Education Bill

Baroness Warnock Excerpts

Tuesday 1st November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, the man that my noble friend Lady Perry was remembering was Tristram Jones-Parry—one of the finest headmasters Westminster School has ever had. When he retired he was not allowed to teach mathematics in a state school, although he had taught it at Westminster. This illustrates how fatuous the current situation is.

I am also worried about this amendment in terms of what the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, was saying a few days ago on the way in which teaching will move as technology moves in. People outside teaching will become much more involved. There is a lot of demand from industry to get involved, say, in language teaching and make their staff available for language teaching. The situation is similar in technology. Certainly the teacher has a very strong role in supervising this, but some of the teaching will be done by people who are never going to be qualified; people who have no interest in becoming qualified and who are performing that function under the supervision of a qualified teacher.

My suggestion to my noble friend is that the best way to tackle the concerns that have been addressed around the House is to make sure that anybody who asks can see a full list of the qualifications of every member of staff in the school. In this way, whatever decisions are being made by the head will be made in public and will be decisions that he or she will have to justify. That seems to me the best way to combine safety with the sort of flexibility that will let some very good people teach, despite their lack of some particular qualification.

[Baroness Warnock]

My Lords, I support what the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, has just said. In the case of languages particularly, it would be losing an enormously fruitful possibility to forbid teachers of foreign languages to teach because they had no qualification. There are many people who come over to this country who would be very good teachers but have no qualification—a wife of somebody who is doing a professional job, for example—and they would be an extraordinarily good resource to be able to use. The question of supervision is, of course, enormously important. The other area where we would lose a great deal is that of music. A lot of professional musicians do not take a teaching qualification.

There are born teachers who love teaching and teach extremely well, but who do not want, or are too old to take, a teaching qualification. They should not be forbidden in our schools. We need lots of flexibility here. It is the attitude of the person to his or her pupils that is important, not a formal qualification. I strongly support what the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, has just said.

[Baroness Benjamin]

My Lords, many Afro-Caribbean families feel that their children are not being served well in schools. We all know that and it goes without saying. A lot of parents believe that the opportunity to have a free school is one advantage that will give their children an opportunity to have a fulfilled relationship in the classroom, as the noble Lord, Lord Knight, said. Having a teacher who is perhaps not fully trained is an opportunity to make sure that those young people who need just a bit of understanding and care can feel that the way that they are thinking and feeling is being embraced. Free schools have given them that opportunity, and if the teacher is not qualified—as we have heard from many noble Lords in the House—we will be doing a great service to those young people in our society who feel excluded in many ways.