Baroness Bousted (Lab)

My Lords, I will speak in particular to Amendments 436B, 436C, 437 and 437A. Before I became a union leader, doing the work of the devil, according to the noble Lord, Lord Nash, I was a teacher. I worked in university departments of education for over 10 years in York, Liverpool and London, and a big part of that job was to give teachers initial teacher training at MA level and at PhD and research level. I know that no education system can exceed the quality of its teachers and that the value of that training was essential. It is not enough that teachers just have very good subject knowledge. They also need to understand professional concerns such as effective pedagogy. They need to learn about behaviour and safeguarding. In fact, initial teacher training is now completely transformed. The majority of it takes place in schools. There are various routes into QTS. It is much easier to work towards QTS while you are training or while you are a classroom assistant. Various Governments over a period of years have made the routes into initial teacher training and qualified teacher status much better. It is an important professional qualification which underpins not only the status of the profession but the quality of the education which children are getting. I would also add that this is a social justice issue, I think, because the fact is that the children who most need teachers who are qualified in the subjects they are teaching are, at the moment, the least likely to get them. DfE evidence to the STRB in 2025 shows clearly that pupils in schools with the highest percentage of pupil premium are more likely than other pupils to be taught by unqualified teachers and non-specialists. They receive a narrower curriculum than other pupils, are less likely to be offered physics as a subject option, and are more likely to be taught by unqualified teachers and teachers teaching outside of their subject area. That is why, over the course of last year, I established and chaired the independent Teaching Commission, whose report, Shaping the Future of Teaching, examines the causes of the teacher supply crisis, which has been two decades in the making—in particular, its effects on pupils whose start in life is disadvantaged, who most need qualified teachers to compensate for the 40% disadvantage gap that is created by poverty before they start school.