A World-class Teaching Profession (Government Consultation)

Baroness Morgan of Cotes Excerpts

Tuesday 9th December 2014 Written Statements

[The Secretary of State for Education (Nicky Morgan)]

The Minister of State for Schools and I are today launching a consultation on proposals to support the teaching profession in England in becoming truly world-class.

Evidence from around the world consistently shows that the quality of teaching is the single most important school-based factor determining how well children achieve. There is much to celebrate in the quality of teachers in our schools, but there is also more that can be done if our teachers and teaching are to be truly world-class.

Increasingly, the teaching profession is becoming a powerful force for its own improvement. The best schools are driving up standards in others, with outstanding teachers leading the way in modelling practice within their own schools and beyond. But there is more that we, as Government, can do to promote and support a self-improving schools system to build on the successes that it has already made.

So we are now proposing a number of measures designed to help teachers to go even further in raising standards. Our proposals centre on the development of teaching as a mature and confident profession whose members are committed to their own development and improvement, and who consequently are accorded the status as professionals that they rightly deserve.

We are consulting on two key areas. First, we are setting out our commitment to supporting the establishment of a new professional body for teaching—a college of teaching. We agree with the many teachers and school leaders who have called for such a body to be established as part of the process of putting greater power and authority in the hands of the teaching profession itself. The consultation proposes a number of ways in which Government might support the initial set-up of a college while guaranteeing its long-term independence, which will be crucial to its success. We are inviting expressions of interest from groups who are interested in establishing the college, through which we can channel appropriate support.

Secondly, we are proposing measures to improve the quality of professional development undertaken by teachers. High-quality, evidence-based professional development is the hallmark of leading professions; too often, however, teachers tell us that they are being let down by the opportunities available to them. We want to support teaching to become a truly “learning profession”, whose members are committed to career-long development. We are therefore proposing to establish a new fund to support the development and delivery of high-quality professional development programmes, led by the teaching schools network but reaching out to those schools which require the greatest additional support to improve. All programmes will be robustly evaluated and the evidence generated will be made widely available to teachers, helping to build and spread a sound knowledge base about the effectiveness of different approaches to professional development.

The full proposals are available online at www.gov.uk and the consultation will be open until 3 February 2015. A copy of the consultation document is also available online at: http://www.parliament.uk/writtenstatements