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.