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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Elizabeth Truss)
It is a pleasure, Mr Pritchard, to serve under your chairmanship this afternoon. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore) on his excellent speech, which outlined many important issues, and on his ongoing work to support the reform of education, which is vital for our country. I note that we do not have Opposition Front Benchers at this debate. The Opposition have remained silent on the issue of trade unions, even though many of their Members of Parliament are funded by those organisations.
Strikes benefit no one. They damage the education of pupils and inconvenience parents and carers, who often rely on school when they are out at work. The children who are let down the most are those from low-income backgrounds who desperately need an excellent education to help them get on in life. Moreover, strikes do not support the teaching profession. What we want is a highly valued and respected profession that takes professional responsibility for what it does. The strikes are in danger of undermining the well deserved public respect for teachers.
The recent strikes have been particularly disappointing. They do not command public support. A recent Populus poll found that 70% of the public do not support the planned strikes, and, as my hon. Friend pointed out, teachers themselves do not support them. Less than a quarter of teachers voted in favour of strike action when they were balloted by the National Union of Teachers and the NASUWT.
I am pleased to say, though, that fewer schools closed than on previous occasions. In last week’s strike in Yorkshire, the midlands and the east of England, only a third of schools were fully closed to pupils. That was down to the hard work and dedication of many teachers and head teachers. By comparison, 60% of schools in the same regions were fully closed in the national strike of November 2011. That shows that those who seek wholesale disruption of our schools are losing the argument, and less and less support for such action is being shown in the classroom. Like my hon. Friend, I encourage teachers and head teachers in constituencies that could be affected by the forthcoming strike to keep their schools open. The majority of Britain’s hardworking teachers understand that strike action is not the right way to express their concerns about education reform, and they need to put pressure on their unions to stop it.
The NUT and the NASUWT have identified the issues of pay, particularly performance-related pay, and pensions as an underlying cause of the strikes. Most people get performance-related pay, so the concept is widely understood. It helps to improve performance and retain high-quality personnel. Teaching should be no different. The public understand that. In recent surveys, 61% of the public supported performance-related pay for teachers. Pay reform, which means moving to a performance-related pay system and away from automatic increments based on how long someone has been a teacher, will reward excellence and raise the professional status of teaching. It will help schools to attract high-flying graduates and career-changers, particularly to subjects for which it is difficult to recruit teachers because there are highly competitive jobs available elsewhere.
Schools in challenging circumstances, which often struggle to retain good teachers, can now, because of the additional flexibility that we are giving, use the pupil premium to attract the best staff and make the biggest difference to the attainment of disadvantaged pupils. Russell Hobby, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said:
“Basing pay progression on performance would bring classroom teachers into line both with head teachers, where it already operates, and with most other sectors”,
so the leader of the head teachers’ union has suggested that performance-related pay would help.
A recent YouGov poll for Policy Exchange found that nine out of 10 teachers think that the quality of teaching should be a major driver in pay and progression, while only six out of 10 think that years of experience should be a major factor in pay. Many teachers themselves support the changes. The unions should be helping us to work with head teachers to ensure that performance-related pay is implemented in a way that is fair to teachers, rather than calling for strike action, which will not only cause problems for the profession but potentially affect children.
The other issue is pension reform. Changes to teachers’ pension arrangements are in line with changes to public sector pensions in general. We all know that people are living longer, and the cost of public service pensions has increased by a third in the past 10 years to £32 billion. The new teachers’ pension scheme remains one of the very best available. All the evidence suggests that it does help to attract people into the teaching profession.
The Minister for Schools and the Secretary of State for Education have had extensive discussions with the unions and others involved in education, and the policy direction on pay and pensions is now fixed. As I have demonstrated in my speech, the reforms command broad popular support, and support in principle from the teachers.
My hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood made some interesting points about why the teaching unions might be motivated to take strike action for ideological reasons, or for reasons relating to their pay and pensions, which appear to be pretty generous when compared with those of teachers. That is no excuse to damage children’s education, disrupt parents’ lives, which has an ongoing impact on the economy, and bring into disrepute the teaching profession.
We are willing to meet the teaching unions; we are planning to meet them again soon to discuss their concerns. However, we are very clear that the direction that we have set on pay and pensions is right, and it is part of our overall reform package to improve education in this country.
We have great esteem and respect for the role of teachers. All educational research suggests that the quality of teaching is the No. 1 factor in a child’s education that will make the difference between learning and not learning. However, we have seen this week, in the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies study from the OECD, exactly where we are in the skills league table, and during the past decades, our skills have not significantly improved. It is a huge worry that, in key skills such as literacy and numeracy, we have not seen the kind of improvement that those who said that exam grades had improved have claimed.
We face a big issue with our education system. We know that the quality of our education and skills is related to economic growth. We also know that children who do not reach the levels of literacy and numeracy that they need to reach will not get good jobs and will face more danger of being unemployed. Those are critical issues, which is why we have embarked on a wide-ranging series of reforms in education. First of all, there was the academy and free schools programme, to ensure that head teachers have the powers they need to improve results in their school. Secondly, there was our programme to reform exams and the curriculum, to ensure that we are teaching subjects such as mathematics, science and English in a rigorous way. That is why we have reintroduced marks for grammar, spelling and punctuation at GCSE level, and why we have addressed the rampant grade inflation that has been evident in our GCSE results. However, possibly most important of all our reforms is the way that we are working to recruit the best and brightest to the teaching profession.
There are a lot of tales of doom about teaching, but our figures compare very well with those of other countries around the world when it comes to the age profile of teachers. In many countries, those in the teaching profession are close to retirement; that is a particular issue in Germany. Here in England, those in the teaching profession are pretty young. Teach First, a programme that ensures that top graduates are attracted to teaching as soon as they leave university, has been very effective. It is now the biggest graduate recruiter from our universities, and teaching is now seen as an aspirational career by many graduates when they leave university, which is fantastic. I am delighted that this autumn we have been able to extend Teach First to the early years, so we now have teachers who are top graduates straight from university teaching three and four-year-olds.
A recent OECD study compared the rates of pay and pensions of our teachers with those of teachers in other countries. We perform above the average for OECD member countries, so our teachers are well remunerated, as is right, and we need to bear that in mind.
There is so much that we have to work on as a country to ensure that our education system is world class. It is about all the things that I have mentioned: teaching; the way that schools operate; and head teachers having the flexibility to run their school in a way that will deliver results for children. There are so many things that need to be done that it is vital that everybody in the education system works to those objectives. Progress is being made, and we have seen very positive results. For example, the number of girls studying physics and chemistry at GCSE is at a record high, and we have also seen the number of children studying maths and science at A-level go up. When we have these very positive results in our education system, it is very disappointing that there are still those who seek to disrupt that system, rather than help us and work with us on the progress that we are making.
I note that there is a new shadow Education Secretary in position, the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt), although I am sad to see that he is not in Westminster Hall today. The former shadow Education Secretary, the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg), refused to condemn the strike action; actually, I do not think that he supported or condemned it, but just said nothing about it, even though children’s education was being disrupted. What we need to hear from the new shadow Education Secretary is an answer to this question: does he agree that these strikes should be condemned, and does he agree with us that it is wrong for teachers to go on strike at this important time in children’s educational careers, or is he in the pockets of the unions, like his predecessor and like the leader of his party? That is a question that I hope the Opposition will answer very soon.
It is very important to have had this debate, and to have discussed these issues at length. It is crucial for our children that they are able to attend school every day knowing that they will receive a good education. The best way of reforming a system is to participate and to have the debate in proper public forums, not to take out frustrations on innocent bystanders—those children and parents who do not have an alternative, including parents who may have to miss a day of work because a school is not open, and children, perhaps from low-income backgrounds, who are learning and who miss a day of their education as a result of this strike action.
I note the positive trend in the proportion of schools staying open. I hope that next week and the week afterwards we will see more schools stay open, and that today’s debate will encourage them to do so.