Education Bill

My Lords, I have a great deal of sympathy with this amendment. My experience as a head teacher for 26 years is that one of the reasons that standards in schools have risen is because of the quality of teachers, the quality of entrants going to university or college and the quality of the qualifications they received. We have to think very carefully about where we are going on this. Are we going to have unqualified people who, for example, have no child protection training, no safeguarding training and no special education training? If we do, we do a disservice to our education sector as a whole. That is not to say that there are not people in schools who are not fully qualified as teachers. For example, currently teaching assistants with NVQ level 3 can teach, provided that the work is prepared by a teacher. Teaching assistants with a higher level qualification can teach and prepare the work, but there is a teacher at hand. The notion that in free schools you have people with no qualifications teaching children is a retrograde step. It is almost Dickensian. It goes back to the pupil teacher. I hope that the Government will look at this very carefully. I am not opposed to the notion of free schools. In fact, the first free school can be traced back to the 1960s in my home town of Liverpool, but it was opened with qualified teachers. The other day, I was listening to a programme on Radio 5 about a school where all the people providing the teaching—I cannot use the term ““teachers”” because they are not qualified—are going to have a military background. I have nothing against that, provided they have qualifications to go with that role. I hope that we will look at this closely and return with some proposals that we can all accept.