Schools Bill [HL]

Baroness Wilcox of Newport Excerpts

Committee stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Monday 13th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Bristol]

My Lords, I rise to speak in place of my noble colleague the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham, who cannot be here today, to his Amendment 33 and to declare his interest as chair of the National Society, and also to speak against Amendment 34A.

Amendment 33 to Clause 3

“ensures that the religious designation of church schools could not be removed by secondary legislation.”

The Church of England provides 4,700 schools, so we take seriously our vision that we are deeply Christian and serving the common good. This vision is for the whole community but is built on the firm foundation of the character of our church schools, which is central to that vision. I again pay tribute to the Minister for the way that her department has valued this character and worked with us to ensure that it is safeguarded in this legislation. We believe that this amendment strengthens that intention and provides a further safeguard.

A necessarily broad approach is undertaken in this Bill in applying legislation for maintained schools to academies through amending regulations. While we can appreciate the need to do this, it is unusual to see primary legislation which enables power to be applied or disapplied by secondary legislation. This short amendment would ensure that the “religious designation” of

“schools could not be removed by secondary legislation.”

I appreciate that Clause 3(3) provides for the protection of the status of an academy “with a religious character” by prohibiting regulations for

“arrangements for collective worship and the provision of religious education”.

However, these are just some of the outworkings of the religious character of a school, and we believe that this additional safeguard is necessary to safeguard the very designation of its character. It would be inappropriate to allow secondary legislation to have such impact on the designation of character of so many schools. This is a significant issue for our schools, and I will be listening with interest to any assurances on this topic that the Minister can provide.

I want also to speak against Amendment 34A. While I support this amendment in principle, as drafted it does not include stakeholders in the list of relevant bodies for consultation. Church schools are not included, but they represent a third of the sector and therefore should be included in the consultation.

[Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)]

We see that this group concerns the Secretary of State’s power to make regulations for any education legislation to apply to academies. Thus, some may see this as redressing the balance between academies and the maintained sector.

I am speaking to our amendments, beginning with Amendment 34A, which prevents the Secretary of State using these

“powers to apply or disapply education legislation”

until they have been consulted on with

“headteachers, governors, academies, and pupils”.

I will pick up the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Bristol’s point, which could be a useful addition, so I thank her for raising it with us. Of course, consultation is the key to good governance and, if there is a sense of imposition from a distant central source, then legislation will never be as good as it could be or implemented in the way it should be.

Furthermore, our Amendment 35 removes the Secretary of State’s power to apply legislation

“relating to further education colleges to academies”

by removing “further education” from “the definition of ‘educational institution’”. As it stands, these clauses signal a further power grab, empowering a future Secretary of State unilaterally to remove religious designation from a faith school, as noted in the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham’s Amendment 33.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

Tempting as it is to take power into my hands and give the noble Baroness the answer straightaway, she knows very well that this is something we need to agree more broadly within the department. As soon as that is done, of course I look forward—that is an understatement—to updating the House.

[Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)]

Before the Minister sits down, I just ask a simple question: when?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I must explain to the Committee that I am not able to give a firm date on that today, but as soon as I am able to, I will update the House.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

Just to add to that, I think there are—or there used to be—ways for teachers moving from the independent sector to the state sector which were far less than nine months.

I take the point about a subject like IT. I absolutely agree with the amendment: teaching is a profession, and all the evidence internationally shows that the better qualified the teacher, the better the achievement for students. That is what this is all about. But if the problem is that, in a fast-moving world, there are a set of skills such as IT that people need to come into education to deliver, there needs to be another way of meeting that need and getting those people in rather than saying to the whole of the school system that teachers do not have to have a qualification. This is not being used to get people with specialist IT skills into schools to help children. It is being used by headteachers and schools where they cannot get staff with qualifications in front of children in classrooms, so they go for those without qualifications.

Although I share with the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, the wish to get the latest skills into the classroom without making people do a year-long PGCE, we just need a bit more creative thinking in order to make that happen. It cannot be that we go back to a profession that not only is not a graduate-level profession but is not a qualified profession at all. The message that gives is something that none of us who are committed to the education of children ought to support.

[Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)]

It is a real pleasure to follow my noble friend. She is absolutely right: this is about profession.

My Lords, we asked to de-group this amendment from that of my noble friend Lord Knight, because it is such an important issue and deserves its own debate. Our Amendment 36 would remove the exemption teachers in academies have from needing to have QTS but gives a grace period until September 2024 to give schools and teachers sufficient time to adjust. We felt that this is a sensible way forward. The amendment redresses the opt-out given by former Prime Minister David Cameron and Secretary of State Michael Gove when they removed that need for academies to have QTS in 2012.

Since that time, there has been a decade where children and young people have been taught in academies by unqualified staff. We would assert that in recognition of the preparation teachers have to undergo, the term “teacher” should be reserved solely for use by those with QTS and that a person in training—or indeed, a specialist or person qualified in IT—should have a different designation. This amendment would ensure that, in future, all pupils in every school were taught by a qualified teacher.

When I was looking at the background to the debate today, I looked at what the Sutton Trust had said. It is a research institution that fights for social mobility so that every young person—no matter who their parents are, what school they go to or where they live—has the chance to succeed in life. In its seminal report, What Makes Great Teaching?, it said that the quality of the teacher is the most important factor in academic and non-academic attainment. We have heard from other noble Lords previously in Committee about the importance of leadership and a justification of the enormously inflated salaries enjoyed by heads within academy trusts, but the Sutton Trust research firmly places the attainment factor in the hands of the teacher in the classroom. Those of us in your Lordships’ House who have had the privilege—indeed, it is a privilege—to work in this profession would no doubt agree.

The research defined effective teaching as that which leads to improved student achievement and focused on six common components that should be considered when assessing teaching quality. First is pedagogical content knowledge. As well as a strong understanding of the material being taught, teachers must also understand the ways students think about the content, be able to evaluate the thinking behind students’ own methods and identify their common misconceptions. These are all areas covered in training teachers towards QTS. It is not just about having the knowledge and content of the subject itself; you have to have knowledge and understanding of how children learn in order to convey that knowledge. The research further identified the quality of instruction, classroom climate, classroom management—which I was very good at, as your Lordships might guess—teacher beliefs and professional behaviours, all of which impact on the quality of education.

I also looked at research by the University of Oxford’s Nuffield College from 2019, which found that pupils are more likely to be taught by unqualified teachers in academies than in maintained schools. It concluded that this widens class-based inequality because schools with more pupils from lower socioeconomic backgrounds tend to hire more teachers without QTS, and that in secondary schools

“this relationship in academies is almost double that in LA-maintained schools, revealing a role for academies in widening class-based inequality in access to qualified teachers”—

which seems like levelling down, rather than levelling up.