Teaching Unions (Strikes)

Debate between Chris Skidmore and Thérèse Coffey

Wednesday 9th October 2013 Westminster Hall

[Chris Skidmore (Kingswood) (Con)]

It is an honour to serve for the first time under your chairmanship, Mr Pritchard.

This debate is extremely timely, as it comes against the backdrop of recent strike action by certain teaching unions. Last week, on 1 October, members of the National Union of Teachers and NASUWT went on strike in 49 local authorities in eastern England, the midlands, Yorkshire and the Humber, consequently denying education to pupils in 2,500 schools. I want to put on the record that, thanks to non-striking teachers’ dedication to their pupils and profession, many of the schools that expected to close were able to remain open.

Another wave of strikes is planned on 17 October in London, the north-east, the south-east and the south-west, where my constituency is located. I take this opportunity to urge teachers in schools in my constituency to think twice about strike action and, like their many fellow professionals who turned their back on last week’s strike, not to strike at the expense of their pupils’ education and welfare. A national strike of union members is planned for later in the year, before Christmas, and that will inevitably disrupt the lives of pupils and parents alike.

Let us turn to the origin of the decision to take industrial action. Last year, the two largest teaching unions, the NUT and NASUWT, voted to take industrial action throughout 2013. At first glance, the results of the ballots seem decisive: 82.5% of NUT members and 82% of NASUWT members voted in favour of strike action. We must, however, look at the turnout for the ballots: just 27% of all NUT members responded by returning their ballots, as did 40% of NASUWT members. In reality, strike action was therefore voted through by just 22% of NUT members and 33% of NASUWT members.

Even then, it is important to note that those unions do not represent the teaching profession of more than 750,000 teachers in its entirety. Taking that into account, strike action was agreed by the unions with a mandate of only 17.3% of teachers voting to strike. That is significant, because we must recognise the increasing divide between teachers or teaching professionals and the unions who claim to represent their voice.

In recent years, it seems that the only voice that unions represent is the growing tendency towards militant socialism that has gripped the heart of teaching unions. A breakdown of the NUT national executive shows that more than half its members have links to far-left organisations, with 21 of the 40 members having links to the Socialist party or the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, while 11 were endorsed by the Socialist Workers party in their election to the executive, four are members of the Socialist Teachers Alliance, one was a Socialist party candidate in the 1997 general election and there is even a member of the Communist party.

It is well known that union leaders do very nicely in pay and conditions out of their members’ subs. In the NUT, Christine Blower’s total remuneration is now £158,155, which has increased by 25% since she became general secretary in May 2009. That is more than seven times higher than the average teacher’s starting salary, and her pension contribution alone, of £42,236, is almost double that starting salary. Chris Keates of NASUWT earns a total remuneration of £139,834, which has increased by 78% since she became general secretary in 2004.

Let us not believe that the unions, either in numbers or in voice, reflect the everyday lives of the teaching profession. Tens of thousands of teachers—the silent majority—work tirelessly to transform the lives of young people in their care, and do so without recourse to strike action or what might be termed “teacher absenteeism”.

A new generation of teachers is coming forward who are the best trained and best skilled work force we have ever had. This generation of teachers deserves to be rewarded for their ability to raise their pupils’ performance. They are increasingly turning their back on the unions as their mouthpiece, knowing that they are being given greater freedoms to teach and improve their pupils’ education in the classroom. Some are even tearing up their union cards. One teacher wrote on The Guardian “Secret Teacher” site that

“we came into teaching for a reason. To inspire children, to go that extra mile, and to become better at what we do—ultimately for the students who are the reason we chose this profession. Yes, there are many issues facing us that do need action—but why is it that the unions’ suggested actions simply serve letting down the very people at the core of teaching?”

We need the best teachers to be in place, particularly in schools where the gap between the most affluent and the most disadvantaged pupils remains stubbornly high, to help turn pupils’ lives around. A good-quality education depends entirely on good- quality teachers, so rewarding good teachers must be at the heart of this Government’s school reforms.

That belief is overwhelmingly backed by the public. In a recent Populus poll of 1,700 people, 61% agreed that schools

“should be able to set the pay of individual teachers based on the quality of their performance as determined by an annual appraisal”,

while 28% believed that teachers

“should…receive the same salary regardless”.

When asked what the most important factor is in deciding teachers’ pay, only 8% plumped for length of service, which is the current measure. The poll found that 70% of people are opposed to teaching unions’ planned strikes, while 34% believe that teachers should be entirely banned from taking strike action.

I do not believe that the Government should be in the business of banning teachers from going on strike. It must be up to teachers themselves, not only as responsible adults, but above all as responsible professionals, to choose how they wish to be regarded. Do they believe that as professionals—that is how we wish teachers to be seen—they should take strike action where no other professionals would dare to? It must be up to teachers to face their responsibilities and to ask themselves why, if it is not acceptable for pupils to be absent from school, it should be acceptable for teachers to indulge in teacher absenteeism. What possible example can that set? How can the authority of a teacher’s professionalism be anything but diminished by strike action?

If teaching unions think that there is a genuine and deeply felt need to strike, they will recognise that such a need is also felt by the entire school community—pupils and parents alike. Each individual school, rather than taking its cue from the phantom democratic ballots of union leaders, should know whether strike action is necessary at local level and whether taking the ultimate step of sacrificing a day of pupils’ education is in those pupils’ interests.

The teachers’ cause would be strengthened if they had the backing of the entire school community, including parents. One solution for assessing whether an individual school has a truly effective mandate for strike action would be for it to ballot its parents on whether they agree with any proposed strike action. After all, parental ballots are not a new feature of our education system: they were introduced by the Labour party in 1998 as a means of assessing whether grammar schools should close.

Rather than strike action taking place with just over 17% of support from teachers, industrial action backed by parents would appear far more legitimate and have a greater chance of being taken more seriously. Allowing parents a voice over teacher strike action would help to depoliticise strikes, which are currently organised by a militant few at the expense of the welfare of the many pupils and parents whose lives will be disrupted in the next few weeks.

Of course, rather than take strike action in term time, thereby disrupting the education of thousands of young people and effectively denying them a day’s learning, surely it would be better for teachers to strike during the school holidays, when they are still at work in schools? We are frequently informed that just as a parliamentary recess is not a holiday for Members of Parliament, school holidays are not entirely holidays for teachers, who continue to work hard in their schools.

[Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful argument. Does he agree that we should encourage head teachers and chairs of governors to do their utmost to keep schools open as a learning environment for children, given that being at home may not be suitably positive for learning reinforcement?

[Chris Skidmore]

It is extremely important that school leadership remains strong at this time. I am referring here to the chair of governors, who has a duty to reflect the community’s voice, and the head teacher. As we know, it is the leadership that decides whether a school should remain open or should close. In my own constituency, I have seen the head teacher make the decision. As well as telling teachers who wish not to strike to have the courage of their convictions and to cross the picket line and go into school, we must also tell head teachers to stand firm on their principles. They are the captain of the ship in the school and they must ensure that it stays open for as long as possible.

Going back to my point about teachers striking in school holidays, I do not believe that teachers are taking off the entire school holiday. They are working hard in that period when the pupils are away from school, so it should not make any difference if the strike action was taken in school holidays rather than term time unless the deliberate aim of the teachers’ unions is to cause the maximum possible disruption to pupils’ learning, which would be regrettable.

In conclusion, there will always be disagreements and battles over how schools are run and pupils are taught. That is fair enough. Teachers themselves may disagree over the direction of a policy or a Government, and that is their right, but such battles should be fought not by strikes but in the court of public opinion, with ballots that reflect the views of all teachers and parents, and, ultimately, at the ballot box. They should not be fought, as those striking well know, at the expense of the children whom they claim to serve.

Debate on the Address

Debate between Chris Skidmore and Thérèse Coffey

Wednesday 9th May 2012 Commons Chamber

[Chris Skidmore]

Indeed, and I wish the hon. Member for Ealing North (Stephen Pound) the best of luck in contributing to this excellent debate on the Queen’s Speech.

The first line of the Queen’s Speech refers to the importance of growth in the economy, but one of the sectors in which we know there will certainly be growth is social care, because we have an ageing population. We used to say that there are two certainties in life: death and taxes. We now know that our population is getting ever older; by 2030 the number of 85-year-olds will double and 11% of the population living today will reach 100. Therefore, we have an enormous cost—not a burden—that society will face as a result of the population getting older, which is inevitably a good thing. The Queen’s Speech recognises this, importantly, by proposing a draft Bill that will seek to modernise adult social care and support, which I absolutely welcome, but it is worth reflecting on the word “modernise” and on what we need to do to modernise adult social care and support.

The Government recognise that tackling social care is not just an issue of tackling the funding of social care, important though that is. The Health Committee, of which I am a member, has already produced a report on the Dilnot commission and recommended it to the Government, and I hope that the Government will look at it in the forthcoming White Paper and that we will have proposals on the table. I know that there is cross-party support for looking at the Dilnot commission proposals and that we had a Backbench Business debate on that in the previous Session. Members from across the House, regardless of their party colours, are passionate about tackling this issue and the impending crisis.

[Dr Coffey]

My hon. Friend makes a really important point, but is he concerned that the Dilnot commission and the risk of open liabilities could make the process unaffordable, or are Members being misinformed on that?

[Chris Skidmore]

The Dilnot issue, which is one of presentation, is that the Government commissioned a report that addressed the specific question, “How do we fund social care as it currently stands?” That is why I want to turn to the issue of modernisation, but we have to remember the important tenet that Dilnot does not cover all forms of social care. It does not cover domiciliary care or living costs, so it is not a panacea, and we as parliamentarians must ensure that we work together and at the same time—Dilnot was very strict on this—come up with a proper system by which we can inform not only elderly people now but the elderly people of tomorrow that they need to begin to save. Only by developing a savings culture and a culture of contribution, which I shall turn to also in my speech, will Dilnot work and will we ensure that the social care system works tomorrow as well as today—although today it is beginning to fail, as I shall explain.

In modernising social care, we need to recognise that the current system is not working on several levels. Personally, I feel that local authorities are becoming not the best places in which to deliver social care. Last week I published a report on local authorities and their delivery of social care, demonstrating from a series of freedom of information requests to every local authority in the country that local authorities have already written off £400 million of debts owed to them by families—and are still owed more than £1 billion.

Put simply, we have a system in which local authorities are not only struggling to provide care, but for financial reasons have lowered the bar and reduced their eligibility criteria. They have done so principally because they have to juggle social care with the services on which people really want to focus when they pay their council tax. For instance, people want their bins emptied or potholes filled, and that, for democratically elected local authorities, can take priority over those citizens who are most vulnerable but who, unfortunately for them, form a small minority. So roads and bins take precedence over social care. That should not be the case, but at the same time local authorities are deeply mired in debt because of their services, and we desperately need them to break out of that.

The current system also does not work because the failure of social care ends up rebounding in only one place: the NHS. We need to make the point strongly that the NHS and social care are two sides of the same coin, and that if there is a crisis in social care there will soon be a crisis in the NHS. Even the IMF has produced figures on how the NHS will look by 2050 if we do not manage our ageing population and work out ways of prevention. We must also look not only at how elderly people can be given the life and dignity that they deserve, but at early intervention. If any problems that they may have, such as diabetes or a disability, are dealt with soon enough, it costs the NHS less. The IMF predicts that the NHS will end up costing £230 billion by 2050, and that is completely unaffordable. It means that the NHS will go broke unless we solve the social care crisis now.

[Dr Coffey]

Does my hon. Friend agree that cross-party consensus on the draft social care Bill is critical? That is why a draft Bill is appropriate. Does he agree also that, as long as somebody is in hospital the NHS pays for them, so the draft Bill needs to tackle the key issue whereby local authorities sometimes delay a person’s exit from hospital so that they do not have to pick up the bill in the interim?

[Chris Skidmore]

That is an interesting point. Obviously, one of the first moves that the Government made when they came into office was to create an output measure of 30 days’ discharge from hospital. Although that was created in August 2011, it is already controversial because we are seeing the scale of the problem. The problem is not new; it has always been there, but the Government are for the first time providing the figures on how many people are leaving hospital and rebounding back into hospital. We should have solved that problem sooner.

My hon. Friend argued for a cross-party approach, and I entirely agree. We must achieve cross-party support on social care. We are talking about a settlement that must last decades, so it cannot be a patchwork solution or a plaster over a wound that might open up in several years’ time. We need to come up with a binding compact on social care. I hope that the draft Bill will aspire to that.

I have talked about the relationship between the NHS and social care. The Government have recognised that the future of saving the NHS will come through a consideration of social care. We focus very much on the NHS, and the Health and Social Care Bill of the previous Session tried to address the matter. Funds were placed in the hands of GPs; for the first time, GPs are taking responsibility for patients. Rather than sending patients directly to hospital, GPs have to look at what preventive measures they must take to cure illness or disability. Over the past three years, the number of over-80-year-olds who have been admitted into A and E has risen by about 40%. We know that 65% of unplanned NHS bed admission stays involve the elderly. If we can solve that, we will solve a huge issue within the NHS.

I am a member of the Health Committee, which recently wrote a report on social care. We visited Torbay, which was instructive. The authorities there have ensured complete integration between social care and health care services. They have done that by pooling budgets; when they have team meetings, there is no empire building in which people say, “This is my budget for the primary care trust, this is mine for the GPs and this is mine for the hospital.” People sit down and consider their overall budget. They have in mind an 85-year-old lady called Mrs Smith, and they ask what treatment pathway they could create to ensure that Mrs Smith gets the best possible care.

The authorities in Torbay recognise that social and community care is the best way to prevent unplanned admissions to NHS hospitals. The result is that Torbay has the fastest-decreasing and lowest number of unplanned hospital bed day admissions in the country. The approach there clearly works, so the modernisation of social care must also be about proper, true integration between social care and health care.

We also need to recognise that to modernise social care is not to speak of the elderly as some homogenous group. Above all, senior citizens are individuals with individual needs. Each will have their own particular pathway through the later years in life. As a Government, we must recognise that to ensure that the individual has the best possible life in old age, we must give them a chance to lead their life as they would like to.

To do that, the Government have built on the work of the previous Government in introducing personalised services. Above all, we have seen the rise of personal budgets. In England, their uptake doubled, from April 2010 to March 2011, to almost 340,000 service users. That is still only about 35% of eligible users and carers. Although the increase in personal budgets is welcome, it has come in the form of local authority managed budgets, rather than individual direct payments, which make up only 26% of that 340,000—that is, 26% of the 35% of eligible users.

Although there has been an increase in personalisation, there has not been a proper increase in individuals being given freedom in how they would like to use their budgets. In other words, councils are offering a menu to choose from but they are not offering a choice of restaurants.

Key to the modernisation of social care will be the introduction of direct cash payments. At present, individual budgets cannot be paid to a spouse or partner to provide care, and that limits uptake and entrenches the difficulty that millions of people have in wanting to care for a loved one in their old age. If we look across to the continent, we see that places such as Germany have a far more liberalised social care system. In Germany, people are assessed as needing care at one of three levels, and they are then offered a choice between an individual budget cash payment with services in kind, including residential care, and a tailored combination of the two. Interestingly, the individual budget cash payment is of significantly lower value than the social care package. In 2007, people who needed considerable care, or care level 1, received €384 per month; those in need of intensive care, or level 2, received €921 per month; and those in need of highly intensive care, or level 3, received €1,432 per month. They were also offered the choice of claiming direct individual budget cash payments that were about two thirds lower than the payments in the social care package, which meant that people at care level 1 received €205 per month, those at care level 2 received €410 per month and those at care level 3 received €665 per month.

One might have expected the population to opt for the higher payment, given that the social care package seems to be more sophisticated and pays more in euros, but in fact 49% of Germans decided instead to opt for the direct cash payment, which gave them greater choice and freedom in how they spent the money, or spent it for their relative. That control is every bit as valuable to individuals as money. It gives them the opportunity to stay in their own home and receive informal care from relatives. They can purchase the service they need without an additional layer of bureaucracy getting in the way. We can learn from what Germany did in modernising social care. Local authorities have traditionally focused on a one-size-fits-all response, in effect acting as a single, inflexible state supplier that cannot hope to offer the choice that people approaching their old age nowadays—baby boomers who have lived their lives having choice—will want equally as they get older.

What would happen if we introduced such a system in this country? In 2009-10, local authorities spent £3.4 billion on residential elderly care. On that basis, if the same thing happened here as in Germany, with half this group opting instead for cash payments and staying at home, we would save £1.14 billion a year, with people receiving £566 million instead of £1.7 billion. We could free up £1.1 billion or £1.2 billion a year, which could go a significant way towards producing the money that might then implement Dilnot.

Above all, the way in which people contribute to their care must be something that they can control rather than something that is done to them. We need to ensure that in modernising social care we make the best possible services available. People will not put up with paying for the current levels of services if they do not think that they are good enough. If we are going to expect people to pay more for their social care in old age, knowing, as we do, that it has never been free of charge—it is a bit of a nasty shock for some people when they find out that it is not provided free—then they need to have the best possible services for their money, and that, essentially, means choice.

With choice comes competition. We must ensure that there is thriving competition between social care providers. We must not only introduce direct cash budget payments but ensure that agencies are available to guarantee a level playing field. The Good Care Guide website is a fantastic resource, but we should be looking to introduce a TripAdvisor-type service into social care so that people can analyse which are the best care homes and write about their own experiences of what they are like. We should trust the people to make those judgments.

I want to end by reflecting on this year. Many Members have spoken about it being the year of the diamond jubilee, but it is also 70 years since William Beveridge published the Beveridge report on 1 December 1942. On that day, there were queues at the shops to purchase the report, and in the first week 600,000 people did so. The report set out what the welfare state would look like for most of the 20th century.

In many ways, Beveridge still casts a shadow over us. The NHS and pensions were established, but when Beveridge wrote his report the average life expectancy was 69. When people received their pension at 65, their pensionable age was only meant to last an average of four years. Beveridge never gave any thought to how we should care for the elderly. It was assumed that families would look after their elderly loved ones. Somewhere along the line, we have gone wrong. I am not blaming any one political party, but why is it that in many countries it is a mark of honour for people to look after those who have brought them into this world? Why do we pay people child benefit in recognition of being parents but not focus on rewarding carers who look after their parents? There is an imbalance, and I hope that by focusing on social care, as all parties must in this Parliament, we can try to redress the balance.

I wish to end with a quote from Beveridge. The odd thing is, the Beveridge report cannot be found online, but I managed to dig out from the Library a copy of the original 1942 report. Everyone remembers the five giants—Idleness, Squalor, Want, Ignorance and Disease—but in the passage after that famous part Beveridge stated that

“social security must be achieved by co-operation between the State and the individual. The State should offer security for service and contribution. The State in organising security should not stifle incentive, opportunity, responsibility; in establishing a national minimum, it should leave room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual to provide more than that minimum for himself and his family.”

Beveridge understood 70 years ago that we needed a contributory principle in our public services. Somewhere along the line, that has been lost. Only through individuals making contributions towards their elderly care will we achieve the best social care services. I hope that as we consider how to modernise social care, the draft Bill that will be published as a result of the Queen’s Speech will focus on all the matters that I have mentioned.

Much of the media’s focus has been on the other place, which we might call a retirement home for rather successful eminent politicians, but what we actually need to focus on, and what our constituents want to focus on, is retirement homes for the elderly population as a whole and what is happening to them. We would do well to remember that. I recognise that I have spoken only about one specific point in the Queen’s Speech, but I believe it was possibly the most important one.

Ordered, That the debate be now adjourned.—(James Duddridge.)

Debate to be resumed tomorrow.