Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lady Barran in her amendments, as I am rather confused by how this will improve the education system. I speak as someone on the front line. As of today, my academy trust employs 717 non-teaching staff across our 18 schools. We provide high-quality benefits to our staff. We have to match the terms and conditions of the local authority, including a very generous pension, and we are proud to do so—but we go much further. For example, we offer a health scheme for all our teaching and non-teaching staff, which provides an online consultation with a GP and online access to prescriptions, so that they can get treatment far more quickly than through the NHS backlog, and we provide a dental scheme which gives access to one hygienist appointment a year, as well as theatre and retail discounts. On top of that, we have been very assertive in pushing through apprenticeships for our non-teaching staff. We have put 69 staff through apprenticeships over the last couple of years, which is a pretty high percentage of the 700-odd staff we employ. We did that knowing full well that we would lose a lot of them as they became skilled and moved on to jobs elsewhere, which is what they have done. How will this improve anything for teaching? It will add another layer of administration and costs, and more HR resource will have to be deployed to wade our way through these regulations. Listening to my noble friend Lady Barran, they sound extraordinarily impractical because, frankly, an IT support staff member in, say, Thetford, which is where we have our most westerly school, is in a very different market from anything in Cambridge. Indeed, what is an IT role? The role is changing almost monthly, as we try to create data lakes to access a large language model for our own teaching data. These things are undefined—you will have to create bands that are so wide as to be meaningless. To the point made by my noble friend Lady Barran, we cannot afford to go higher and we cannot go lower, so what is the point of all this? I would be grateful for the Minister’s comments.