Qualified Teachers

Debate between Anne Main and Tristram Hunt

Wednesday 30th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Tristram Hunt]

My hon. Friend makes a brilliant point: that pedagogy, as well as subject knowledge, is absolutely essential. It seems bizarre that we simply do not want the best-skilled teachers possible.

[Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)]

First, may I reassure the hon. Gentleman that I do not have an obsession with him? I speak as someone who also has a PGCE to my name on top of my degree, but please do not confuse being qualified and being able to teach pupils with bits of paper. I have seen plenty of excellent teachers without PGCEs and some pretty poor ones with, and I think the hon. Gentleman is getting the two rather mixed up.

[Tristram Hunt]

This is about reducing the risk in the teaching system. This is about making sure we go up the value chain in terms of qualifications and teacher capacity.

As it has been raised, let me deal with the issue of non-qualified teachers in the private sector. First, figures from the Independent Schools Council show that 90% of those teaching in such schools have a teaching qualification and over 70% have qualified teacher status. Secondly, if head teachers in the private sector wish to employ teachers without QTS, that is their decision. But a Labour Government will demand a minimum standard of QTS for those teaching within the state system. As Secretary of State for Education, I am not going to allow for the deregulatory free-for-all which produces the likes of Al-Madinah.

School Governors

Debate between Anne Main and Tristram Hunt

Wednesday 24th October 2012 Westminster Hall

[Tristram Hunt (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Main, and to follow the right hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Andrew Stunell). It is always a joy to discover people who realise after they have left the Government that the rhetoric about localism and decentralisation is suddenly not as true as they thought. Perhaps in time, the right hon. Gentleman will discover the same things about the Department for Communities and Local Government as he has discovered about the Department for Education.

I thank the hon. Member for Stroud (Neil Carmichael) for securing the debate, his interesting practical suggestions and his work on the question of school governors. Like him, I pay tribute to the 300,000 people who serve as school governors in communities, as well as to governors in my constituency of Stoke-on-Trent Central. We, like many cities, could do with more, and higher calibre, school governors—there is no point in hiding from the Ofsted figures on the quality and satisfactoriness of governors—but I am not sure whether the Government’s education reforms are helping to improve governor capacity. In short, the confusing morass of competing initiatives arguably undermines the capacity for local leadership and muddies the waters as to what is required of a governing body. That relates to the importance of building capacity before we establish a vacuum in local governance, rather than finding that a situation has arisen and thinking about how to resolve it.

That point is particularly relevant to academies. The speed and slapdash nature of the academy conversion process under this Government is putting at risk people’s willingness and ability to serve their schools. That is, first, because of the competing powers of academy sponsors and existing governing bodies. Governance provisions for converting to an academy set only minimum requirements and allow for a reduction in size and composition of the governing body. The laxer rules are more open to abuse. As we heard from my right hon. Friend the Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw), in academies a lack of governor control can be particularly worrying. Indeed, there are widespread reports of academies selecting their own governors or manipulating the process. If we are interested in proper accountability and a proper non-executive role for governors, we must sort out the relationship between sponsors and governors. Evidence shows that where such changes in governance have taken place previously, the governors nominated by parents, staff and the local authority are the casualties.

I am not ideologically opposed to the academy programme. There are some able academy sponsors in Stoke-on-Trent—notably Stoke-on-Trent college and the Church of England diocese of Lichfield—but aggressive takeovers of governors can put communities’ backs up and affect the success of the academy conversion process. Furthermore, what is happening represents a massive centralisation and accrual of power by the Secretary of State. I always thought that conservatism was about the little platoons of society. I thought that the big society was an attempt to revive the great teachings of Edmund Burke for the 21st century. Instead, we have in our Secretary of State, with his minions, a Jacobin centralist of whom the Rev. Richard Price would have been proud. The Government are intent on gutting local communities and local democracy to hand over the practice of teaching and the inculcation of citizenship often to carpet-salesman chains and car dealerships.

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

Order. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman is going to get back to the debate on governors, rather than carpet salesmen.

[Tristram Hunt]

Absolutely, Mrs Main.

Since the Education Reform Act 1988 came into force, the Secretary of State has accrued an extra 2,000 powers, including on questions of local school governance. Indeed, the Secretary of State, not Parliament, has almost total de facto control over what schools do, even including the curriculum, thereby subverting the role and contribution of a governing body. There are now often no intermediate bodies or forms of civil society standing between the head teacher and the Secretary of State. That is a recipe for the arbitrary misuse of power—something that the Tory party was originally established to fight against in the late 17th century. Surely good school governance is about respecting local democracy and civic engagement. It is about having the right people round the table with the right composition of skills and a balance of capabilities, and providing effective strategic oversight, not day-to-day management. The comments of the hon. Member for Stroud on the role of federations in that context are particularly germane and interesting.

Good school governance is about conducting professional recruitment procedures, drawing on specialist expertise, and, where necessary, holding teachers to account in the interest of parents and pupils. Like my right hon. Friend the Member for Exeter, I have experienced in Stoke-on-Trent a situation involving a strong-willed and arguably devious headmaster and a governing body that was unable to take control. It was up to the local education authority to step in and deal with that situation. Had that happened in an academy, I would have been worried about the teaching of those children and their prospects.

To act properly in such situations, governors require the right support. They need professional induction training and professional clerking services. I take the points made about mandatory training and the costs involved, but we want that to become almost the norm, without it necessarily being mandatory. Although that requires greater professionalisation and dedication on the part of governors, it also requires wider respect for that role from the Secretary of State and the Government. We have had the Teach First campaign, which the Labour Government successfully inaugurated, but what about a “Become a Governor” campaign—not necessarily with a picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger? Instead of talking governors down and undermining their role in the school ecology, we should celebrate them as civic heroes. We need, as the right hon. Member for Hazel Grove suggested, to raise their esteem. That is what the 2010 report suggested. Instead, the Secretary of State has condemned those civic-minded individuals

“who see being a governor as a badge of status, not a job of work.”

Surely, it should be both, as I am sure it is in St. Albans, Mrs Main. It should be a mark of status and should be taken seriously and conscientiously as work. Just as with the stakeholders-versus-skills question, this is not an either/or option.

As the Government’s reforms grind on and local education authorities are stripped of their functions, the role and importance of the governor will only grow. When we think about such questions in the Labour party, we always have in our mind creating brilliant schools in local communities. The Government—a Conservative Government, of all things—seem concerned with denigrating governors’ volunteerism, undermining their capacity and transferring all power to Whitehall functionaries rather than local champions. If we want true governors creating great schools, we should focus on capacity-building, training and raising their esteem.

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

I call the Minister— [Interruption.] Sorry, I call Kevin Brennan. The Minister has a few more minutes.