Education: Initial Teacher Training

Baroness Pinnock Excerpts

Wednesday 14th October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

My noble friend raises an extremely important point. We will look at this in the new ITT framework, which is under consideration. It is currently conducted by Prevent co-ordinators, but I shall certainly write to her further on this.

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, with a YouGov poll showing that 50% of current teachers are considering leaving the profession within the next two years, when we are 8,000 teacher training places short of what we need and with rising school numbers, would the Minister not agree that, however good the quality of teacher training, the fact is we will not have enough trained teachers in our classrooms? What is he going to do about it?

[Lord Nash]

If I may say so, this is slightly a case of creating a crisis out of a challenge. We actually have more teachers than ever before. We have a higher quality of teachers than ever before. We are improving behaviour management and workload to reduce the risk of teachers leaving the system. Many more teachers are returning to the workforce and the vacancy rate has remained at around 1% or below over the last 15 years. Indeed, frankly, over the last 15 years it has on several occasions, including under the last Government, been higher than it is at the moment.