Teachers: Academies and Free Schools

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

Monday 12th September 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, it is a great privilege to congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Finn, on her excellent maiden speech. Everyone here knows how difficult it can be to get things done in government quickly and effectively given the nature of the modern governmental beast, and how central advisers are to that task. I know that every senior civil servant will agree on this. The noble Baroness brings from her government service a wealth of experience in getting things done in government that will be invaluable to the crucial role of this House of detailed legislative scrutiny. I am sure that we all look forward very much to her future contributions to our debates.

I need to declare two interests with respect to this Question for Short Debate: as a founding governor of King’s College London Mathematics School, to which I will return; and as the author of a report, the Wolf Review of Vocational Education, which had some direct influence on current government policies on qualified teachers. I still stand by the recommendations I made in that report but, before explaining what they were and why I made them, I turn to the question of what it means to be qualified.

Of course we all want teachers to be qualified. If you do that useful trick of turning a question around and asking people how they would feel about the Government increasing the number of unqualified teachers, you would probably find them looking at you as though you were about to lose your faculties. But I wonder how many people outside the world of education understand fully what the term “qualified teacher” means. I am sure that everyone in this Chamber knows, but I have been struck by the fact that most people tend to assume that the term encapsulates within it a great deal about subject knowledge and mastery of the subject being taught. But having qualified teacher status is about whether someone has gone through training as a teacher. In our current system, someone is able to teach a subject in which they have no formal academic or professional expertise or qualifications as long as they have qualified teacher status. I think that these are very different things and that we should worry a great deal more than we appear to about how many teachers in our system are not qualified in the sense of having a full mastery of the areas in which they teach.

Perhaps I may quote in their rather turgid form the two recommendations I made in the Review of Vocational Education, which I submitted to the then Government in 2011 and they accepted in full. The first ran as follows:

“At present teachers with QTS can teach in FE colleges; the FE equivalent—QTLS—should be recognised in schools, which is currently not the case. This will enable schools to recruit qualified professionals to teach courses at school level … with clear efficiency gains”.

There are more than efficiency gains, but that is what I wrote. The reason I had to make that recommendation was because there had been such resistance in the schools sector to recognising the qualified teacher status of people in FE, and this is an issue to which I will return in a moment.

The second relevant qualification stated that the Government should:

“Clarify and evaluate rules relating to the teaching of vocational content by qualified professionals who are not primarily teachers/do not hold QTLS. Many schools believe that it is impossible to bring professionals in to demonstrate/teach even part of a course without requiring the presence of additional, salaried teaching staff. This further reduces the incidence of high quality vocational teaching, delivered to the standards that industries actually require”.

Why was this so important? It relates to the issues raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris. We are systematically excluding people from classrooms who have the skills, knowledge and expertise that we need because they do not have QTS and there is no obvious way for the schools concerned to get around it. This is more of a problem in the highly specialised areas than it is in mainstream education. We have to realise that if people have to spend two years getting qualified teacher status, which is a long route, they will not come into teaching even though they have genuine and important expertise. In the vocational and technical areas, which are what interest me most, you want people in classrooms and workshops whose main occupation or career is not teaching, but who can bring with them the up-to-date, high-level skills and expertise that are needed.

That was why I made these recommendations. I must underline at this point that the schools’ objections for many years to recognising any other form of QTS are not something they should be proud of. Also, this is not just about vocational skills. I mentioned that I am a founding governor of King’s College London Mathematics School, which is a free school and takes highly talented young 16 to 19 year-olds from across London to give them, in our view, a high-quality mathematics education. We expect our full-time teachers to have QTS. We think that that is important to their careers and that, in the programmes we send them on, it really increases their skills and capabilities. However, it is absolutely important to us that we should also be able to bring in highly skilled and qualified mathematicians at the top of their game without having to worry that, when Ofsted comes to call, we will be told we have done something we should not. There is a major issue here and no simple way round it.

I also worry about a blanket demand for this. The evidence for such demands for qualification or licensing is not terribly encouraging. Morris Kleiner, the leading academic analyst of licensing, studied its impact on price and quality all around the world. He finds that the general result is to raise prices for ordinary people and increase salaries without any indication that you get a general improvement in quality. It tends to be promoted by practitioners. My favourite example, which is not an English one, is that in Michigan the state licensing board requires 1,460 days of training to become a licensed athletics trainer. A good number of American states also license beekeepers and ballroom dance instructors.

Obviously, there are things where you want a licence to be absolutely sure that people are actually able to do what they are doing. I doubt that anybody in this House would want people able to practise medicine who were not licensed and carefully regulated. Yet the skills they practise in medicine are the medical skills. We currently have a situation in this country—I reiterate this—in which you are allowed to teach maths without knowing anything very much about maths. That seems to be of far greater significance than the fact that, outside the academy and free school sector, you will not do it without QTS. That is the major issue.

In passing I say that, again to my great regret, the evidence on blanket requirements for further pedagogical training is somewhat depressing. It does not seem to have any guaranteed impact. That is not to say that it cannot do so. Rather, this is a very difficult issue and not one that you can solve by demanding pedagogical training for everybody.

To finish, I make the same point once again: we at least have more information on whether teachers are qualified to teach their subjects than we did 10 years ago. However, we still take far too lightly the threat to the quality of education from the number of teachers who teach, often unhappily, in subjects where they have very limited subject knowledge at a high level. Have the Government any plans to address that serious issue, which to my mind is more important than that of QTS?