Education Bill

Before the Minister responds, I wanted to make a quick comment in response to the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, who raised the crisis issue. That underlines our argument, which echoes what the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, said, that surely what we need to do is to review how the existing legislation has been working so far. It has been in existence for 15 years. If there were going to be crises, they would have happened by now and we should know about them. We should therefore know what extra legislation, if anything, is needed to deal with it. I can genuinely say that there does not appear to be a chorus of demand from the teaching professions saying, ““We were in this awful crisis and we were constrained from what we could do by your really unhelpful legislation””. There does not appear to be that demand, but maybe it is out there. Maybe we should do what the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, is saying and find out what is happening on the ground, but without rushing into the new proposed legislation, which opens us up to other problems and repercussions, which we have not yet fully identified. I wanted to make the quick point that we should review first and see whether there are those crises out there.