Education Bill

Debate between Lord Puttnam and Lord Quirk

Monday 4th July 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Puttnam]

My Lords, the purpose of this amendment is to challenge the Government but in effect also to challenge the profession itself. During Second Reading, I and the Minister disagreed on one issue. I suggested that the Bill challenged the professional status of teachers and diminished them, while he felt otherwise. If there are two overused phrases in this Bill and in discussions on education generally, they would have to be “world-class education” and “professionalism” in relation to teaching. I have not done a word count on the Bill but it is literally littered with the words “profession” and “professionalism”, normally prefixed by the words “enhanced” or “increased”.

It is the refuge of a pedant to look in the OED but the words are very clear. Under “professional” and “professionalism”, it says:

“Reaching a standard or having the quality expected of a professional person or his work; competent in the manner of a professional”.

Or there is,

“raises his trade to the dignity of a learned profession”.

A professional is:

“One who belongs to one of the learned or skilled professions; a professional man”.

As someone who comes from outside politics, I have never ceased to be amazed by the sometimes brilliant ability of politicians to oppose, which in my judgment is only matched by the apparent hopelessness to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors. It is something that I have observed over the past 15 years and I have no reason at all to think that I am wrong.

I declare an interest as a former chair of the General Teaching Council. I make two points. I genuinely loath government by assertion, which is what we are dealing with here, whereas I celebrate government by evidence. We came in in 1997 on a mantra of evidence-based policy-making. Sadly, that had died by the millennium. None the less, it was a good idea in its time. Creating policy involves learning lessons from the past and gathering evidence from the present. In support of my contention that scrapping the GTC was the coward’s way out, I started looking for lessons from the past and I found more than I could ever possibly have hoped for. In the process, I have become a quasi-authority on the formation and development of the General Medical Council.

I have an advantage over the Minister in that I have looked through a number of interesting and riveting documents from the Library on the development of the General Medical Council—and I shall certainly hand them to him. What strike you immediately are the extraordinary parallels between the development of the GMC and the hoped-for development of the GTC. It is also interesting to see that throughout its history the GMC relied on lessons learnt, and mistakes made, by the development of the legal profession, which in turn relied entirely on the very ragged process of the development of the clergy. Only Henry VIII tried to interrupt this learning process—at least, until now. I will not go into that at this stage, although I certainly could.

The parallel is quite extraordinary. For example, there has always been only a minority of pressure within the profession for increased professionalism. Prior to 1858, when the law was passed in this House, the bulk of doctors did not think that it was necessary that they be regarded as professionals. They were perfectly happy with the way things were and thought that the market operated very satisfactorily. Throughout the history of the GMC, there was very little agreement on the level of the retention fee that ought to be charged to be a member of what was termed a profession.

Here I come to a challenge to the profession itself. I bow to no man in my belief that this is an important profession and that all my futures, and those of my children and grandchildren, are entirely dependent on several generations of outstanding teachers. That is very clear throughout the Bill. It cannot be squared with an attempt to scrap the embryonic professional body that we attempted to create, inadequately, in 1997.

Another fascinating parallel that I dug up a moment ago is that the inadequacy of the original legislation for the GMC in 1858 was described as a sort of disgrace because the public were ill served as the legislation was watered down to a point where they could not rely on the professionalism of an individual doctor. Noble Lords may think that I am overstating this parallel but I think that it is a very important one.

For 153 years, a great deal has been learnt about turning the medical profession into a respected professional body, frequently in the face of fierce opposition from within. I am not pretending that the GTC was remotely what I would have liked it to be—dreadful mistakes were made—but you do not scrap a professional body; you build on it and enhance it. You improve it and nurture it and sometimes you have to cajole and maybe kick it. But our aim is to have a far more professional and far more effective body of teachers adhering to a set of responsibilities.

Finally, I say this to the Minister. If the profession does not want the proposals in my amendment—and I have deliberately used the form of balloting for which the Government clearly have a preference in settling disputes—you will hear not one more word from me. But let the profession decide whether it wishes to be professional, whether it wishes to acknowledge the obligations that go with being professional and whether it wishes constantly to prove itself to the point where we have a generation of teachers of whom we can truly be proud. I beg to move.

[Lord Quirk]

My Lords—