Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)

My Lords, I support Amendments 111A and 111B in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran. I declare an interest as a governor of King’s College London Mathematics School and as a member of its finance and pay committees. I have been trying to get my head around the implications of these clauses for support staff ever since the Bill was introduced. The more I think about it, the more unworkable it seems to be. As the noble Baroness pointed out, the complexity of support staff roles and the way they vary with different types of schools has become much greater in the last 20 years. My experience is of a rather unusual 16-to-19 academy. We do outreach and projects in collaboration with charities and the university. We engage in a large number of things that are not about just standard school teaching. The standard scales for teaching staff are not a problem for us but, for support staff, we have specific roles that are suited to the particular activities in which people are engaged. We certainly pay as much as we can afford to; in the London market, we do not have much choice. The point that I want to stress is that, while it is very welcome that the Government recognise that people’s pay should not be reduced as a result of this, the real problem is that there are huge numbers of important and central jobs and roles out there, which vary hugely according to the nature of the school, the nature of the environment and what people are doing. The complexity that this will introduce when we do our workforce planning and try to work out where a new role fits on these scales really worries me. I hope that, as things roll out, the Government think very hard about how to move forward in a way that allows successful schools, which are going beyond traditional classroom teaching and doing a huge number of important things, to continue to create support staff roles that fit what they are trying to do.