Education and Inspections Bill

I hope that it will draw back into schools all those head teachers who have retired at 60. I know that noble Lords find the idea of retiring at 60 ridiculous—indeed, retiring at 85 is something of a problem for us. A lot of teachers who retire may require a break of a year or two to start to miss school, but they often do after a while, and they should be welcomed back in this role. I am delighted that the Government have found a role for them, but this role sounds like something that has been dreamt up in Communist China, where you have a party representative in every factory. There will be an LEA spy responsible to the LEA in every school. Fine, you will survive that in the ordinary course of events—but if you get difficulties or conflicts, that person will very quickly be regarded as the enemy and not as the critical friend. That is a fundamental difficulty in what is being done here. The noble Lord, Lord Adonis, in his letter to my noble friend, referred in the fourth paragraph to a trial and went on to say that those head teachers who had SIPs, "““especially in relation to the value of challenge and support from a credible professional””," had said what a good thing they were. Is that information that the Minister would be prepared to put in the Library? Is the result of the trial something that he would be prepared for us to see, along with the subsequent comments by head teachers? It would not damage anybody to make that public, and it would give me a lot of confidence that this will in general work well. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Crosby, I see a conflict here. When things are tough, you want someone who sees their role as being a critical friend, but as your friend first, and who is not there to report to someone else. If you are in the business of choosing that person, do you want the choice imposed on you by someone else who does not understand the personalities or your priorities, or, to get the best critical friend, are you going to want to have a say yourself? We are trespassing a bit on subsequent groups of amendments, so I will not speak for too long—although this should all be one group, in my view. None the less, I wanted to enlarge on the points that the noble Baroness raised.