National Curriculum

Lord Quirk Excerpts

Tuesday 26th March 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Quirk]

My Lords, there is a great deal that I like in the new curriculum. Of course, not all that I like is new, and not all that is new is to my liking. Let me begin on the cheery side. I like the goals and the direction of travel. I like the way that vocabulary and language development are explicitly spread out across the whole range of core and foundation subjects. I also like the way that two of the core subjects, maths and English, are accorded special status; rightly so, because of their uniquely dual role in education, a point that was noted by the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, and the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton. It is my understanding that English and maths will be taught up to the age of 18 in the event that pupils have not achieved a satisfactory level at GCSE. It is vital that we get these two subjects right.

Well, those who designed the maths curriculum seem to have risen to the challenge. We find a well thought out pedagogical progression, step by step, year by year, together with the gradual introduction of the requisite vocabulary. It is just dismaying to compare this with English, where the people responsible seem to have lost their way or never found it. They do not seem, for example, to have taken on board the clear injunction laid down when the review process began in January 2011: namely, that they should study and emulate the corresponding curricula in the world’s most “high-performing jurisdictions”, a phrase that the Minister himself used earlier this afternoon.

People at the DfE could have learnt a great deal from programmes for teaching the mother tongue in countries not as far as Hong Kong or even Massachusetts but neighbouring countries such as France, the Netherlands, and Germany. There is little sign that they even tried. There are many other and more overt defects. The most obvious is the gross unevenness: for example, dozens of pages are devoted to KS 1 and 2 while key stage 3 is dismissed with barely a wave, yet this, as the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, reminded us, is when puberty-fired youngsters are at their most restlessly keen to explore, and when teachers—God help them—need all the supportive guidance they can get.

Then there is the unnerving difference in expertise as we pass from one content area of the English curriculum to the next. By far the most professional is the treatment of spelling, with its formidable and convincing step-by-step progression, laid out in extraordinary detail and at extraordinary length. The treatment of grammar is far less professional, both linguistically and pedagogically. There are, I grant, glimpses of attempts at something more sophisticated than the old preoccupation with a few shibboleths, but such efforts are lost in muddle and inconsistency and dumbed down in a curious diffidence. I am told on the grapevine that the note of nervous apology is because many teachers, and teacher trainers, still hanker after the grammarless “anything goes” days of yore, when standard English was the butt of smear and sneer. Others at the DfE whisper, “No, no, it’s not that—it’s because teachers are frightened of grammar and the arcane terminology”. Well, I just do not buy that. Teachers—in many cases, the same teachers—take in their stride the no less arcane terminology of maths and science with their square roots and quadratic equations, their molecules and precipitates. They happily and confidently explain the difference between sulphate and sulphite and sulphide, so why not the difference between semantic inverses such as imply and infer? If grammar is prescribed diffidently and inconsistently, lexicology, semantics, and the vital matter of vocabulary networks seem beyond the DfE entirely.

There is no sign of linguistic professionalism to help teachers build on children’s hungry interest in naming things and finding better ways of describing them, and no sign of any step-by-step progression in enriching pupils’ word-stock. Yet this is the very soul and centre of language. Like others, I have provided the DfE with detailed criticism and, serious as the defects are, they can be speedily put right if the advice is understood, accepted and, of course, implemented.

But I am left with worries that cannot be so readily dispelled. Getting a good curriculum agreed is one thing; getting it taught across the country is quite another, as the noble Lord, Lord Storey, said. Are the many thousands of teachers in post willing to teach it and are they equipped to do so? There is much in the curriculum that will be unfamiliar to them. Then there are tomorrow’s teachers. Are our teacher-training institutions willing and—again—equipped to make the big, radical changes in what they must instil into their pupils?

Schools: Performance

Lord Quirk Excerpts

Tuesday 4th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

I have discussed the specific case that the noble Baroness raises before. I am not sure that the facts around primary school places and sports provision in London are quite as straightforward as she portrays. To take the general point, I feel very strongly that it is right that there should be more choice locally for parents who want outstanding primary school places. Whether or not there is a basic need problem, it is right that they should have that choice. So far as the free schools generally are concerned, most of that new primary provision is in areas of basic need. As regards the role of local authorities, they are discharging their responsibilities in different ways across the country. Clearly, the trend over a long period has been towards greater autonomy for schools, and that is something on which this Government are trying to build.

[Lord Quirk]

My Lords, should we be concerned not just with the variation between schools but between schools and young offender institutions and within young offender institutions, where this report shows that the skills and learning provision is both thin and patchy?

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

I agree with the noble Lord’s point. It is an area where more work needs to be done. I accept that the provision is patchy. As regards the variation between different kinds of provision, the more we can publish data which illustrate what the facts are, so that people can then draw their own conclusions on the action needed, it is a good and healthy development.

Schools: Curriculum

Lord Quirk Excerpts

Wednesday 20th June 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Winston]

The Government are to be congratulated—

[Lord Quirk]

Given the centrality of English in the whole of education, is the Minister aware that many in the profession are delighted with the steps taken to create a key stages 1 and 2 curriculum that meets our present and future needs? Can he therefore assure us that the Government will do their utmost to ensure the enthusiasm and competence of the teaching body to deliver this most promising curriculum?

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

My Lords, I am very aware of how important the whole issue of language development is to the noble Lord. I agree with him, and one of the things that we are seeking to emphasise in the new curriculum is the importance of the use of language and language development all the way through. I am grateful for his support for the changes that we are trying to make. As I have said, we will now consult on those proposals and we will certainly do all we can to make sure that teachers have the support to deliver this more ambitious curriculum.

Young Children: Language Development

Lord Quirk Excerpts

Thursday 8th December 2011 Lords Chamber

Asked By

[Lord Quirk]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to ensure that, by the age of seven, all children with retarded development of their language faculty have been identified and their problems addressed.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Hill of Oareford)]

My Lords, the revised early years foundation stage framework will emphasise more strongly the importance of communication. We plan to introduce a check on children's progress at age two from September 2012. Revised assessment arrangements will identify more clearly how every child is developing in this important area at age five. There will be a new phonics test at age six. Together, the new arrangements will also promote better information sharing between reception class and year 1 teachers, and with parents.

[Lord Quirk]

My Lords, I am most grateful to the Minister for that encouraging reply. Does he agree with John Bercow that severe delay in language development is “far more prevalent” than the SLIs of his own recent inquiry—that is, the pathologies that demand professional therapy? Even with the very welcome news of the 2012 programme aimed at toddlers, many thousands will continue to be missed. Will improved Ofsted procedures ensure a primary school regime that is sensitive enough to spot the little boy whose unhappy silence is born not of incapacity but of being starved of normal linguistic stimulus from parent, sibling or carer?

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

My Lords, I agree with the point underlying the Question of the noble Lord, Lord Quirk, about the importance of this. Our combination of measures will include the point that he refers to about making sure that Ofsted inspectors get specific training in identifying the problem that he raises about linguistic development. The number of language therapists is going up as well, and I hope that with our range of measures we will make the kind of progress that he would like. Will we be able to catch every child always and give them the help that they want? That is a noble aspiration, but I cannot put my hand on my heart and say that we will, for obvious reasons.

Education Bill

Lord Quirk Excerpts

Wednesday 26th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley]

My Lords, I support this amendment. I shall start with what I think is going to be my only line of agreement with the Government on this. To take the attitude that intervention in schools should reflect the risk of schools doing badly, and to say that we should intervene less when schools are successful, is absolutely right. As my noble friend has just said, that is a principle that was followed by the previous Labour Government, so I am with the Minister on that. We should not be constantly going in to excellent schools and getting in the way of them doing an excellent job; that is an absolute principle.

The second absolute principle is that inspection should be universal for all our schools. Does the Minister really think that one visit every five years is going to be a big burden on outstanding schools? One visit by Ofsted inspectors every five years; that is what happens at the moment, that is what the data say.

The reason for drafting this clause perplexes me. I am trying to think what motivates it because, to be honest, I never thought that the Tories would go soft on inspection, and that is what they have done with this clause. They fought hard to put Ofsted in the legislation, they fought hard to put it into schools, they have argued the case with head teachers and teachers, almost all of whom were opposed to inspection when it first started, and the Labour Government did the same. The political parties have been on the same side on this; we have thought that inspection was a necessary part of raising standards. So I am absolutely perplexed why the Tories, of all parties, should go back on this now. This is a principle, and you would have to come forward with some absolutely outstanding reasons why this principle should be broken. That principle is that in a devolved system, more than ever, every school should be inspected. Every parent has the right to know that the school which their child attends should be inspected. Every child should have a right to be reassured that the school which they attend should be inspected. That is an inalienable right and should be a fundamental structure of our school system.

The second question is: is doing that once every five years a terrible burden on schools? I do not think it is. To some extent, that is where the argument finishes. If you believe that those rights should not be given to parents and teachers, vote against this amendment. If you really believe that one inspection every five years is a terrible burden—do not forget that some children will have gone almost right the way through a secondary school in that time while there has never been an inspection, as they will have started in year 7 and might leave in year 11—then vote against this amendment.

I am going to be really helpful to the Minister here. I am going to warn him not to get into a position that I know I got into when I was a Minister. It is a great ministerial habit when you come up with an idea. Listening to the debate, I have to say that when the Minister responded to my friend Lady Hughes on the previous amendment it was the most troubled that I have heard him in the whole consideration of this Bill. I did not believe that he had convinced himself, let alone the House. What is happening now is that the Government have a policy but they are, in honesty, persuaded by the arguments against it. Rather than withdrawing that policy, they are seeking to put plaster in the holes and rearranging the bricks: “Well, let’s have greater risk assessment. Let's talk to the heads when they are new. Let’s do this, that or the other”. I can tell your Lordships that that is how the camel was invented, rather than the horse.

I remember when we ourselves got into exactly that position. You do not want to backtrack, because this is politics, so you start trying to plaster up the cracks. But what you end up with is so disastrous that in two years’ time you are asking, “Why weren’t we just brave enough to say that we got that wrong”?. I say to the Minister that he is at that point now. He should take a deep breath and protect himself from having to come to your Lordships’ House in two years’ time to answer many questions and queries about an inspection system that clearly will not work.

I have two more points to make. I really worry that the Minister may have constructed a terrible bureaucratic tangle in order to get out of the political difficulty that he is in. He will now have an army of Ofsted inspectors doing more risk assessments. They will have to weigh and measure the schools and collect the data. Now they will have to go and talk to every new head when he or she is appointed to a school—perhaps the Minister could tell us how many interviews that is going to be in a year—just to check their plans for that school. The Government would not have to do that if they backed this amendment. From the schools’ point of view, we are meant to be freeing them from this terrible burden of one inspection every five years, but what is the Minister putting in its place? He is making them provide more data. He has the local authority checking on them, so that it can refer back to Ofsted. He has the new heads having to talk to Ofsted and he has a third of them having to be inspected every five years. They will not know where they stand. I can assure the Minister that it would be easier for them and less of a burden if he would just say, “Once every five years, and that’s it”.

My last point is this, and to some extent it is the most important point for me. From the point of view of the Ofsted inspectors, it is crucial that they measure the standards of every single school in this country by the performance of the best. That is absolutely central to effective Ofsted inspection. If you say to your average Ofsted inspector—not the ones doing the one-off thematic reviews—who spends their time going into schools, “Thou shalt not be seeing any outstanding schools”, how do they know what outstanding looks like? When they go to the satisfactory school, it might be the best that they have seen for six months and they might think that that is outstanding. To help the Ofsted inspectors, it is crucial that, as part of their job, they see outstanding schools as part of their regular inspections.

To be helpful to the Minister, I think I know why he, or his colleagues—I am sure that it was his colleagues and not him—came up with this terrible idea: it is this idea of having a long list of freedoms which you can grant to schools to prove that the policy of granting freedoms to schools works. We saw it in the debate on admissions on Monday and we have seen it today. These are wrong freedoms, because they are freedoms that answer the political drive of the Government and they stand in the way of raising standards. This is the moment when the decision is made: go on and the camel will have several extra humps in two years’ time, I promise the Minister that. I passionately support this amendment, more than anything else in the Bill, and hope that noble Lords, having listened to this debate will vote to preserve universal inspection. I praise the Tories for bringing it in in 1988; I think it would be terrible if they voted to get rid of it now.

[Lord Quirk]

While the Minister is taking the deep breath that the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, has urged upon him, may I give him an extra couple of minutes of breathing time by saying what a difficult job he is going to have in offsetting the arguments presented by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and the noble Lord, Lord Knight? Surely it is the outstanding schools that need to be inspected in order to have reports coming out showing what can be done in state sector, mainstream schools. Once every five years is, as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, said, nothing compared to the extra bureaucracy which we are threatened with in some kind of compensation for this. I hope that the Minister will bow to the wisdom that has been cast before him this afternoon.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I add my voice to those who have already spoken. I am greatly saddened by this Government’s attitude to inspection, which seems to me to be coloured by too many years in opposition listening to schools complaining about inspection. Indeed, inspection under the previous Government was not generally taking a constructive turn, but then, we had not constructed it in a constructive way ourselves previously. I had hoped that this Government would go back to first principles and ask what inspection is for. If you start by saying that it is to make sure that our children are receiving the best possible education, then you need a system which is much faster to react than the current one. It can take Ofsted three years to pick up that a school is going wrong, because their data are always backward-looking and they always want two years of that before they believe that there is any trend in place. So in the schools that I have seen and known to have gone wrong, it has been the third year or the beginning of the fourth when Ofsted have come to call and by then, a lot of children’s educations have been harmed. I would have been looking to produce something which was much faster to react, rather than something which is going to be slower to react.

To pick up the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, and the noble Lord, Lord Quirk, it is essential that inspectors, the people who are seeing a lot of schools, see the very best. The point about the best schools is that they are utterly surprising and jaw-dropping when you see them: you could not believe that what they are doing could be done. When you have seen it, you start to understand how other schools could do it too, but if you have not seen it, you just do not know; you just accept that the ordinary way of doing things is sufficient, that the platitudes that, “We are doing well by our children here” are right, because it is okay by the current average, rather than being anywhere near the potential of the children. When you see the difference that a really good school can make, you understand that there is a long way to go; not that schools are bad at the moment, but that the good schools can be a great deal better than they are. That understanding comes from going round outstanding schools and being able, as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, said, to set your yardstick on the basis of what you know can be achieved with children like these in a school that really understands how to deal with them.

We do not have that; we have something that goes backwards. We have a decision to remove outstanding schools from the purview of Ofsted. However, things change. I came across a school by chance the other day—Glenthorne in Sutton. It is sprouting all sorts of new initiatives. You can study three A-levels and golf, as well as tennis and football, to a professional standard. It is great to see these initiatives but no one will take a look at them. No one will know whether they are going right or being balanced correctly. It will be three years before anything shows in the figures. However, a good, experienced head, going around six months into the project, would know whether it was going right. To think that you can do this by remote control—that we are looking after the future of our children by stepping back in this way—is a profound misconception. I am afraid I despair of changing the Government’s mind at the moment, but give it a year or two, let an outstanding school or two crash, and then we will think about it again.

--- Later in debate ---

Now that we have more faith schools not of the faiths that we were used to, free schools and academies, it is more important than ever to have community cohesion in the list for inspection. Without community cohesion, young people will not understand what it is to live in a community. If somebody wishes to ask, “What is community cohesion?”, Ofsted has a very good checklist of the issues under that heading. We should not deprive schools or the community of this inspection, or stop children learning about and understanding their own and other communities.

[Lord Quirk]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 79. Clause 40 requires the chief inspector to consider a familiar quartet: the spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of pupils. Amendment 79 would insert the word “linguistic”. In other words, we would wish the chief inspector to focus upon the child’s unique and very precious language faculty, and properly so, because language proficiency is not only essential for the other desiderata in Clause 40, for example social and cultural development, but, more widely, it is a precondition for the whole of education itself.

Many thousands of our children start school linguistically impoverished and hence cognitively impaired. The numbers extend far beyond the unfortunates with pathological problems that require serious intervention by speech and language therapy. These are a tiny unfortunate minority compared with the far greater unfortunates who by reason of family dysfunction or social circumstance have little experience of parental or sibling chatter let alone bedtime stories. They have been denied the rich linguistic exposure that more fortunate children can happily take for granted.

The language faculty depends crucially upon early intervention. Language development is something that has to happen as early as possible, pre-school preferably, as we have just heard in relation to Amendment 76A, moved by my noble friend Lord Northbourne, and as we did on his very first amendment, last week, when the elegant intervention by the noble Lord, Lord Peston, was especially memorable. If serious linguistic deficiency cannot be spotted before school, and if it cannot be spotted at least in the first few terms of primary school, then the consequences are disastrous.

None of this is controversial, and it is indeed in line with Her Majesty's Government’s policy. What we are talking about is language development that merely leads to the confident, competent command of English. Surely that is not a lot to ask of an English education, but at present we fall very far short of it. Employers are on record as preferring teenage recruits who learnt their English in Poland, Russia or China, because it is easier for everyone to understand their less sloppy diction and to read their better-formed sentences and clearer handwriting. We could go further. Without giving pupils a sound basis in English, how can we attract far more to go on and learn Spanish, German, even Mandarin? As noble Lords will know, one of the proposers of this amendment, the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, chairs the all-party group on foreign languages.

Among possible objections to our amendment, let me just mention two. First, adding the word “linguistic” may invite further additions—“mathematical”, for example. But language is different, and is genuinely unique. It is the precondition of all else, from the rules of maths to the rules of football. Secondly, it may be objected that the addition of “linguistic” creates a tautology, since it is implicit in “social” and “cultural”. We would disagree. Doubtless some degree of social and cultural development need not depend upon language—even, perhaps, enough for inspectorial hurried box-ticking. But inspectors must in our view be required to pause and address language development as an area requiring their separate and specific consideration. Indeed, so far from being superfluous, we would argue that the omission of the word “linguistic” from the clause should be seen as a glaring oversight, so much do its neighbours “social” and “cultural” depend on it as the faculty by which all other development is both inculcated and expressed.

This brings me to a further and final point in urging this amendment. Clause 40, to repeat, requires that the chief inspector “must consider” how pupils are developing in four different respects:

“spiritual, moral, social and cultural”.

This is a quartet, of course, that is quite familiar in Ofsted-speak. It has been on Ofsted’s agenda for some time. Perhaps the Minister can give us some indication of the success that inspectors have had in grading children according to their development in these four respects. What does the Minister expect the inspector actually to do before ticking, say, the “spiritual” box, thus declaring his satisfaction at the pupil’s spiritual development? Then, when he moves on to the box labelled “moral”, what does he actually do before ticking that all is well with their moral development?

Now, if the next box were labelled “linguistic”, I know—and, more importantly, I know the inspector would know—how a professional assessment in this crucial area would be made. I would have confidence in what a tick meant and know that actual, speedy attention would be given if a tick were withheld.

My point is obvious. Not only is successful development of the language faculty essential for progress in all else that education has to offer, but linguistic development is observable, quantifiable and objectively assessable to a degree that makes the inspectorate’s judgment of critical value.

[Baroness Warnock]

My Lords, I very strongly support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, as well as the amendment just spoken to by my noble friend Lord Quirk.

Linguistic deprivation is just as serious as any other form of deprivation that a child can suffer. An enormous amount of linguistic knowledge, practice and efficiency is learnt before the age of two or two and a half years. There are a vast number of children whose parents—or whose single parent, very often—are quite unable to supply the kind of stimulus that children essentially need, and from the deprivation of which they really cannot catch up. How can children start learning to read when they hardly have any vocabulary in the language they are supposed to be reading? It seems to me that before school is the crucial time, but as we have heard the most difficult and most needy children are very likely those who do not take advantage of pre-school provision.

Here I must repeat something that I have said a million times before, which is that I believe that the BBC has a huge responsibility for those children who are at home before school, and are not getting out of their home. The BBC should be providing radio programmes with songs and stories which supply what children’s parents very often cannot supply, namely constant exposure to language. I was also delighted when a noble Lord—I am afraid I cannot remember which—said at an earlier stage that one of the worst things that has ever been invented is the pushchair which faces away from the parent, so that the parent who is pushing the child cannot speak continuously to the child even before the child has any language to respond in.

I think that this is of enormous importance, and should be in the Bill, more so than all the stuff about spirituality and morality. I entirely agree that that can all go, because we cannot measure it anyway. What cannot go is what can be measured, which is the vocabulary of a child and his ability to communicate and respond to other people talking and singing to him.

Education Bill

Lord Quirk Excerpts

Wednesday 20th July 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord McAvoy]

I rise very briefly, just for a few minutes, to speak on Amendment 116. When the noble Baroness, Lady Flather, was moving the amendment, I felt I reached a new understanding with her, seeing as we have previously disagreed. I was even starting to think that I had a soul mate—I will withdraw the word “soul” in case that offends her. She said so much in the first part of her speech, but I will deal with that secondly. She rather spoilt it in the second part of her speech by homing in on faith schools. Although she made it clear, as usual, that she was not talking about Church of England schools, I had a bit of bother trying to fathom out which particular faith school she was on about. I am sure I will figure it out at some point. It would be totally invidious if separate criteria applied to faith schools, and I am afraid it shows deep paranoia and suspicion about Catholic schools that I just do not get.

Being positive and concentrating on the first half of her speech, it was brilliant in trying to get across how much all schools can contribute to community cohesion. I see schools I am most aware of—outside England’s jurisdiction, but nevertheless, I have knowledge of schools in England as well—and all schools getting involved in fair trade and fund raising for Africa and going out to Africa as part of various voluntary organisations. There are parent-teacher organisations that dig deep into the community because they get the parents involved. All of this goes back to the school and feeds back to the community. If there is any discrimination or any lack of importance given by the Government to community cohesion, the noble Baroness has highlighted that that is a weakness. Where it is going well, it is going very well. I also notice a bit of local rivalry which helps because if one school sees that another school has raised £2,000 or £3,000 for aid to Africa, that is its target. That is friendly rivalry, not contentious rivalry. Anything that brings back into consideration by the Government the contribution of all schools to community cohesion, the sooner the better.

[Lord Quirk]

My Lords, in a spirit of attempting to clarify rather than add to the duties of Ofsted, the proposers of Amendment 117 hope that it will find favour with the Committee and with the Minister. Indeed, we can see no reason why it should not, for this minimalist, one-word addition to the Bill very much runs with the grain of the clause in which we propose to embed it.

For those who may say, not unreasonably, why not add also other terse desiderata, such as mathematical, musical or physical, we say, no, linguistic is in a class of its own. The social and cultural development of pupils depends critically on their command of language and the interpersonal relations that promote such development proceed above all else on successful and confident facility with language. In other words, the social and cultural development already in the clause actually entails linguistic development. So manifestly true is this that it might well be felt that adding “linguistic” is superfluous, but it is not. Rather, its omission from the clause should be viewed as a glaring oversight, so much do the other two—social and cultural—depend on it. Language is what supremely distinguishes the human species, giving us uniquely the facility to talk about the past, speculate about the future and analyse the present.

This is why Ofsted's attention needs to be specifically drawn to the monitoring of linguistic development, not only for the sake of the unfortunate minority of youngsters with pathological problems in speech and language, nor for the sake of the much bigger minorities who come from non-English speaking homes or from homes which are non-speaking, and in which conversation in any language is in short supply. Our amendment has all these in mind but we propose it for the sake of the school community as a whole, for whom rich, rapid and early language development is the key to their whole education and subsequent careers. Moreover, the richer their English, the likelier it is that their interest—social and cultural—will reach out beyond English to the social, cultural and, indeed, vocational opportunities to be found in the realm of foreign language learning.

Education Bill

Lord Quirk Excerpts

Monday 18th July 2011 Grand Committee

[The Lord Bishop of Lichfield]

My Lords, I thank those who set out so clearly the reasons against religious assemblies for schools. I shall go on thinking about those reasons and some of my best answers will come in the bath tonight.

Several noble Lords have said that religious assemblies are way out of date. I am not so sure about that. I have got to leave my duties here on Wednesday because one of our home regiments is coming back. Apparently, when they come back from Afghanistan and the local population want to greet them, the first thing they think should be on the agenda is a religious service. So there we have the youth of today opting for a religious and corporate act of worship in order to express what they want to say.

I cannot help feeling also that the surroundings of this Room have something to tell us about our own history. Is what we see around us all out of date? I do not think so. It has been a constant feature that people have suggested that religious assemblies for children are divisive and divide up communities. That is not my experience at all. On the contrary, I see constant cohesion in welcoming people of all different ethnic groups and faith groups and managing that. I often go to assemblies where children are given a major part in running it. It is a regular part of our diet for someone to get up and say “I am a Jew; this is how it happened to me” and so on. Muslims, Buddhists and other parents are usually very keen to have their children come to assembly. The assertion that lots of children sit outside is just not true. I remember a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses but, apart from them, there are very few people who sit out.

We are agreed on both sides of this debate that assembly is a good thing. What divides us is whether it should be substantially Christian. My own opinion is that the great advantage of a religious assembly is that it gives us the opportunity to give worth to worship that goes further than the latest fad from the head or from the local authority, that gives not just a sense of the numinous but of someone beyond our daily matters who can guide us with regard to the values that our society should be built upon. I do not think any age is too young to start that struggle of saying, “If we want a cohesive community, if we want tolerance, truth and honesty, where do those values come from?” I think many of us in this Room would say they come from God, and that the authorised version of the Bible is not only so impressive because of the style of the writing but also because of the content.

There is much more to say but I am against those who say that Christianity is just one of our religions. It occupies a more important place in our constitution than that. If we are having debates about the constitution, we should not just nibble away at one side of it without seeing that it affects all the others as well.

[Lord Quirk]

My Lords, if there is one thing that is clearly agreed in the Committee this afternoon, it is the value of the assembly as a way of showing that the school has a sense of community. There is much good in the amendments put forward, but at the same time we should not forget that church schools happen to be extremely popular with parents, even those with no religion or religious beliefs of their own. Church schools are not popular by accident. If we wish to move from the current position, let us say in Northern Ireland, with mutually hostile but strongly religious schools, to something of the idealism put forward by the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, and the noble Lord, Lord Peston, we need to think very carefully about what we will put into this mix of idealism and discipline that appears equally in these amendments.

[Baroness Flather]

My Lords, church schools are extremely popular, especially with ethnic minority parents. They feel that there is more discipline and they are better controlled, and there is usually a uniform. Most ethnic minority parents like that. I am not sure it is because of collective worship and we should bear that in mind very carefully. If we take out the word “worship”, we have had things about spirituality and about Christian heritage. It is very important that children from anywhere and everywhere learn about the Christian heritage of this country. That is fundamental: if we do not know anything about the Christian heritage of Britain we do not know about Britain.

I would also like to point out that this is the most irreligious country I have ever come across. The people in this country are not religious and they do not even pretend to be religious. If collective worship is your idea to bring up a generation that will be more religious, it will not, because it has not done so. As far as the worship in the Chamber is concerned, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Peston. I went once; I could not go again, simply because it is so ludicrous. Turning your back and showing your bottom is just not on. I would never do that. I do not mind a few words thanking God et cetera—that is fine. I have no problem with any religion, or no religion. I was brought up to believe that all faiths, all religions, are pathways to God and they are equally valid in that sense. I have no problem with that, but there has to be a limit to how we deal with these issues. Certainly there are old people here and people of a generation who are used to that kind of thing. For me, it was very strange indeed. We talked about peer pressure. Peer pressure works here as well.

I say to the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, that, during the years that I spent in voluntary work in Maidenhead, my closest allies were the Methodists and I have long since learned how good they are. I now judge people not according to what I learned once but as they present themselves to me. However, I would say that the Catholics suppress women, and hundreds of thousands of women die in childbirth. He may not like that, but I do not care.

Education Bill

Lord Quirk Excerpts

Monday 4th July 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Puttnam]

My Lords, the purpose of this amendment is to challenge the Government but in effect also to challenge the profession itself. During Second Reading, I and the Minister disagreed on one issue. I suggested that the Bill challenged the professional status of teachers and diminished them, while he felt otherwise. If there are two overused phrases in this Bill and in discussions on education generally, they would have to be “world-class education” and “professionalism” in relation to teaching. I have not done a word count on the Bill but it is literally littered with the words “profession” and “professionalism”, normally prefixed by the words “enhanced” or “increased”.

It is the refuge of a pedant to look in the OED but the words are very clear. Under “professional” and “professionalism”, it says:

“Reaching a standard or having the quality expected of a professional person or his work; competent in the manner of a professional”.

Or there is,

“raises his trade to the dignity of a learned profession”.

A professional is:

“One who belongs to one of the learned or skilled professions; a professional man”.

As someone who comes from outside politics, I have never ceased to be amazed by the sometimes brilliant ability of politicians to oppose, which in my judgment is only matched by the apparent hopelessness to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors. It is something that I have observed over the past 15 years and I have no reason at all to think that I am wrong.

I declare an interest as a former chair of the General Teaching Council. I make two points. I genuinely loath government by assertion, which is what we are dealing with here, whereas I celebrate government by evidence. We came in in 1997 on a mantra of evidence-based policy-making. Sadly, that had died by the millennium. None the less, it was a good idea in its time. Creating policy involves learning lessons from the past and gathering evidence from the present. In support of my contention that scrapping the GTC was the coward’s way out, I started looking for lessons from the past and I found more than I could ever possibly have hoped for. In the process, I have become a quasi-authority on the formation and development of the General Medical Council.

I have an advantage over the Minister in that I have looked through a number of interesting and riveting documents from the Library on the development of the General Medical Council—and I shall certainly hand them to him. What strike you immediately are the extraordinary parallels between the development of the GMC and the hoped-for development of the GTC. It is also interesting to see that throughout its history the GMC relied on lessons learnt, and mistakes made, by the development of the legal profession, which in turn relied entirely on the very ragged process of the development of the clergy. Only Henry VIII tried to interrupt this learning process—at least, until now. I will not go into that at this stage, although I certainly could.

The parallel is quite extraordinary. For example, there has always been only a minority of pressure within the profession for increased professionalism. Prior to 1858, when the law was passed in this House, the bulk of doctors did not think that it was necessary that they be regarded as professionals. They were perfectly happy with the way things were and thought that the market operated very satisfactorily. Throughout the history of the GMC, there was very little agreement on the level of the retention fee that ought to be charged to be a member of what was termed a profession.

Here I come to a challenge to the profession itself. I bow to no man in my belief that this is an important profession and that all my futures, and those of my children and grandchildren, are entirely dependent on several generations of outstanding teachers. That is very clear throughout the Bill. It cannot be squared with an attempt to scrap the embryonic professional body that we attempted to create, inadequately, in 1997.

Another fascinating parallel that I dug up a moment ago is that the inadequacy of the original legislation for the GMC in 1858 was described as a sort of disgrace because the public were ill served as the legislation was watered down to a point where they could not rely on the professionalism of an individual doctor. Noble Lords may think that I am overstating this parallel but I think that it is a very important one.

For 153 years, a great deal has been learnt about turning the medical profession into a respected professional body, frequently in the face of fierce opposition from within. I am not pretending that the GTC was remotely what I would have liked it to be—dreadful mistakes were made—but you do not scrap a professional body; you build on it and enhance it. You improve it and nurture it and sometimes you have to cajole and maybe kick it. But our aim is to have a far more professional and far more effective body of teachers adhering to a set of responsibilities.

Finally, I say this to the Minister. If the profession does not want the proposals in my amendment—and I have deliberately used the form of balloting for which the Government clearly have a preference in settling disputes—you will hear not one more word from me. But let the profession decide whether it wishes to be professional, whether it wishes to acknowledge the obligations that go with being professional and whether it wishes constantly to prove itself to the point where we have a generation of teachers of whom we can truly be proud. I beg to move.

[Lord Quirk]

My Lords—

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch]

My Lords, a few of the amendments in this group are in my name and it may help the debate if I speak to them first. I apologise for interrupting. I shall speak to Amendments 64A, 64B, 73A, 73B, 73C and 73D.

We have considerable sympathy with the intent of noble Lords who have supported Amendment 64. We believe that there is a need for government to send out a much stronger, more positive message to the teaching profession about their value and status. Therefore, we believe that a body carrying out the key functions of the GTCE should remain in the Bill.

Like my noble friend Lord Puttnam, we fully acknowledge that the GTCE has struggled to fulfil parts of its mission. However, in abolishing it, we are in danger of losing other functions which it has delivered well and which would be lost to the profession as a whole. For example, in abolishing the GTCE we will deny the teaching profession a self-regulated professional body on a par with virtually every other professional body in this country. As the GTCE itself says:

“The Bill would remove the professional infrastructure that is standard for other professions such as medicine, law and nursing, and for other teachers”.

Equally, teachers themselves are calling for the continuation of such a body. For example, the NASUWT says the abolition,

“will damage the status of the profession”.

Meanwhile, as we have heard, the Government talk endlessly, and quite rightly, about raising the status of the profession. However, if they are serious, it would surely be a regressive step to take away the professional body.

The Bill describes how certain functions will transfer to the Secretary of State and others will stop completely. I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hill, for his letter of 13 June setting out in more detail which of the GTCE functions will stop. In that letter he said:

“The GTCE functions which we do not propose to continue include: maintaining the register of teachers; investigating cases of professional incompetence; undertaking a range of surveys and research about the teaching profession; disseminating research and statistics; supporting teachers’ continuing professional development”.

Taking some of those examples, we believe that it is vital to maintain a professional register of teachers, as other professions do and, indeed, as the comparator bodies in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland will continue to do. The register of those qualified and entitled to teach in our schools has been successful in enabling employers to make recruitment checks. Under the Government’s proposals, all that will be held is a database of those prohibited from teaching.

Organisations such as the Association of School and College Leaders and the National Association of Head Teachers have made it clear how much they value a register of all qualified teachers that is accessible by schools. The NUT echoes that, saying that it would be a waste of resources if this work were abandoned now. The ASCL said that abolition of the GTCE and discontinuation of the registers removes the public’s guarantee that all registered teachers are,

“eligible, suitable, properly qualified and of good standing”.

It is not just the public’s but parents’ rights to the same guarantees that matter. For example, as part of my other life, I carry out some paid work for the General Medical Council, and I listened with great interest to what my noble friend had to say about it. Not only have I seen how much doctors value the General Medical Council’s register but I have seen how important it is for patients to access details of their doctors’ registration in an open and transparent way. Surely parents deserve the same rights? In a recent survey, 93 per cent of parents want teachers to be regulated, to have an agreed level of training and to be registered with a regulatory body before taking up a teaching post.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Quirk]

My Lords, if the only the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, had been in charge of briefing for the Opposition in the other place in February, such a massive and very welcome defence of the GTC might well have given this Bill a different course as it has proceeded through Parliament.

Even now, having heard the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, we seem still to be assuming that the GTC is no good. We know that it has not been the huge success that those of us who spoke for it 15 years ago naively anticipated, but it has not been a complete failure either. The GMC, the historic model, has been discussed by the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam. Let us not forget that, even at the present time, the GMC’s wheels sometimes grind a little greasily, particularly over the competence of individual practitioners. That does not mean that any patient would want to see the GMC abolished and its role devolved to Andrew Lansley. The GMC is strong in its institutional mechanisms and it can put right the defects that are inevitable in any human institution. That is true for the GTC. I do not know much about it, and I certainly do not know as much about it as the noble Lord, who directed it during its first, uneasy infant steps. The GTC, I am reliably informed by people inside it, knows that it is not working properly. It knows what is wrong, why it is wrong and how to put it right. The solution surely is to fix the GTC, not to abolish it and then have a string of amendments such as we have in front of us today replacing the bits of the GTC that we see as so essential and putting them into somebody’s hands in the Department for Education. Surely the time has come really to think, “If this is a failure and if we did wrong 15 years ago, let us look to see whether this is true”.

In his Second Reading speech, the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, who said that teachers in the private sector of education, for whom this Bill is not intended, are very keen to join the GTC. In January this year, research was published that showed that more than 90 per cent of parents wanted the profession to be regulated by a body such as the GTC and not by the Government. During all their speeches in this House and the other place, Ministers such as Mr Gove and the noble Lord, Lord Hill, have talked continuously about trusting the profession and letting teachers use their professional judgment. The amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, says, “Let teachers be the judge”. Let us go to the teachers and ask—as we had thought and hoped that we would—whether they want to be regulated by someone in Whitehall or are big enough to start regulating themselves properly.

[Lord Lingfield]

My Lords, I will not take you back to Henry VIII, as the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, did. I sympathise enormously with his position. He did a magnificent job in trying to get the General Teaching Council off the ground. The issue of the GTC arose long before the noble Lord did, but rather after Henry VIII, in so much as the publication of Nicholas Nickleby by Dickens in, I think, 1840 so shocked the Victorian mind concerning conditions in schools that moves towards a general teaching council were started almost straight away. As the noble Lord told us, and the noble Lord, Lord Quirk, repeated, the General Medical Council was a great spur to teachers to get moving to get their own profession. What went wrong?

What went wrong was something that went right. In the 1860s and 1870s, as these moves were going on, teachers’ unions and associations started to get their act together. Quite rightly, they were there in order not to protect the customer—which is what a general teaching council and a general medical council are about, by improving professionalism—but to stop teachers being exploited by employers. That is how the unions came together. Unfortunately, these two things became conflated, and they stayed conflated throughout the 20th century. All the moves towards a general teaching council, which were successful in Scotland, died away because of the conflation of ideas on what a union would do and what a general teaching council should do.

I remember being sent by the then Secretary of State, Mark Carlisle, to talk to all the union leaders, because he rather thought that a general teaching council would help to improve professional standards. It was very clear right from the beginning that it was all about how the unions would get certain seats on such a council and what power they would have, and what power they would have to give away.

When it comes to the noble try by the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, to get that together, we find exactly the same thing. As he said at Second Reading:

“Some of the unions that claimed to want a GTC backed off the moment they realised it might involve power-sharing, and the Government of the day were extremely ambivalent”.—[Official Report, 14/6/11; col. 754.]

Governments of every shade have been ambivalent throughout the history of bids for a general teaching council because they were absolutely unwilling to hand the reins of teacher supply to an outfit that would come to be dominated by unions. Today, if I remember correctly, some 36 of the current General Teaching Council’s 64 members have strong union connections. Therefore, the conflation is still there.

Education Bill

Lord Quirk Excerpts

Thursday 30th June 2011 Grand Committee

These are reasonable and sensible measures and I hope that when the Minister comes to respond he will think that they are a good idea and wonder why the Government did not think of them first.

[Lord Quirk]

My Lords, I support Amendments 34 and 35. I do so having in mind particularly children who are speech defective and suffer from various communication needs where the continual and continuous support by speech therapists and others is vital. There is only a small window of opportunity, to coin a phrase, in which you can address speech pathological problems. All exclusions are a tragedy, but they are an especial tragedy for someone for whom a continuous supply of special education is required as, for example, in speech pathology.

The amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Rix, which was introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, talks about behavioural needs. I hope that it is understood that this goes very much further to the conditions underlying the behavioural needs in question.

[Lord Ramsbotham]

My Lords, I entirely endorse what my noble friend Lord Quirk just said about those with communication difficulties. Like a number of other failings in health and education, I have been alerted to a particular problem by the numbers suffering from it in custody, such as those with the communication difficulties that we have just been hearing about. Some 48 per cent of young offenders suffer from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, commonly known as ADHD.

I have spoken already about the concentration in this Bill on who should be assessed and the lack of detail on what should be assessed. In the opening amendment, my noble friend Lord Northbourne talked about a child's healthy, social, emotional and cognitive readiness to enter school. The noble Baroness, Lady Perry, questioned the responsibility for preparation being passed to local government. I agreed with that in one particular respect—the word “consistency”. If you delegate responsibilities, they will inevitably be given different priorities, which leads to what are known as postcode lotteries. There must be no postcode lottery in ensuring that our children—all our children—are as ready as possible to enter school, which means that possible preventable problems have been identified and amelioration plans made.

I spoke to Amendment 1 to suggest that every child’s communication skills should be assessed, not just to identify learning disabilities and special educational needs, but also difficulties that do not qualify for either definition. The problem with ADHD is that it is another one that does not qualify for definition either as a learning disability, a disability or a special educational need. It is not mentioned in any of the other amendments in this group although it is hinted at in Amendment 42 about which the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, has just spoken.

ADHD is a common behavioural disorder affecting school-age children. But it is also a clinically distinct neurobiological condition that is caused by an imbalance of chemicals affecting specific parts of the brain responsible for behaviour. If you look at the figures, 3.62 per cent of all boys and 0.85 per cent of all girls aged between five and 15 suffer from ADHD, 90 per cent of whom will underachieve academically at school. Children with ADHD are more than 100 times at greater risk of being excluded than other children and up to two thirds of those who are diagnosed with ADHD will continue to experience symptoms into adulthood.

It is not always generally understood what these symptoms might be, and in looking for them the clearest I could find was in A Parent’s Guide to ADHD in Children published in 1997, which said that:

“Children with ADHD often act without thinking, can be hyperactive, and may have trouble focusing. ADHD can affect all aspects of a person's life, extending far beyond poor behaviour or problems at school. The symptoms can have a significant impact on family life, relationships with friends, school discipline and society as a whole.

In other words, it is not something to be taken lightly or wantonly.

Although the youth crime action plan in 2008 identified ADHD as one of the main risk factors in criminal offending during childhood, ADHD struggles for recognition within the current educational system. The term is not listed in the Special Educational Needs and Disability Act. It is not listed in the Disability Discrimination Act, the SEN Code of Practice, or the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 Code of Practice. It is not mentioned in the 2005 report on improving behaviour by the Practitioners’ Group on School Behaviour and Discipline led by Sir Alan Steer. It is mentioned only in the section entitled removal of pupils on medical grounds in the 2008 government guidance on exclusion, Improving Behaviour and Attendance: Guidance on Exclusion from Schools and Pupil Referral Units. The only mention under that is pretty bare. It does not include any direction regarding the next steps for school staff to adhere to in order to make correct, informed decisions on exclusion.

ADHD is not mentioned in Support and Aspiration: A New Approach to Special Educational Needs and Disability published in March this year, so does not qualify for education and health and care plans from birth to 25.

A specialist consultant using standard criteria and rating scales can diagnose ADHD in school-age children, but the majority of adolescent psychiatrists and paediatricians believe that it is currently underdiagnosed in the United Kingdom. Sadly, once it is diagnosed there is no quick fix. The condition is manageable with a combination of regimes that include behaviour management, cognitive therapies and medication.

According to NICE, ADHD is associated with significant financial and emotional cost to the healthcare system, education services, families, carers and society as a whole, quite apart from the basic financial cost of £4,000 a year to teach a child in mainstream and £15,000 a year in a pupil referral unit. Carrying on with this problem, two thirds of parents of children with ADHD who had been in contact with teachers found that the perceived competence by teachers in the management of ADHD was at best variable. A very large number of specialists feel that teachers are not aware of ADHD and do not therefore realise what the symptoms are or that people showing those symptoms should be referred to someone as quickly as possible. We come down to the fact that, at present, ADHD is usually identified only after the second exclusion for bad behaviour. The youngest excludee whom I came across in prison was a boy who had been excluded from his playgroup at the age of four and never allowed to attend any form of education thereafter. It was small wonder that I found him Young Offender Institution Dover—and that was down to ADHD.

What should we do? We have already brought out the fact that a large number of ministries are involved in taking action to ensure that every child is ready for school. I have already quoted a number of Ministers who are involved in different aspects of ADHD. I ask the Minister to agree to undertake not only to consider my amendment, which has a specific recommendation about action following a second exclusion and is what is happening now and should be enshrined—but to start thinking seriously about those who are at risk of exclusion as a result of ADHD by raising its profile on the political and healthcare agendas to ensure better futures for children with this condition.

If we were to go on to debate the subject, I would talk about the effects of nutrition, because it has such a huge effect on the brain and is such a powerful contributor to the condition and its treatment. However, this is not the time or the place for that. However, confident in the hope that the Minister will accept my plea and its logic, I am sure that all that can come out in the consideration that will, I hope, follow.

Education Bill

Lord Quirk Excerpts

Tuesday 14th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Quirk]

My Lords, my main concern is with Part 3 of the Bill, which I had hoped would address more fully and robustly the issues presented in last November’s White Paper, The Importance of Teaching. Of course our education system needs attention in many other respects as well and the Bill tackles several of these, but the role of teachers is surely paramount. For too long their profession has failed to attract the best of our school leavers or university graduates. We are told that:

“Top-performing countries consistently recruit their teachers from the top third of graduates”,

but our own target, and that only from September 2012, is to be a Lower Second, an astonishingly modest goal these days when few graduates get lower.

The White Paper rightly contrasts us with the highest performing economies where,

“teachers and teaching are held in the highest esteem”,

as of course they were in this country within living memory. You do not have to go back to Goldsmith’s “Deserted Village”, where the teacher was held in awe,

“and still the wonder grew

That one small head could carry all he knew”.

How do we make teachers respected and admired once again? It will not be done while entrants to the profession have only two A-levels at E grade. Teachers will hardly become role models by cravenly adopting the styles of their most disadvantaged students—sloppy in dress, behaviour and speech. Nor can it be done when teachers are bullied, terrorised and physically abused with near impunity by disruptive minorities of 13 year-olds. No wonder so many flee the job they would love to do. I therefore welcome the measures in Part 2 of the Bill to strengthen the hand of teachers and enable them to get on with their teaching. This is what the bulk of pupils want and it is certainly what their parents want. Nor, finally, will we get happy, respectful learning while half the classroom has no interest in, or aptitude for, the subject being taught. So, the flexibility and variety of schools now envisaged must surely command support, not least the UTCs of the noble Lord, Lord Baker.

Fifteen years ago, I was among those who believed that a vital way to raise the status of teachers, and hence their self-respect and the public’s respect, was to make the profession self-regulating with its own general council analogous to the councils for medicine and other major professions. After all, who better than teachers to know the requisite aptitude and training for new recruits and to recognise the failings in those who subsequently do not come up to scratch? Sadly, as we know, little of that happened when the 1998 Act duly delivered the GTC. Better-qualified candidates still did not queue up to be teachers, as they do to be doctors, vets or lawyers. Nor has the GTC been anything like as muscular as, say, the GMC in asserting its authority to set the standards for recruitment and training or to weed out incompetence. Last year, I asked the Government a number of detailed questions about the qualifications of teachers currently in post. I was told bleakly by the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Drefelin:

“The information requested is not held centrally”.—[Official Report, 3/3/10; col. WA 355.]

Why was the GTC not assembling just such data?

So I can understand why the GTC became a sitting target in the quango cull, but I am puzzled by the quiescence and apparent complicity on all sides. Are teachers not proud of their status-conferring council? Some say that the annual fee made it unpopular. However, it is only £36. Junior doctors on comparable pay have to stump up £200. Can noble Lords imagine doctors sitting quietly on their hands if what we had before us was a health Bill proposing to abolish the GMC and transfer all its powers and duties to Mr Andrew Lansley? How does abolishing the GTC square with repeated mantras about trusting teachers and giving them more autonomy—a word used by the noble Lord, Lord Hill, several times this afternoon? Not least, I am puzzled why, with the GTC mentioned in the 1997 Labour manifesto and duly delivered a year later, so many MPs are ready to discard it, as shown by the six-hour Commons debate in February, when the GTC was barely mentioned, let alone defended.

Even if this House were content to see the GTC’s powers and duties vested in the hands of the able but already pretty busy Michael Gove, we would need to scrutinise very carefully what these powers and duties are. Clause 8, in particular, requires detailed elucidation. It gives the Secretary of State power to deal with a teacher’s improper conduct. I wonder whether that applies also to a teacher’s incompetence. It surely cannot be the case that, after getting a thumbs up on completing an initial three-term induction period, a teacher is deemed to be fit for the job throughout the next 60 terms.

I wish to make one final brief point. Mr Gove posed a rhetorical question on 8 February:

“Do we want to keep ... the General Teaching Council”,

and other education bodies,

“in their current forms?”.—[Official Report, Commons, 8/2/11; col. 173.]

Will the Minister say whether this last phrase implies that the Government might consider retaining the GTC in a substantially changed form—for example, with more employer representation?