The former joint general secretary of the National Education Union (NEU) has been made a life peer by prime minister Keir Starmer.
Mary Bousted, who led the Association of Teachers and Lecturers and then the NEU between 2003 and 2023, was one of 30 new peers nominated by Starmer.
Others included Anne Longfield, the former children’s commissioner, and former Cardiff West MP Kevin Brennan who served as minister for further education in the last Labour government.
Bousted, a former teacher and president of the TUC, is now an honorary professor at the Institute of Education, UCL, and leads an NEU-funded teaching commission.
Bousted told sister paper Schools Week she was “delighted to be appointed a Labour life peer”.
She added: “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”.
Longfield was the children’s commissioner at the Department for Education from 2015 to 2021, and has since founded the Centre for Young Lives.
She previously led a national children’s charity, 4Children, and worked on the delivery of the Sure Start programme as a policy advisor in the Cabinet Office.
Former Capital City College Group governor Simon Pitkeathley was also made a life peer by Starmer.
Conservative party leader Kemi Badenoch nominated six peers and Sir Ed Davey nominated two peers on behalf of the Liberal Democrats.
Toby Young, co-founder of the West London Free School and director of the New Schools Network was nominated by Badenoch.
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 the House of Lords with a “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.
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