Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Bousted Excerpts

Wednesday 10th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I was not going to intervene in this debate, because I find it quite difficult. I have some sympathy with the amendment that has just been moved, but my position is that teachers should have qualified teacher status. I have not got involved in the fringes of the debate because I think it is genuinely difficult to draw dividing lines. If I have to come down on one side or the other, I come down on the side of people having qualified teacher status. I strongly disapproved of the actions of the previous Government in taking away that requirement for either teachers in academies or for all teachers, I cannot recall.

I have always had sympathy with that range of subjects where, in my heart, I know that many people without QTS—instructor status or whatever—but with that practical experience could motivate children and deliver the curriculum, possibly to a higher standard and more effectively than other teachers. I know from experience as a teacher that very often what happens is that the teacher who is not a teacher of those subjects but who has qualified teacher status ends up teaching. I have sympathy with that and very much hope that, in the understanding that I think the Government have expressed, and in their promise to bring forward further information, some flexibility can be brought back around this arrangement of subjects. I am not talking about exceptions, because I do not want to go down that route; I am talking about an acknowledgement that we do not want to waste the talents of people who have got something to offer to our children. It would be a move that I would very much welcome.

[Baroness Bousted (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak in particular to Amendments 436B, 436C, 437 and 437A. Before I became a union leader, doing the work of the devil, according to the noble Lord, Lord Nash, I was a teacher. I worked in university departments of education for over 10 years in York, Liverpool and London, and a big part of that job was to give teachers initial teacher training at MA level and at PhD and research level. I know that no education system can exceed the quality of its teachers and that the value of that training was essential.

It is not enough that teachers just have very good subject knowledge. They also need to understand professional concerns such as effective pedagogy. They need to learn about behaviour and safeguarding. In fact, initial teacher training is now completely transformed. The majority of it takes place in schools. There are various routes into QTS. It is much easier to work towards QTS while you are training or while you are a classroom assistant. Various Governments over a period of years have made the routes into initial teacher training and qualified teacher status much better. It is an important professional qualification which underpins not only the status of the profession but the quality of the education which children are getting.

I would also add that this is a social justice issue, I think, because the fact is that the children who most need teachers who are qualified in the subjects they are teaching are, at the moment, the least likely to get them. DfE evidence to the STRB in 2025 shows clearly that pupils in schools with the highest percentage of pupil premium are more likely than other pupils to be taught by unqualified teachers and non-specialists. They receive a narrower curriculum than other pupils, are less likely to be offered physics as a subject option, and are more likely to be taught by unqualified teachers and teachers teaching outside of their subject area. That is why, over the course of last year, I established and chaired the independent Teaching Commission, whose report, Shaping the Future of Teaching, examines the causes of the teacher supply crisis, which has been two decades in the making—in particular, its effects on pupils whose start in life is disadvantaged, who most need qualified teachers to compensate for the 40% disadvantage gap that is created by poverty before they start school.