Former union boss Mary Bousted and ex-children’s commissioner Anne Longfield will be made peers.
The pair will sit in the House of Lords and be given the title Baroness. They were nominated to be life peers by the Labour party in this year’s political peerages list.
Bousted is a former teacher who was joint general secretary of the National Education Union, the largest education union in Europe.
She told Schools Week she’s “delighted to be appointed a Labour life peer”.
“My life’s work has been education. I want to work for the profession and for pupils in the Lords and to support the Labour party’s reforming agenda,” she added.
Bousted was also general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers from 2003 to 2017, prior to its merger with the NEU, and is a former TUC president.
She then served as joint NEU boss, along with Kevin Courtney, from 2017 to 2023.
The announcement comes after Bousted launched a commission on teaching, which she is chairing, last month.
The Teaching Commission will draw up suggestions for the government to solve the recruitment and retention crisis.
New Schools Network director also appointed as peer
Longfield is the former children’s commissioner, holding the post from 2015 to 2021, who has since founded the Centre for Young Lives.
She previously led a national children’s charity, 4Children, and has also worked on the delivery of the Sure Start programme as a policy advisor in the Cabinet Office.
Toby Young has also been appointed as a peer by the Conservatives.
Young co-founded the West London Free School; and later the Knowledge Schools Trust, which now has nine academies.
At Knowledge, he served as the chairman of the board of trustees and, later, as the chief executive.
He became director of the New Schools Network, a national education charity, in 2016.
Elsewhere, Stephen McCabe, a former shadow education minister from 2013 to 2015, and former education minister Kevan Brennan, have both been nominated by Labour.
In total, government appointed 30 new Labour peers, including “party-gate” investigator Sue Gray – just two months after she stepped down as the prime minister’s chief of staff.
While in opposition in 2022, Labour pledged to abolish the Lords and replace it with a “new, reformed upper chamber”.
But it watered this down before the election, with its manifesto promising a consultation to replace placing the House of Lords with an “more representative” alternative chamber.
It committed to removing the 92 remaining sitting places for hereditary peers – left over as a compromise from a Tony Blair-era purge – and introducing a retirement age of 80.
Your thoughts