Clause 17
Education and Inspections Bill
5:30 pm
Sarah Teather (Shadow Secretary of State for Education and Skills, Education & Skills; Brent East, Liberal Democrat)
Another possibility could be work-based learning providers that were private companies. That is precisely the kind of vision that we are trying to draw out. The point is that a trust would be based in a local area, rather than spread throughout the country, with favoured schools being cherry-picked. Our proposal would provide for a model of integrated learning involving further education colleges, work-based learning providers and any other expertise that could be offered in an area. It would allow schools, particularly disadvantaged ones, to overcome, for example, shortages of specialist teachers in subjects such as science, maths and languages.
It is notable that the shortage of specialist teachers occurs particularly in disadvantaged areas. Let usconsider the statistics. Only about 4 per cent. of teachers throughout the country lack specialist status, but in many central London boroughs the figure can be as high as 15 or 16 per cent., so the disparity is huge. It might be interesting to consider our model for those areas.
Such collaborations may happen already. However, we are concerned about the rhetoric behind theBill. Admittedly, we have not heard that rhetoric in Committee, where this Minister is leading on the Bill, but there has been rhetoric from No. 10 about picking off different schools—about schools operating inisolation in a competitive model. Our concern is that there will be a disincentive to the kind of collaborations that can happen already and that some of the good collaborations that have happened in many areas and that are helping to drive up standards will be broken.
Our model would strengthen the collaborations that can already happen, but they would happen in the context of the safeguards that we dealt with in relation to earlier clauses and that we will come to in the next string of amendments.