School Teachers’ Review Body: Recommendations

Lord Hampton Excerpts

Wednesday 4th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The noble Lord is right that we have inherited a situation where school budgets are stretched. That is why we have already made available an additional £2.3 billion for the core schools budget in the October 2024 Budget, of which £1 billion was for high needs. We have also made available, on top of that, £930 million to support schools with the cost of the national insurance contributions increase in March 2025. There is also, as I have already said, £615 million for the 2025 pay awards. That means that, while this Government have been in power, we have seen the core schools budget increase from £61.6 billion to £65.3 billion.

There will be productivity challenges for schools and the Government have been clear that, as with other parts of the public sector, we will look to support schools in finding 1% of efficiencies to contribute to the ability to pay the pay award. That is alongside considerable funding support; considerable additional funding, on top of the efficiencies, to fund the pay award; and work that the department is doing with schools to help them find those efficiencies. That is a responsible way to balance the need for teachers—who are the most important in-school determinant of children’s success—in our classrooms with our responsibility to the taxpayer to ensure that public money is spent as effectively as possible.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, as a working teacher, I say thanks very much for the 10%—it is very gratefully received. It occurred to me a few days ago that the Government seem to presume that nowadays everybody leaves university, trains to be a teacher and stays a teacher for the rest of their lives. That is just not happening. The way working patterns are now, people change professions after 10 years. Is that built into the model of recruiting now—that people last only, say, 10 years and move on, and that we can get people who have been in other jobs and recruit them into this very fine profession?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The noble Lord raises an interesting point. There are of course people who enter the teaching profession, teach for 10 years, and then leave to become Members of Parliament and Ministers. I am probably too old now to ever countenance going back into the classroom, but the noble Lord makes an important point about how we attract people into the profession at a later age.

That requires, for example, some of the flexibilities we have introduced through the postgraduate apprenticeship route into teaching. It also means that you have to make teaching an attractive profession for people to enter at any age and, importantly, to stay in. That is why we are—through the targeted retention incentives, the bursaries we are offering for specialist subjects, the action we are taking on supporting teachers on the considerable workload they face and the action we are taking to ensure that technology can support teachers in doing the face-to-face work in the classroom that makes all the difference—helping to recruit teachers at the beginning of their careers and teachers who are perhaps coming from other areas and, most importantly, to retain the excellent teachers that we have.