Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
Lord Hampton Excerpts(2 days, 11 hours ago)
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Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)
My Lords, I will speak briefly on this group of amendments in the same vein as have my noble friends Lady Morris and Lady Bousted, and emphasise that we need qualified teachers, particularly for the most disadvantaged pupils in our country.
Some years ago, prior to the pandemic, I was for seven years a senior executive at TES—the Times Educational Supplement, as it once was. During that tenure, I set up the Tes Institute, which was a teacher training institute. It is now the fifth-largest qualifier of teachers in England. The main route that we opened up through the Tes Institute was something that we branded “straight to teaching”: in essence, it was the opportunity for people who were working as instructors, who had instructor grades of pay but had experience of teaching, to be assessed for how close to the teaching standards they would be; then a bespoke professional development programme could be devised for them so that they could reach that set of standards and get QTS.
Incidentally—I say this to the noble Lord, Lord Agnew—I was surprised to learn that a PGCE did not qualify you to teach; there is not an equivalence between the two. Qualified teacher status is a separate thing, but there is an assumption within the system that a PGCE equals qualified teacher status.
The process of developing Straight to Teaching taught me that there are plenty of people who are working as instructors in our schools in this country, in effect, and who could be taken through to become qualified teachers on the job while carrying on being paid and using their experience. That could apply to those in vocational settings as well as in more academic settings; it says to me that there are routes.
Teaching apprenticeships are now being opened up for those people who have the sorts of qualifications and experience that have been discussed in this debate to be hired by schools and then, within a reasonable time, to be taken into qualified teacher status. That is something we should grab because it is important to value pedagogic training as well as subject knowledge. It is also important to value training in bullying, to which Amendment 439 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, refers. It is important that people should understand and be trained around special educational needs. It is important that they should be trained around physical literacy, as was explored by the noble Baronesses, Lady Grey-Thompson and Lady Sater, in their important speeches. Having training programmes to achieve qualified teacher status for those people who are brought into classrooms to teach as instructors is something that we should expect as part of the move towards every teacher becoming qualified.
Finally, I support Amendment 495, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Sater, has added her name and which was spoken to by the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson. I support it in the terms that they set out around the importance of sport and physical literacy. Like them, I was a member of your Lordships’ National Plan for Sport and Recreation Committee. I hope that we will have a chance to revisit what we recommended then to see whether it remains valid for a new Government to take forward.
I also support Amendment 495 on the basis of some of the other things that are listed around a review of ITT, such as financial literacy, AI literacy and media literacy. These have become increasingly important but are currently neglected in initial teacher training. Once the curriculum and assessment review has reported, it will be timely for there to be a review of whether we need to change aspects of initial teacher training in order to take account of that review.
Lord Hampton (CB)
My Lords, as a secondary school teacher, I admit that I am conflicted by this group of amendments. Noble Lords have highlighted the benefits of getting industry experts to teach in schools. At our school, we use architects to teach the architecture programme. I recently went to a UTC that gets employers to come in and set projects for students. The employers then regularly come in to look at the projects so that the students get real-world, real-industry training. It is unrealistic to expect these employers to get teaching qualifications.
I am afraid that I cannot let Amendment 438 go. I have admired the optimism and creativity of the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Wei, and I acknowledge the sterling work that the elective home-schooling community is doing. Like many in this Committee, I have undertaken formal teacher training. I have QTS, which does not appear to be the gold standard any more, I am afraid. I had one disastrous attempt at home-schooling during lockdown, when I tried to teach my primary school-aged daughter maths. She is still shouting at me even now.
To say that somebody who has experienced only home-schooling can go from that to teaching 32 boisterous students in the last period on a Friday, without any formal training, and impart any knowledge at all is optimistic at best. The noble Lord, who is sadly not in his place, unwittingly belittles two years of pretty intense training for mainstream teachers.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, briefly, I support the noble Baronesses, Lady Grey-Thompson and Lady Sater, in saying that physical education is one of those things that we all decry and think somebody else should be doing. The fact of the matter is that there are certain physical skills that you need. In racquet sports, for example, you need to know how to move your feet, how to hold the racquet and so on; I say that in front of the noble Baroness, Lady Sater, with, shall we say, a degree of fear. There are certain basic skills that you will need to get the best out of a sport and to see whether you have any potential for it—if you do not have them, you are not going to find out.
When it comes to how to integrate those abilities into PE lessons, you need some training and structure. If you turn around and say to your outside agency, “This is possible, so please make sure that it happens”, you are taking a step further forward. So a degree of knowledge is required.
We have just mentioned the fact that special educational needs are a factor. I have managed to make a couple of speeches without mentioning them, so I shall revert to the norm. If you have special educational needs but somebody who is trying to teach you does not understand what they are about, chances are you are going to fail. They may say, “Everybody take some notes”, but you may have one person who is dyspraxic so cannot do that easily and two people who are dyslexic so will not be able to read them back and will not get everything down in time. You have to have some degree of knowledge to reach them—and those are fairly commonly occurring conditions. You will need some training somewhere in this.
I do not say that the existing pathways are always there because, if they were, I would not be making this point in the first place. However, we need to have that degree of training—or at least the awareness to say, “Right, I don’t know how you do this. Can you defer and find me another pathway?” That would be very helpful. I look forward to exploring this matter, both in this Bill and in future Bills, to make sure that we get something in place that means that more teachers can become teachers of special educational needs—not just saying that they are, because more of the same does not work. What they have at the moment is failing them.
Lord Hampton (CB)
My Lords, as a teacher at Mossbourne, who has one child there and one who has just left, I—slightly emotionally—thank the noble Lord, Lord Sewell of Sanderstead. I cannot thank him and the Hackney Learning Trust enough. I cannot add anything to that except to quote the chair of a multi-academy trust I was talking to a couple of days ago, who said: “Education is one of the few things in this country that really works. Why do they want to dismantle it?” I can leave it at that.
Baroness Caine of Kentish Town (Lab)
My Lords, I apologise as I was not able to speak at Second Reading as I missed the start of the session for family reasons. So I hope noble Lords will bear with me as I make a contribution linked to this group and Amendment 497 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, who is not in his place, but I thank him for highlighting the important issue of artificial intelligence.
I declare an interest as chair of Camden STEAM. One of the initiatives it has helped catalyse and launch this year is Camden Learning’s first-in-the-world trailblazing pilot: the London AI Campus. Developed in collaboration with Google, it aims to inspire, inform and educate students and teachers in AI and digital skills. If any noble Lords are interested in further information or, indeed, a visit to the centre, I ask them to please get in touch with me.
The Department for Education articulates its purpose as
“the department for opportunity … breaking the link between background and success”.
The national curriculum review, which is nearing its conclusion, is vital to that mission for many reasons, including, as one of its terms of reference states, in developing
“a cutting-edge curriculum, equipping children and young people with the essential knowledge and skills which will enable them to adapt and thrive in the world and workplace of the future”.
I hope the contributions in this Committee session will be helpful to Becky Francis, the chair, as she focuses on this area in the second stage of her work. She has rightly talked about the review pragmatically following a path of “evolution, not revolution”, recognising what has been working successfully, such as the advances the previous Government made in reading and maths.
However, while I support that approach, we are also in a revolution in the world of work, brought on by rapid advances in technology, with the attendant need to effectively support growth and productivity, particularly in the key sectors of the industrial strategy and in our regions. As well as the central issue of AI, which, I am sure, the noble Lord would have eloquently spoken about and has focused on, employers and respected research bodies identify creativity as critical to our future too. As raised in this House before, remedial work and investment are needed to address the consequences of previous policy decisions that have led to the Cultural Learning Alliance’s 2025 report card showing arts entries in GCSEs falling by 48% since 2010, with design and technology seeing an above 70% drop. This has led to an arts entitlement gap highlighted by the disparity between attainment in state-funded schools and independent ones.
It is welcome, therefore, that the importance of addressing these issues has been recognised and that the Prime Minister has spoken about the need to put creativity back at the heart of the curriculum. However, to be effective and up to date, that remediation has to do a number of things. One is the existing suite of qualifications in the arts being modernised to take into account the impact of technology, including artificial intelligence, and the attendant resources required to deliver the Prime Minister’s ambition. This includes capital investment, teacher recruitment and training, online learning, supporting talented children’s access to centres of specialist excellence, and so on. Critically, there is the need to address the need for the new: new qualifications and courses to deliver what is necessary for the future of work.
One of our USPs as a country is our talent in combining creativity and digital innovation—createch —which is driving change across a number of industries, creating new businesses, new roles and new jobs. Ukie, the trade body for computer games, on the back of its very successful Digital Schoolhouse project and with the support of the Creative Industries Council, has put forward a case for the development of a digital creativity GCSE as an alternative to the current computer science qualification. The inconsistent digital skills teaching in schools since the introduction of the computing curriculum a decade ago has led to a postcode lottery in digital education. These new approaches would offer young people other pathways to high-reward skills and jobs, and we wait to hear whether it will be supported as part of the review.
There is a lot to think about. At the same time, we need to move forward with launching the national curriculum. I would be interested to hear my noble friend’s views on whether, as the amendment suggests, a process of evolution and review might be needed for the curriculum so that it continues to develop in step with the revolution that is unfolding before us.
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
Lord Hampton Excerpts(2 days, 11 hours ago)
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Lord Hampton (CB)
My Lords, I rise to speak briefly in support of Amendment 448A in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, to which I have added my name. I must declare an interest in that I have been a member of teaching unions, but somewhere along the line, I let that slip. I confess that as this Bill goes through, I am learning a lot about education. I did not realise that as a non-union member, I was not naturally entitled to legal representation if a complaint was made against me. That does not sound entirely legal to me. I believe that unions do a good job and are a necessary part of teaching for many people, but being part of a union should not determine whether a teacher feels safe and supported.
Amendment 448A promises important improvements to working conditions within the teaching profession. Referrals to the Teaching Regulation Agency have more than doubled over the past three years. As the noble Lord, Lord Storey, is about to point out, one in four teachers is subject to an allegation from a student or parent at some point in their career, and, as a result, many are subject to disciplinary investigations and hearings. This puts pressure on teachers in what is already a highly pressurised job. The process of investigation can severely impact a teacher’s mental health or their ability to fulfil their job. This issue demands careful attention to prevent a worsening of the recruitment and retention crisis. Teachers need to be able to raise their own concerns, grievances or requests for flexible working arrangements. Many schools already allow trained companions, but that is exactly the problem: it depends on the good will of individual heads. Without legal clarity, the practice is inconsistent. Exercising equal working rights should not be dependent on union membership.
Lord Ashcombe (Con)
My Lords, I, too, would like to speak in support of Amendment 448A, which I believe represents a significant step forward in promoting fairness within the teaching profession. Just as there are many reasons why an individual may choose not to join a political party, there are likewise numerous legitimate reasons why a teacher may opt not to join a union. Although I fully support the right of teachers to join trade unions, it is deeply concerning that many feel they must do so merely to secure access to appropriate representation when facing formal proceedings. No individual should feel compelled to join a union solely for the legal protection it affords, yet evidence from representative surveys indicates that many teachers do precisely that, joining primarily for legal support in the face of allegations.
At its core, this amendment is about one fundamental principle: teachers’ access to support in formal disciplinary or grievance proceedings should not be contingent on their politic beliefs or union membership status. At this juncture, I should declare an interest, in that my wife, who is the chair of a board of governors for a foundation school, is currently in the process of a disciplinary procedure.
The issue before us is the basic right to be accompanied. At present, this right is extended only to union members or those who can identify a suitable colleague. But what of the many teachers—an increasing number—who, for entirely valid reasons, can access neither? These are not theoretical concerns. There are teachers who prefer independent forms of support; teachers who are uncomfortable sharing sensitive or personal information with colleagues; and teachers who, as is their right, choose not to participate in collective structures. Tens of thousands of such professionals exist in our education system. They are not exempt from the formal process, yet they are expected to face them alone. This is a question of fairness.
We already recognise this principle in other sectors. Under the NHS’s maintaining high professional standards framework, doctors and dentists are entitled to be accompanied by representatives from defence organisations such as the MDU or the MPS. This has not undermined the role of unions in healthcare; rather, it has ensured that highly scrutinised professionals are not left unsupported at crucial moments. It is only right that teachers, who work to and conduct similar levels of public and institutional scrutiny, should be afforded the same basic protection.
We debated a similar issue during the passage of the Employment Rights Bill, and I anticipate that the same concern may be raised again today—namely, that widening accompaniment rights risk “lawyering up” disciplinary procedures. With respect, that is a mischaracterisation of both the amendment and the current legal framework. The law already imposes clear limitations on the role of a companion in such hearings, and this amendment would not alter those parameters. It would not introduce legal representation into the room.
Indeed, it is worth noting that, under the current law, a teacher who is a union member may be accompanied by a lawyer, provided that individual holds union officer status, without the need for employer approval. Yet a teacher outside a union has no statutory right even to a trained non-legal companion. That is the imbalance this amendment seeks to address.
As unions themselves often emphasise, far from escalating matters, the presence of a trained companion often helps to prevent conflict, reduce procedural errors and resolve issues before they spiral. This is about fairness, not formality; it is also about extending protection, not creating confrontation. It is not about undermining unions; it is about extending a basic protection to all teachers regardless of their affiliations.
This is a modest and reasonable proposal that would not diminish the role of unions. Rather, it acknowledges that freedom of association includes freedom not to associate. No teacher should be disadvantaged for choosing an alternative form of professional support. If we believe in individual liberty and procedural fairness, we should not turn a blind eye to a group of professionals facing complex, often career-defining moments, unsupported.
This amendment would impose no additional financial burden on schools. On the contrary, it is likely to result in savings in both time and resources that would otherwise be spent on facilitating teachers to bring colleagues to hearings.