Teaching Quality

Damian Hinds Excerpts

Wednesday 29th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Bill Esterson]

My hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg) talked about London Challenge and the huge success that happened right across London. Does my right hon. Friend agree that one way of addressing the problems in Wolverhampton would be to have that whole system and a thorough investment in skills?

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

They have had it.

[Bill Esterson]

The hon. Gentleman says that they have had it. I am talking on a much more extensive scale.

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[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin), my erstwhile colleague on the Education Committee, who spoke passionately and, for the most part, compellingly. I agree entirely that teaching is a noble profession and a vocation.

I also agree with three key aspects of Labour’s motion. First, it is obviously right that the quality and effectiveness of a school system cannot exceed the quality and effectiveness of the teachers in it. Secondly, those teachers must be able to access the best possible training and ongoing development, and not just in subject knowledge, but in classroom management, lesson planning, progress tracking and all the other things that are so important. Thirdly, I agree about the importance of validating and revalidating teachers’ effectiveness, because if we want to raise the bar and improve the overall level, we cannot wait for a turnaround in all the generations of teachers. I disagree on exactly where and how that validation should happen, however, as did my hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore).

There are also three important deficiencies in the motion. First, in its headline emphasis on qualified teacher status, it refers to a very small proportion of teachers. It is often said that no one forgets a great teacher. Sadly, most of us can also remember at least one who was pretty rubbish. I mean that not as a value judgment or a political point, but as a statement of fact; some teachers are better than others, and some are just not very good at teaching. That person we remember was almost certainly a qualified teacher. According to the 2012 work force survey, 96.5% of teachers were qualified, which means 3.5% were not, and the figure is now lower than it was under the previous Government. As the Secretary of State pointed out, the part of the country that does best in education is the part with the highest proportion of non-qualified teachers, and—to add another little fact—four fifths of them are not on a route towards QTS.

Secondly, the motion is logically inconsistent. If QTS is an irreplaceable standard that every teacher should reach before being let loose in the classroom, how can it possibly be acceptable to have someone teaching who has only just begun the route towards QTS? Thirdly, the motion’s critical deficiency is that it conflates two words that sound a bit the same but are completely different: “qualifications” and “quality.” I note that the conflation extends even to the hallowed institution of our democracy, the Order Paper, because two days ago it referred to a debate on teacher qualifications, but today that has morphed seamlessly into a debate on teacher quality. Either subject would have been an important and interesting subject for debate, but they are completely different topics. That is the fundamental problem here.

I do not expect a sudden flood of teachers who have not done a PGCE or other qualification to come into teaching. When Mary Beard appeared before the Education Committee, she talked about Jamie’s dream school—I hate to bring it up again—and, when asked what she would have done differently, said, “A bit of training would have been nice before going in to teach the kids.” What an understatement. Of course, an individual going into teaching, let along the school and the parents, wants to know that they have been properly trained to cope with the situation.

There are, however, circumstances in which somebody has a lot to give, and in which taking the necessary time out for full retraining—something like a PGCE—would put them off. They might be someone who has taught for years in a private school, a university lecturer, a business leader who goes in part-time to do lessons in entrepreneurship, or an artist, musician or actor with unique skills and creativity. I want such things to be available to kids in our state system.

Private schools educate only 7% of children in this country, but they account for 32% of AAAs at A-level. There are differences between private and state schools, the biggest of which is in the resources of money and facilities that are available. One of the others is the freedom accorded head teachers, reporting to governors, about who they employ and how they run their school. We have a rigorous accountability regime for exams, Ofsted and pupil choice. Within that framework, a head teacher, reporting to their board of governors, should be able to decide the direction in which their school goes. There are things we should focus on to improve teacher quality.

[Stephen McPartland (Stevenage) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the focus should be on the quality of education for children in schools, as opposed to the quality of delivering paperwork to be revalidated?

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[Damian Hinds]

I absolutely agree.

We can do other things further to raise teacher quality; that is what the title of this debate turned out to be. The first of those concerns Teach First, which accounts for a relatively small proportion of the overall teaching work force. It is heavily concentrated—half of all Teach First teachers are there—in London, which has come up more than once today. It has what I call a positive disruptive influence in schools in bringing in new ideas, in new teachers learning from teachers it already employs and those teachers learning from new ones and, importantly, in increasing the pool for recruitment and selection. Head teachers often say that having more people, including fresh graduates, applying for jobs helps them a lot. We need greatly to expand Teach First outside London.

[Chris Skidmore]

Does my hon. Friend welcome the fact that when, this morning, I met and spoke to the chief executive officer of Teach First, Brett Wigdortz, he talked about its tremendous success in the city close to my constituency, Bristol? Teach First has now established centres there, so regionalisation is taking place as we speak.

[Damian Hinds]

I very much welcome that. Teach First is also doing good work in Bournemouth, a coastal town that has had particular issues. We should look at what impact it has had there—

[Ben Gummer (Ipswich) (Con)]

And in Ipswich.

[Damian Hinds]

And in Ipswich, but I want that to be done on a big scale in Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham and all the other places where we can make a big difference. We now have Teach Next, and it would be nice to have “Teach Later” so that people towards the end of their careers in business or academia who want to come back and give something back to schools can do so.

The second critical thing we could do is further to develop performance management and performance pay. That has been well covered by other hon. Members and, as time is short, I will not bang on about it.

The final thing I want to mention—I apologise to erstwhile Select Committee colleagues, because I have frequently banged on about this in the past—is how teaching is such a high stakes profession and is such a high stakes commitment to make. When people do their PGCE or undergraduate degree, the assumption is that they will do the job for life. There are very few careers left in this country for which that is the case.

We ask, “How can you tell a great teacher?” The answer is that we cannot: we cannot tell from a paper qualification, QTS, degree results or anything else, but we know it when we see it. That also goes for the individual considering teaching. We need a heavy emphasis in teacher training and accreditation on classroom performance. We also need more taster sessions, in which sixth-formers or undergraduates considering doing an undergraduate education degree or a PGCE get an opportunity to teach in a classroom and figure out if it is right for them.