Education Bill

Lord Quirk Excerpts

Tuesday 14th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Quirk]

My Lords, my main concern is with Part 3 of the Bill, which I had hoped would address more fully and robustly the issues presented in last November’s White Paper, The Importance of Teaching. Of course our education system needs attention in many other respects as well and the Bill tackles several of these, but the role of teachers is surely paramount. For too long their profession has failed to attract the best of our school leavers or university graduates. We are told that:

“Top-performing countries consistently recruit their teachers from the top third of graduates”,

but our own target, and that only from September 2012, is to be a Lower Second, an astonishingly modest goal these days when few graduates get lower.

The White Paper rightly contrasts us with the highest performing economies where,

“teachers and teaching are held in the highest esteem”,

as of course they were in this country within living memory. You do not have to go back to Goldsmith’s “Deserted Village”, where the teacher was held in awe,

“and still the wonder grew

That one small head could carry all he knew”.

How do we make teachers respected and admired once again? It will not be done while entrants to the profession have only two A-levels at E grade. Teachers will hardly become role models by cravenly adopting the styles of their most disadvantaged students—sloppy in dress, behaviour and speech. Nor can it be done when teachers are bullied, terrorised and physically abused with near impunity by disruptive minorities of 13 year-olds. No wonder so many flee the job they would love to do. I therefore welcome the measures in Part 2 of the Bill to strengthen the hand of teachers and enable them to get on with their teaching. This is what the bulk of pupils want and it is certainly what their parents want. Nor, finally, will we get happy, respectful learning while half the classroom has no interest in, or aptitude for, the subject being taught. So, the flexibility and variety of schools now envisaged must surely command support, not least the UTCs of the noble Lord, Lord Baker.

Fifteen years ago, I was among those who believed that a vital way to raise the status of teachers, and hence their self-respect and the public’s respect, was to make the profession self-regulating with its own general council analogous to the councils for medicine and other major professions. After all, who better than teachers to know the requisite aptitude and training for new recruits and to recognise the failings in those who subsequently do not come up to scratch? Sadly, as we know, little of that happened when the 1998 Act duly delivered the GTC. Better-qualified candidates still did not queue up to be teachers, as they do to be doctors, vets or lawyers. Nor has the GTC been anything like as muscular as, say, the GMC in asserting its authority to set the standards for recruitment and training or to weed out incompetence. Last year, I asked the Government a number of detailed questions about the qualifications of teachers currently in post. I was told bleakly by the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Drefelin:

“The information requested is not held centrally”.—[Official Report, 3/3/10; col. WA 355.]

Why was the GTC not assembling just such data?

So I can understand why the GTC became a sitting target in the quango cull, but I am puzzled by the quiescence and apparent complicity on all sides. Are teachers not proud of their status-conferring council? Some say that the annual fee made it unpopular. However, it is only £36. Junior doctors on comparable pay have to stump up £200. Can noble Lords imagine doctors sitting quietly on their hands if what we had before us was a health Bill proposing to abolish the GMC and transfer all its powers and duties to Mr Andrew Lansley? How does abolishing the GTC square with repeated mantras about trusting teachers and giving them more autonomy—a word used by the noble Lord, Lord Hill, several times this afternoon? Not least, I am puzzled why, with the GTC mentioned in the 1997 Labour manifesto and duly delivered a year later, so many MPs are ready to discard it, as shown by the six-hour Commons debate in February, when the GTC was barely mentioned, let alone defended.

Even if this House were content to see the GTC’s powers and duties vested in the hands of the able but already pretty busy Michael Gove, we would need to scrutinise very carefully what these powers and duties are. Clause 8, in particular, requires detailed elucidation. It gives the Secretary of State power to deal with a teacher’s improper conduct. I wonder whether that applies also to a teacher’s incompetence. It surely cannot be the case that, after getting a thumbs up on completing an initial three-term induction period, a teacher is deemed to be fit for the job throughout the next 60 terms.

I wish to make one final brief point. Mr Gove posed a rhetorical question on 8 February:

“Do we want to keep ... the General Teaching Council”,

and other education bodies,

“in their current forms?”.—[Official Report, Commons, 8/2/11; col. 173.]

Will the Minister say whether this last phrase implies that the Government might consider retaining the GTC in a substantially changed form—for example, with more employer representation?