Education Bill

My Lords, I want to pick up the point about staff qualifications. Many of your Lordships will be aware of the EPI report, which was a very rigorous piece of research on the quality of early-years education and its effect on young children. It clearly found that high-quality early-years provision can have enormous personal and financial benefits all the way through the lives of the young people concerned but that very poor-quality early-years provision does not produce any benefit at all and may even have the opposite effect. I am very keen on evidence-based policy-making. That is why we on these Benches have always promoted high-quality early-years provision. Even if my noble friend the Minister is not prepared to accept any of the amendments that we are discussing, I hope that he will be kind enough to say something about what the Government propose to do to increase the quality of this provision, particularly as regards the qualifications of staff working in early years.