All children need a qualified teacher? How can that make any sense!

Posted on 05/06/2025

Architects of the academisation programme lined up in the House of Lords in May 2025 to criticise Labour’s Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. Patrick Yarker considers one of the more bizarre objections raised.

The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill is making its way through parliament. Provisions in the bill diminish a little the role of academisation in government education policy, and impose slight curbs on the powers vested in those who run academies. For example, academy chiefs must ensure from next year that all their teachers have qualified teacher status (QTS) or be working towards this. Consequently, advocates of academisation such as Lords Nash, Harris, Moynihan and Fink have been among those organising against the bill in the upper house.

Joining them there to speak in a recent debate was Lord Agnew, founder and chair of a multi-academy trust (MAT) in Norfolk. Lord Agnew was much involved in implementing the education policy of successive Conservative governments after 2010. An ally of Michael Gove, he served as chair of the Department for Education’s Academies Board and later as an education minister.

Unsurprisingly, many aspects of the bill dissatisfied the noble lord. He spoke against provisions concerned with the national curriculum and with school admissions, before taking issue with the QTS mandate. He confessed himself entirely baffled by the idea that students should be taught by people qualified to teach:

Turning to qualified teachers, I believe that this terminology is a complete misnomer. Apparently, someone with a subject-specific degree in, say, maths or science is less qualified than someone with a degree in a different subject than the one they are teaching – but that is fine, because they completed a nine-month course which it is almost impossible to fail. In 2023, only 8 per cent of applicants failed to gain qualified teacher status, and mostly because they dropped out. How can that make any sense?[i]

How indeed? Let the practice of teaching fly fully-fledged from the nest of subject-knowledge! The only possible answer, it seems to me, is to entertain the arcane notion that teaching is its own discrete intellectual and practical domain. That it is distinct from – albeit infused with – the domain of the subject-area being taught. Strange as it must seem to anyone as closely involved down the years as Lord Agnew with government education policy, teaching can be accounted a formal practico-theoretical activity in its own right, with specific substance and a long history. Those who take up this activity and become teachers are more properly equipped to meet the demands of the work if they have been inducted into this substance and history: its pertinent knowledge, the rationale for its practices, the lineaments of its informing debates and distinct dilemmas, the most fruitful ways to frame that self-reflection so vital in the job. It might even be claimed that without an induction into the philosophical, sociological, psychological, political, historical and ethical dimensions which always bear on the practical work of teaching and the role of the teacher, neophyte practitioners, however accomplished and knowledgeable in their subject, are sold short. Ultimately, so too are the students they will teach.

Lord Agnew’s characterisation of the formalised process of this necessary induction as ‘a nine-month course which it is almost impossible to fail’ reveals a striking disdain. The expertise of initial teacher educators, and the dedicated hard work of those undertaking the course, results in the success of the great majority of ITE students. This might be supposed a cause for celebration and a source of hope. But to Lord Agnew the term ‘qualified teacher’ is a misnomer.

It seems extraordinary that anyone genuinely concerned (as Lord Agnew declares he is) with the better education of the rising generations would object to a legal requirement that, before they assume full responsibility for a class of students, those formally charged with educating them shall have embarked upon, if not completed, a recognised accredited initial teacher education course.

So what’s really going on here?

As the head of a MAT, perhaps Lord Agnew takes umbrage at the QTS mandate in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill because it will deny him the opportunity to cut staff costs by hiring the unqualified to teach in his academies. Perhaps those ermined partisans of academisation who lined up with him spoke against other provisions in the bill because these too limit the scope of academy chiefs to act exactly as they want. Perhaps they all see government beginning to free itself from the undemocratic, costly and all too often educationally restrictive and wasteful confines of the policy they refined and imposed, and for which they were ennobled.

If Lord Agnew’s is a representative voice, the debate on the bill will continue to remind everyone why the academisation programme was such an educationally backward step.

[i] See Hansard, House of Lords, Volume 846, 20 May 2025, Columns 165-169: Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill – Hansard – UK Parliament