Baroness Bousted (Lab)

My Lords, Amendment 65A refers to “any other sector where the core duties require in-person collaboration, physical presence, or real-time operational responsiveness”. That could well be argued to be teaching, of course. As my noble friend Lord Katz said, flexible working is not just working at home—it has a whole range of other alternatives and ways of doing it. The lack of the ability to work flexibly has real consequences for the delivery of a profession that I know a lot about, which is teaching. Some 76% of teachers are women. The biggest proportion of teachers who leave the profession every year are women in their 30s. I declare an interest in that I am chairing the commission on teaching. We have commissioned some independent research on this issue from the Key foundation, which finds that women in their 30s with children leave teaching in huge numbers. It was 9,000 last year, the biggest number on record of women leaving the profession. They leave when they have children because their requests to work part-time or flexibly are denied. The noble Lord, Lord Sharpe of Epsom, asked whether employers were just routinely refusing flexible working. Well, in education, yes, they are. The rate of flexible working among graduate professions is about 46%. In teaching, 2% of teachers last year asked whether they could work flexibly. Those requests are routinely denied by employers who have a very poor understanding of what flexible working involves and, frankly, by employers who refuse flexible working because of a one-size-fits-all policy and then find that the teachers who are so precious to them leave the profession. Last week I spoke to a young teacher with two children who asked whether she could have two registration periods off a week—she would make up the time in other ways—because her youngest child, who is three, was finding it difficult to settle at nursery. That was refused and she has now given in her resignation. Work on this has been done by the Key foundation and by the Missing Mothers report from the New Britain Project, authored by Anna McShane. When she looked at the reasons for women leaving the profession in their 30s, she found that overwhelmingly they leave because they do not feel that they can manage the demands of the job full time and the demands of bringing up a family. The main recommendation in that report was that flexible working should be supported and encouraged. So, if an amendment that refers to “any other sector where the core duties require in-person collaboration, physical presence, or real-time operational responsiveness” were to be included in the Bill, it would be used up and down the land by education employers as a “get out of jail free card” for flexible working requests. As the Minister said, that means all sorts of things, including the right to flexible working—and the DfE defines flexible working as flexible and part-time. We have to get out of the idea that there are whole swathes of the economy—education being the one I know most about—where flexible working is just not possible. We have to start thinking differently about this. If this amendment were agreed, it would make doubly difficult the right to request and to engage in flexible working, which would have such an effect on retaining teachers in the profession and on raising educational standards in our schools. So I think it is a very poor amendment.