Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Storey Excerpts

Wednesday 10th September 2025 Lords Chamber

The other thing I urge the Government to look at is what people are being taught when getting qualified teacher status. It ought to be a prestigious, useful qualification—the sort of thing you get early in your career because it teaches you so much that you can use in all sorts of other aspects of life. But its whole structure seems to be turned inwards; it just teaches you the things that are useful in teaching and does not help you expand that into something that is a broad skill for the rest of your life. Qualified teacher status should be something where people say, “Why should I do a master’s, it is just a boring year doing a pointless exercise? If I can do QTS, I will have a whole range of skills that any employer looking at me will appreciate and I will find a deep use for in my life”. I do not see why it cannot be like that; the skills that the noble Lord, Lord Knight, described are exactly the sort of things that you want to have going through life, but that is not the way QTS is taught. There is a real opportunity to change that.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, is right: there is a crisis in the supply of teachers, not just the numbers but also, as he said, in specialism. There is also the great worry that we are seeing the lowest number of people wanting to go into teaching and the highest number of teachers leaving early. But his solution is not my solution.

I have said in this House on many occasions that the most important thing in a child’s life is the quality of their teacher. We do not, as a society, value teachers. Having a qualification does not make you a good teacher. We can remember that, in the 30s, 40s and maybe even the 50s, someone with a university degree would come out of university and think they could teach. You cannot always. Occasionally, they could do it. Those who could not do it at secondary modern schools quickly tried to transfer to grammar schools, where they thought it might be easier. As the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, rightly said, if you have in the playground or on the sports field some challenging pupils haring around and you do not have an understanding of child development or behaviour management, you cannot cope. You would not, for example, expect someone who has a law degree to suddenly step into a court; you just would not have it. We have to work out how on earth we can ensure that people want to become teachers.

It is not just about training to become a teacher; we have to support them when they are in teaching. It is not just about salary, although that helps. It is about continuous professional development. It is about the campaigns about workload that many of us have constantly gone on about. I think that is a simple thing to solve. Teachers have said to me any number of times, “If I could just get on with the job of teaching without having to do all these other tasks”.

That does not stop visitors coming into school. It does not stop experts who have a particular knowledge being linked to a school and coming in from time to time to talk to the children. By the way, high-level teaching assistants can teach in schools. Teaching assistants at level 2 can teach, as long as they are supervised by the teacher. Maybe we should be encouraging teaching assistants to go on to become qualified teachers. We cannot have in our schools a situation where qualified teachers are undervalued and where we increasingly think the answer is to bring in unqualified so-called experts.

Turning to my amendment on bullying, I am a bit surprised that it is in this group—I think that the issue is covered in one of the later groups as well. It is worrying that currently 35% of 10 to 15 year-olds have experienced bullying of some sort. In 2023, 1.5 million children suffered bullying. Bullying happens in all sorts of ways. It can be physical, it can be emotional, it can be verbal and it can be cyberbullying. We seem to think that the important thing is to sort out mobile phones, which will stop bullying and make pupils more attentive to learning. I have a great deal of sympathy with that, as we probably all do, and mobile phones can increasingly be used for bullying pupils as well.

When a pupil is bullied, a number of things happen. It is not just physical, where there might be bruising or whatever; it is also emotional, of course. It leads to increasing absence from school. Children are frightened to go to school, because the bully might be there, so that affects their school attendance and we have talked at length about how important school attendance is. It will affect their grades when they come to do their exams. They will not be handing in homework, and so it goes on. We have to ensure that we take the whole issue of bullying seriously, which I know the Government do, and the amendment spells out some of the things that we need to do. I hope, when we come back to this at a later stage, to be able to look at it in more detail.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My Lords, this group has elicited another excellent debate and, like other noble Lords, on these Benches we remain unclear what problem the Government are trying to solve. The Government’s own data shows that the percentage of teachers without a formal teaching qualification has been pretty stable in both primary and secondary schools for the past 10 years. It sits at about 1% in primary and between 1.5% and 2% in secondary, which is about 6,000 teachers out of a workforce of over 450,000. We are talking about tiny numbers, largely in specialist subjects, which has not changed over a very long time. I could not find—and I did look—any evidence that suggests that teachers without a formal teaching qualification provide lower-quality education.

That is not to disagree in any way with any noble Lord who has spoken already. We know that the quality of the teacher at the front of the classroom is the single biggest and most important influence on the education that a child receives. The Government have argued that one would not want to be seen by an unqualified lawyer or dentist. As other noble Lords have said, any of us, if asked, “Would you like your child to be taught by a qualified or unqualified teacher?”, would say, “A qualified teacher”. But as the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, said, if asked, “Would you like to be taught by someone with a physics degree and 10 years in the industry, or someone with a degree in English and QTS?”, I think, to be fair, the answers might be different. Amendments 437 and 437A in the names of my noble friends Lord Holmes of Richmond and Lord Agnew of Oulton have my support, because they just apply common sense, focusing on the combination of specific subject expertise at degree level, in the case of my noble friend Lord Agnew’s amendment, and demonstrable competence in teaching.

Now, having listened to the debate, I am beginning to wonder whether, given the tiny number of unqualified teachers in the system, this whole clause is not a bit of a red herring. We have a number of routes: there is the assessment-only route to get QTS, where a school or initial teacher training—SCITT—is able to award qualified teacher status to someone who has GCSEs in English and maths and a degree, and who demonstrates suitability; they obviously read my noble friend Lord Agnew’s amendment. If we have an assessment-only route, we have higher-level teaching assistants, which the noble Lord, Lord Storey, referred to, and we have teachers from FE colleges with QTLS, rather than QTS, who can currently teach in secondary schools—if all those routes are followed, maybe we can close what I argue is an inconsequential gap in a way that will allow the Government to say that everyone now has QTS, but it does not really change anything on the ground.

The noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, who is not in his place, talked earlier about what the public care about. I think they care about Governments focusing on real issues rather than this, which feels like a slightly confected problem.

My amendments in this group follow a familiar pattern. By calling for the clause not to stand part of the Bill, I am offering the Government the logical, simple course of action. There just is no need for this clause, unless the Minister can give us evidence of the harm being done or the lower outcomes for children from teachers without QTS.

The other amendments seek to limit the damage done to schools from the clause as drafted, particularly the schools that we all care about, which the noble Baroness, Lady Bousted, and my noble friend Lord Agnew talked about: schools in the most disadvantaged communities. My Amendment 436C would exempt shortage subjects from the constraints of the clause, and my Amendment 436B would give schools five years rather than one, in which time a teacher would have to achieve a teaching qualification. That is particularly important—I hope the Minister will comment on this—for special schools, where the percentage of teachers without a teaching qualification is often higher.

I have added my name to Amendment 436A in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, which limits this measure to core subjects in the national curriculum. The noble Baroness spoke with enormous experience and insight into the potential impacts of the measure, particularly in relation to technical and vocational qualifications.

The noble Lord, Lord Storey, gave the Government the answer to at least a start on reducing bullying in schools by introducing a smartphone ban, which I am hoping the Minister’s new ministerial colleague will persuade her of, because apparently in another life he thought it was a good idea.

The issue that the clause raises is a point of principle, again, about autonomy and accountability. Like all the others, it is easy to say that the clause on its own will not be too harmful; that may or may not be true, but, overall, the Bill is fundamentally centralising and will undo the ingredients that have improved English education so much over the past 14 years. We on these Benches deeply oppose the principle of clawing back the discretion that we have given to school and trust leaders. We remain baffled why the Government want to undo what has worked well and do not focus instead on areas that deserve their attention. We would rather see the expansion of freedoms to maintained schools than their withdrawal from academies.

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[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Sewell of Sanderstead, gave us an inspiring scene-setter for the next groups of amendments that we are discussing. It was a taster of why the decisions that we make on this Bill matter to so many pupils and young people. This is why I urge the Government not to throw the baby out with the bath-water and, in many instances, to think again. I have my Amendment 506A in this group, which simply says that, before the Bill is passed or enacted, the Government’s own curriculum review needs to be published and consulted on.

The legislation before us requires that all schools follow the national curriculum, yet there is no agreed national curriculum. Instead, the Government want to review that curriculum, which is fair enough, but that review will not even be published before we are asked to vote “blind”. It is simply wrong for a Bill to force schools to follow a particular curriculum when we have not been told what is in it: cart before horse and all that.

More broadly, we have spent a long, long time on this Bill so far. Outside of here, the Bill is informally known as the Schools Bill, yet we have managed not to discuss the whole reason for schools—to educate children into the world of knowledge—until this point. Educating children requires us to agree on what the content of that education consists of. The curriculum is not, or should not be, an afterthought. It is key: the raison d’être for schools as vehicles used by one generation to pass on to the next the canonical knowledge of humanity. When taught well, it is our greatest tool for social mobility. It is neither a fixed body of knowledge nor frozen in aspic. It changes over time. It is often contested and can be challenged, but it is a key component of educating the young.

The argument epitomised by this group of amendments asks whether every school needs to follow the same curriculum that every school must follow, yet we do not know what curriculum we are talking about, despite how important the curriculum is. The Government recognise that, which is why they set up the review. Taking three of the amendments we have here gives us some sort of meat on what the curriculum bone might be or what the arguments might be. One calls for financial education in primary schools, which we have already heard motivated. There is one to come on education for growing food and food preparation and another on education for voting.

You might say that those curriculum-related amendments are “hobby-horse” amendments. I am not saying that in an insulting way: they suggest the interests of the people putting them forward. They could all be creative and positive in a particular head’s hands with certain groups of pupils, depending on how they were used. If you get any group of teachers, parents, adults or indeed pupils together at any time and ask what should go into the curriculum, there are always very lively and creative discussions about priorities, what should matter, and so on and so forth.

The point I am making is that, even at the best of times, the curriculum is something that is a source of dispute. It can be liberating, transformative and inspiring, but it can be—and we all know this to be true—overly ideological, propagandist, politicised and used as a device for social engineering. As I said at Second Reading, I worry when Professor Becky Francis says that her curriculum review will look at what is taught through a “social justice lens”, with an emphasis on inclusivity. I am afraid I think of some of the more divisive aspects of identity politics and some of the arguments that have been had over critical race theory in schools, decolonisation and so on. It fills me with dread.

This Government have already had to pick up the pieces of curriculum mis-steps in relation to RSHE, as parents across the UK have become shocked to discover that their children were covering highly sexualised and age-inappropriate content and that some schools were affirming children in their chosen gender identities, a form of social transitioning now broadly discredited. I commend the Government for tackling that and taking it on: the point I am making is that all of that was inspired by centralised curriculum diktats. I therefore think we have to consider what the centralised curriculum diktat for all schools will be after the curriculum review.

Professor Francis has apparently said that the review will look at the alleged problem that the curriculum is too heavy. My problem is that we are now being asked to vote on legislation in a “curriculum lite” way, with the curriculum absent, despite a hugely significant mandate that all schools must follow this curriculum.

We are told that the curriculum review will address barriers to attainment, but so far the hints we have been given into the review look to be blaming exams and a curriculum that is overly academic for creating too much stress and anxiety for pupils—something that I completely disagree with. This hints at a new assessment regime that will be less stressful, and I am afraid that that fuels genuine concerns among educators that the curriculum review might amount to a recipe for lower academic standards. As we have seen in both Scotland and Wales, which have completely upended their curriculum in recent years, attainment has plummeted, sometimes below the OECD average.

I have not yet decided whether the Bill’s Clause 47 is totally wrong-headed and should be dropped, although I thought that the noble Baroness, Lady Evans of Bowes Park, made a very good case that was worth considering. I am sold on the idea of a common entitlement for all children, and I am not opposed in principle to a national curriculum for all. But the Government should not be rigid and there should be more flexibility. Amendment 444 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Storey, would allow for that, so I am very interested in that.

However, none of this is the point of my amendment. This Bill says that all schools follow a national curriculum but will not tell us what is in it before we are being asked to rubber-stamp it. It reminds me of one FE student I taught. He was a bit of a cheeky chap. He missed a deadline for his GCSE and he said out loud in the class: “Can’t you just pass me, miss? I’ll show you the essay when I’ve written it later”. I thought that was a bit of a cheek, and I am afraid the same cheek is being displayed by the Government. I urge them to get their essay in on time, or at least to allow us to not have to vote until we have seen the essay.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, for that. It has made me think, and I will come back to some of the points she made.

In the 1970s, we did not have a national curriculum and schools could teach whatever they liked. There was only one subject they had to teach, and that was RE. Along came the William Tyndale School in London, which decided that its curriculum was going to be progressively radical and its teaching methods very child-centric. Relationships at the school broke down completely between staff and children, and the Government of the day had to step in. Then came along a Mr Ken Clarke—the noble Lord, Lord Clarke—with his national curriculum, which said that we as a society have a duty to spell out what we expect our school children to learn. The national curriculum was born. But it is not a national curriculum, because it is not taught in Northern Ireland, Scotland or Wales, and, as we know, it is not taught in over half of our schools, because they can choose what they want to teach.

These amendments make us question what we should teach. Do we think we should teach financial education in school? I think we should, but why should it be left to an individual school to decide that? Should we not, as a society, decide that? I firmly believe that water safety should be taught in schools, but it is not down to me; it is down to individual academies to make that decision. Should we insist that every primary school pupil should have swimming lessons and be able to swim 25 metres before they leave primary school? I think that is really important—I wonder how many other people think that is important. But it is not down to us; it is down to individual academies.

I welcome the curriculum review. I did not put down an amendment saying that water safety should be included because I am not carrying out the curriculum review, but the organisation I am a patron of has written and given evidence as to why that should be the case, as I think a number of people have for financial education. We wait to see what the review suggests.

I believe that one of the strengths of academies has been that they have built flexibility into the curriculum of their choice. I am just making the case—it will not be for me to decide—that there could be an opportunity for all schools to have some flexibility when deciding their curriculums.

I will end by discussing what the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, said. She is right, but each individual academy that is deciding its own curriculum does not come to us and ask whether we agree with it. They just get on with it—they are just allowed to do it. Maybe the noble Baroness is right that there should be a political decision about what is taught in our national curriculum. That is a very interesting thought, and I will leave the Committee with it.