with on iPlayer. It is slightly depressing but insightful. In it we see a head teacher, James Pope, struggling to improve standards at Marlwood secondary school, a rural comprehensive in south Gloucestershire that has been put into special measures by Ofsted, while simultaneously being expected to cut nearly £1 million from his annual budget.

Austerity is biting. Funding reductions mean that schools, as the OECD tells us, are employing younger, cheaper teachers, who are often less resilient. More are now leaving the profession than are joining it; I see from today’s statistical first release that initial teacher training recruitment targets at secondary level were missed again for the sixth consecutive year. What then happens is that reduced local authority support, especially for special educational needs, as the noble Lord, Lord Addington, talked about, creates more problems. Those problems often start with an increase in low-level disruption in the classroom, which grows. Teacher stress then grows and, with that, illness; the Education Support Partnership reports that one-third of teachers in this country have mental health problems. That increases the numbers off sick and the need for more expensive short-term supply teachers and, as a result, behaviour gets worse and learning falls. Teachers start to leave as their workload increases because they are left to do the planning and paperwork that supply teachers do not have to do, and as they struggle, the behaviour management problems grow.

As teachers leave, the school tries to recruit in the normal way to fill the vacancies, using the usual vacancy service, but finds that the candidates looking for jobs are not there. The school then re-advertises if there is time, or it may have to go to an expensive headhunter. In 2016, PwC reported that the cost of recruiting teachers is rising as recruitment agencies capitalise on the perceived shortage of candidates. Their market share has risen to 25%, at a cost of 65% of school recruitment budgets. If the headhunter fails, the school may ultimately have to get a long-term supply teacher at great cost, and often poor quality. This creates further pressure on budgets, with the promise of free recruitment services delivering a bitter reality, because the candidates are not looking. As a result, the school suffers declining teacher quality, results suffer, the high-stakes accountability system kicks in, followed by parental choice and a collapse in budgets, and the end of the head teacher’s career. This is the spiral of decline, and school and local authority funding cuts are often at the heart of that story.

We currently see a burning platform of rising pupil rolls coming out of primary into secondary—there will be 500,000 extra secondary school pupils by 2025. There will be fewer secondary teachers; if we are to fill all the maths teacher vacancies with people studying maths at university, we would need to persuade 40% of all maths undergraduates to become teachers, which is impossible. We have a narrowing curriculum, with less subject choice. The 20% cut in sixth-form funding, which my noble friend Lady Morris talked about, is cutting the number of subjects available at sixth form, but I am increasingly worried about this fetishisation of the academic over the applied, because we are training young people to be outperformed by machines.

If we train young people just to recall knowledge in tests—machines do that better; they are really good at it—computers will take their jobs. We have to remember what it is like for a young person growing up in this country. They are over-tested; they are looking forward to a debt of £50,000 if they choose to go to university, just at a time when employers such as AXA—an insurance company I was talking to someone about today—have done away with graduate recruitment. AXA prefers to source people earlier and train and develop them to meet its individual needs. It is not alone: Apple, Google, Cosco, Starbucks—all these companies, according to Glassdoor, are phasing out graduate-only recruitment because they want more diversity in their workforce.

The payback on going to university, in exchange for that debt, is starting to diminish. Young people are worried about robots taking the jobs they hope to get if they are successful at university. Their qualifications are starting to be dismissed by employers. No wonder we are facing a mental health crisis among our young people. What most parents want from schools is for their children to achieve according to the cultural norm, to be happy—parents do not want a battle to get them out from under the duvet every morning—and to be able to make a meaningful contribution at the end of the educational journey. That vision for parents is being rapidly eroded by a school system that is not fit for purpose. We have a funding crisis but, as my noble friend Lady Morris said, there is also a lack of hope about that on the horizon. But this is an opportunity for us to build consensus for change in our school system, and for a new paradigm for education. We could even call it a national education service.

We could cut testing. It is estimated that in this country we spend around £2 billion per year on testing in our schools. Let us just say we halve that: £1 billion could go a long way in helping with some of these problems. We should trust teachers more to shape a curriculum that engages young people and uses testing for formative rather than summative purposes as assessment for learning. More applied learning could be inserted on top of a foundation of knowledge and core skills in the curriculum. A more diverse 14 to 19 curriculum could be created, perhaps by abolishing GCSEs at 16 and ending the national curriculum at 14 to free up the years from 14 to 19 for a much more engaging curriculum experience. We should welcome back teachers in creative and applied subjects, so that they can properly develop the whole child; we should reconnect teachers with their vocation, so that they stay in and, at the same time, equip learners to find their vocation in time.

All this should be underpinned by proper resources, focused on learning and child development, not on testing and accountability. I look forward to the Minister’s reply. I look forward also to hearing from the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, and I salute her for having made sure that the Minister is not quite so lonely on his Bench.

Schools Update: National Funding Formula

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Thursday 14th September 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

Well, it is true that we are the first Government who have actually done this. It is not easy and I pay tribute to the officials in the Department for Education. They tell me that they have been working on this for at least 10 years, as I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Knight, knows, and are personally delighted that it has happened.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the Government and particularly the officials on bringing this forward. I certainly remember commissioning a review of the funding formula back when I announced one, about 10 years ago. Unfortunately it felt as if politics, with things such as general elections and changes in government, got in the way of implementing the outcome of that review. These things happen. I am particularly pleased to see sparsity issues recognised in this announcement.

My question relates to a welcome guarantee, if I heard the Minister correctly, of a real-terms, per-head increase of at least 0.5% next year and 1% the year after. That is important. However, I am also mindful of this week’s report from the National Audit Office regarding the recruitment and retention of teachers—and I remind the House of my interest in respect of my work at TES. At paragraph 2.2, the report states:

“To meet the increasing need for teachers, particularly in secondary schools, the Department for Education … and schools will need to improve teacher recruitment and retention. We reported in February 2016 that the Department has not met its overall target for filling teacher training places in each of the past four years. It has since missed the target for a fifth year”.


As the department reflects on that, particularly given that this week we have seen the pay cap go for the police, is it possible that it might reflect that the pay cap for teachers needs to be lifted? If so, will the department then ensure that the Treasury funds that rather than it coming out of the money announced in this funding formula? I would hate to campaign to raise the pay cap for teachers but then see the ensuing problems as schools scramble to try to fund 0.5% from what, certainly in some of the urban areas, will be quite a limited extra amount of money.

[Lord Nash]

The noble Lord makes some very good points about teacher recruitment and retention. Of course we have a strong economy with very high levels of employment and very low levels of unemployment which impacts on the ability to recruit teachers. We are doing a huge amount of work on improving our recruitment approach, which is a much more regionally focused approach to look at where we particularly need to recruit teachers. There is no doubt that the work of a number of our multi-academy trusts in career development, CPD and teacher retention will help teacher retention.

The independent School Teachers’ Review Body has recommended teacher pay increases. We have listened carefully to what it recommended and accepted the recommendations. We continue to work closely with schools to help them manage their finances.

English Baccalaureate: Creative and Technical Subjects

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Thursday 14th September 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Viscount on his maths. I also congratulate the noble Baroness on securing this important debate and on the excellent way in which she has introduced it. I remind your Lordships of my interests in respect of my employment as the chief education adviser at TES.

This debate goes right to the heart of what we think the vision for schooling in this country and the curriculum should be. I have ringing in my ears the voices of a discussion that I hosted this morning. Andreas Schleicher, the head of education at the OECD, led that stimulation for us. He talked about the exponential change going on across sectors throughout the world, particularly in the world of work, largely driven by technology. There is massive change everywhere except in education, where not a lot changes generation by generation. He said he thought that there was a risk of schooling becoming obsolescent in our digital age.

This debate goes to the heart of whether we think that schooling is about churning out children whom we define as “educated”—as being familiar with a canon of knowledge that they have an ability to recall at will at small desks in large sports halls in June, and whether, in turn, their ability to perform in those exams can work as a sort of academic sift. We have a system designed around sifting, rather than developing, people so that they can then go to university—probably 40% of them and, if we were ambitious in my day, perhaps 50%.

However, I question whether that is still valid. The person who will be babysitting in our home on Sunday is a very bright 20 year-old with excellent A-levels. She is now in the Civil Service and has worked in the private office of a Cabinet Minister and, post the Brexit referendum, she worked for the Department for International Trade on trade negotiations. She now has another excellent job, while her friends from school are saddling themselves with huge amounts of debt and are looking jealously at her career progression. The assumptions about a sifting system to get us into a university system that is starting to creak need to be challenged.

At the same time, that system obviously fails around 40% of young people who miss the sift. They do not get the five A* to C equivalents at GCSE. They are pushed through an accountability system that is getting tighter and tighter around test recall, and they are turned off learning in the way that the noble Baroness described. Yet what they really need for their future in the workforce is a love of learning, because they will be cycling through multiple careers.

The person who has just refitted our bathroom is an excellent plasterer, electrician and plumber, and his tiling is superb. He is a Bulgarian who fully qualified as a veterinary surgeon. He is not going to continue with his building skills because his wife, who is a lawyer in Moscow, is not allowed a visa to come to live in this country, so he is moving to Moscow to set up two internet businesses with a Chinese partner. That will be his third career, and he is not unusual in this world. We do not have an education system that prepares people to reinvent themselves in the way that we need them to do.

Instead, that 40% who are turned off by the system are channelled into work-related learning. Why is not everybody channelled into work-related learning? We have heard how important the creative sector, the manufacturing sector and the technical sectors are to around a third of our economy, yet the higher-performing people have no learning relevant to work; it is all about relevance to going to university.

The noble Baroness talked about design and technology and the fact that in the last seven years there has been a 43% drop in GCSE entries in those subjects. The device on which I have the notes for my speech was designed, along with all the other Apple products, by a British hero, Sir Jony Ive. His dad was a design and technology Ofsted inspector. A Christmas treat for Jony was to work in the labs in his dad’s school during the holidays, and Jony did a degree at what was Newcastle Polytechnic. He has changed the world through design and technology. This country has a rich tradition in design and technology, yet we do not have room for it in the curriculum in many of our schools. We need young people to be confident in the human skills of empathy and of getting wisdom from reflection through the creative subjects in particular, and they need to have the resilience to deal with the changes that are coming thick and fast in our society.

Today, Andreas Schleicher talked about a curriculum that is a mile wide and an inch deep. I worry about just extending the EBacc into some more subjects, because I worry about the level of prescription to which we already require our teachers to adhere. Then, at 16, we go all of a sudden from width into great depth, which, compared with what happens internationally, is very unusual.

We will also be creating a binary choice for children when the T-levels come in in 2020. They will have to decide at the age of 16 whether they are going to be academic or technical. Incidentally, I do not know how the T-levels will work against apprenticeships, with employers being asked to take on work experience people for T-levels or for more directly vocational qualifications. I would love the Minister to tell us how that middle route will be any better than or different from the diplomas which I was responsible for steering through and which ended up not really taking off because of a change of Government. I do not know whether, having got their kids into a great school at 11, parents will be aspirational to allow them to leave at the age of 16 to go to college to pursue a middle-level qualification that is not quite vocational and not quite academic.

Instead, I would love to see us collapse a lot of the curriculum, free up the 14 to 19 phase, get rid of GCSEs at 16 altogether and have a free run at it, embracing UTCs and studio schools. I would love us to have some public examinations at 14 to test the recall of a broad and balanced curriculum, but then to free up and trust teachers to build their professionalism and collaborate, as we see them doing in Shanghai and Singapore. Teachers there are trying to learn from what we used to do with creativity. Then, we can not only give employers, with their increasing frustrations, what they want from a schooling system but we can give our young people the best possible chance to live fulfilling lives and make a meaningful contribution to our society.

Schools: Recruitment and Retention

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Tuesday 18th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

As we have discussed before, there is no doubt that initially pupils who either do not speak English or have poor English do make life difficult for teachers, but the evidence is clear that those pupils, once they can speak the language—which many of them do relatively quickly—can be, to put it bluntly, much more aspirational. As we now all know, although we spend a lot of time compiling statistics on what we call English as additional language pupils, it is in fact white working-class pupils who are falling behind dramatically in our schools. That is why we are making such a substantial investment in coastal towns, former mining villages and other such communities to improve education.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I refer the House to my interests relating to teacher recruitment through my work at TES Global. The Minister says that he is not complacent. When I look at the statistics for teacher retention and take out retirement because the number of those retiring has been reducing, I can see that the number leaving the service prematurely has been increasingly significantly every year since 2012. The figure rose from 28,630 in that year to 39,980 in 2016. To repeat the question: is this because of workload pressure or because of pay?

[Lord Nash]

I know that the noble Lord is very experienced in this area, but he has picked one particular statistic. The fact is that returners to education employment have increased by 8% since 2011 and, as noble Lords will know, this year our recruitment programme has run substantially ahead of last year. We have again recruited 100% of primary teachers and 89%, as opposed to 82%, of secondary teachers.

Schools Update

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Monday 17th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, further to the question asked by the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, I too was drawn to the announcement of the further 140 free schools, which said that 30 would go through the local authority route. I am interested to know exactly how that works, given that this is the Minister’s responsibility, and how much more efficient that is than going through the department. Will he answer her question as to whether the local authorities concerned will get any money to pursue that route?

[Lord Nash]

Yes. As I said, we have been working very collaboratively with local authorities to plan much more accurately with them precisely where they want free schools. Local authorities obviously often produce free school sites on a peppercorn for no money. It is also clear to us that some local authorities have perhaps not been spending their basic need money, as they should have been, but relying on the central programme. I believe that this can be done efficiently. The local authorities that we work with certainly seem keen to provide many more of these schools. We go through a process whereby they decide where they want the schools to be and, effectively, an open process is then gone through whereby school providers can approach them and be approved, initially by the local authority and then by the department.