Teaching Quality

Andrew Percy Excerpts

Wednesday 29th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Tristram Hunt]

My advice is to not have unqualified teachers in the classroom and to keep going with the reforms that have been introduced recently on league tables and the literacy and numeracy strategy. We know that the surest way to improve children’s attainment is to boost the status, elevate the standing and raise the standards of the teaching profession. Therefore, today, let us put our differences aside and send a clear message to teachers, parents and pupils that the House understands the importance of teacher quality to improving the performance of our education system.

I saw it first hand last week when I attended the annual prize giving at St Thomas More Catholic school in Wood Green, north London, the most improved school in England. As we saw from last week’s analysis of GCSE results, much good work is being done in schools throughout the country.

[Andrew Percy (Brigg and Goole) (Con)]

Can the hon. Gentleman tell me whether he draws a distinction between teachers who have gained qualified teacher status through the study of a PGCE and teachers who have gained QTS through the graduate teacher programme or Teach First? Do international jurisdictions consider those qualifications gained in a different way? Do they value them differently in international comparisons?

[Tristram Hunt]

As ever, the hon. Gentleman is a master of his profession. We were happy to introduce, under a Labour Government, the wonderful Teach First scheme, which was about the road to having qualified teachers in the classroom. Gaining QTS, as I will explain, is not the be all and end all of focusing on teacher quality, but it is an important plank of the minimum standards that we would expect. The attainment gap between children on free school meals and those whose parents can afford to pay actually widened in 72 out of 152 areas last year. There remains a worrying attainment gap between less advantaged pupils and those from more affluent families, and current policy is failing to address that. The most worrying disparities were in the affluent areas of Wokingham and Buckinghamshire. There is therefore much work to be done.

--- Later in debate ---

[Michael Gove]

Yes.

I know what the shadow Secretary of State will say, because I have heard him say it before. He will say, “Okay, Secretary of State. The quality of teachers at the moment—it pains me to admit it—must be good, but I prophesy that the situation will deteriorate. It will deteriorate because of your open-door policy on teaching.” Like his fellow west midlander or black countryman Enoch Powell, Tristram sees the Government letting all the wrong people in. As a result of our dangerously liberal policies, he can see torrents of rubbish being taught in our classrooms. His is what one might call the “rivers of crud” prophecy.

What is the truth? The number of teachers without qualified teacher status is going down under this Government. In 2012, unqualified teachers made up only 3.3% of the teaching work force in all schools, down from 4.5% in 2005. The proportion of unqualified teachers has diminished in every year that we have been in power. That utterly refutes the scaremongering of the Enoch Powell-like figure on the Opposition Front Bench. We know that Labour will say, “Well, it’s going up in academies and free schools.” Labour uses a statistic, and I will leave it to the House to decide exactly how accurate and helpful it is: in its proper scaremongering way, it says that there has been a 141% increase in unqualified teachers in academies and free schools since the election. Like the Fat Boy in Dickens, he wants to make our flesh creep.

The truth is that the number of unqualified teachers in academies has risen only because the number of academies has increased so much. In fact, the proportion of unqualified teachers in academies has halved since 2010, from 9.6% to 4.8%, and the number of qualified teachers in academies has increased by 460%—North Korean levels of achievement under the coalition Government.

[Andrew Percy]

I am sorry to intervene on the Secretary of State halfway through his assessment of North Korean education. May I take him back to the issue of unqualified teachers under the previous Government? We have heard the repeated myth that they had to be on course to qualification. Will he confirm that under the previous Government schools could employ instructors permanently to teach subjects? As they did in my school, they taught classes and taught subjects on a permanent basis.

[Michael Gove]

Not for the first time and I am sure not for the last time, my hon. Friend hits the nail squarely on the head. It has now been the case for some time that schools can advertise for and employ instructors, trainees or others.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Skidmore (Kingswood) (Con)]

I echo the remarks made by the shadow Secretary of State, who said that we should put our differences aside and start the debate in the spirit of bipartisanship. It might be helpful to put on the record what we can welcome and agree on. We can welcome the fact that the number of unqualified teachers has fallen by 3,000 since 2010, down 20% from a high of 18,600 in 2010. We can also welcome the fact that the proportion of unqualified teachers has dropped in academies from 9.6% of all teachers in 2010 to 4.8% today. The hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg) was absolutely right to talk about Teach First as one of the great successes of the previous Government, and it is booming. In 2015, there will be 2,000 graduates from Teach First, four times as many as in 2010. This year, the No. 1 destination for Oxbridge graduates is teaching, and we should all be very proud of that fact.

We should welcome the establishment of School Direct, under which 9,580 teachers are being trained in a school setting. The success of School Direct is highlighted by the fact that demand far exceeds the number of places. There was demand for 17,700 places, so I hope that the scheme will grow. It has been proven to have a far better retention rate than a university-based PGCE.

We should welcome the 363 teaching schools that have been established, just as we should all welcome the fact that the Government have limited the number of resits for teacher training tests in English and maths. Previously, people could take that test—and someone did—50 times. We are ensuring that the PGCE qualification is far more rigorous than it has been. We should welcome that, just as I welcome the statistic that has already been mentioned: the proportion of teachers with degrees at 2:1 or higher rose from 48% in 1998 to 62% in 2010 and is now at 71%. That is a collaborative success between this Government and the previous Government in driving up standards in teacher training and teacher qualifications.

I also welcome the shadow Secretary of State’s support for performance-related pay to reward excellent teachers. He has done that in the face of opposition from unions and from some of his Back Benchers. It is a brave stance and he deserves credit for it.

For all our agreement, we are stuck on one problem like it is a broken record. We had this debate back in October, and the shadow Secretary of State seems to fall into a dogmatic, ideological approach that could come from the pages of George Orwell, saying “QTS good, non-QTS bad,” as though QTS has magical properties and bestowing it on teachers will somehow make them excellent. We know that we cannot bottle good teaching and inspiring teachers by slapping on “QTS”. Such a requirement would also restrict the very head teacher freedoms mentioned by the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby that we want to encourage.

[Andrew Percy]

Does my hon. Friend find it bizarre that we hear a lot of noise from the Opposition about how we should be following international examples such as Finland and Singapore, which have very high teaching standards, when in fact the non-PGCE QTS qualification that teachers would gain under the shadow Secretary of State’s policies would not qualify as a teaching qualification in those countries?

[Chris Skidmore]

That is a good point and I welcome its being placed on the record.

Another problem is the Labour party’s definition of “working toward QTS” including a two-year cut-off. I would appreciate the shadow Secretary of State putting it on the record whether the axe would come down at the end of that period. Would the 14,000 who are still unqualified simply lose their jobs because they had not gained QTS in that period?

There is an elephant in the room in this debate in respect of QTS, which is that there are plenty of bad teachers who have QTS. The problem is that defining a good teacher as one who has QTS is nothing short of protectionism. The General Teaching Council estimated under the previous Government that there were 17,000 teachers with QTS who were underperforming and should not be in the classroom, but in the past 15 years, and even up to this day, we see bad teachers not being removed from the classroom or sacked, but instead being managed out. Up to 2010, only 18 teachers had been removed altogether from the teaching profession for poor teaching standards. What we see is this “dance of the lemons”—teachers moving from one school to another, into deprived areas, which are the areas that suffer the most. That is a national scandal. We need transparency—