Teachers Pay

David Laws Excerpts

Tuesday 18th September 2012 Westminster Hall

[The Minister for Schools (Mr David Laws)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Southport (John Pugh) for the kind comments that he made at the beginning of his speech, and I congratulate him on securing this important debate. As he mentioned a number of times, the issue is incredibly important for many people across the country, particularly in the north and in his constituency, and he will understand that it is an issue throughout much of the country beyond the south-east, including the area that I represent in the south-west of England. The Government acknowledge how sensitive it is for many people who work and do extremely important tasks within the public sector.

My hon. Friend has raised the issue at an important moment. As the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan), mentioned, the School Teachers Review Body is considering the issues and will report relatively shortly. I think the shadow Minister said that he was expecting the response on 20 September. The latest information available to me indicates that it is more likely to be published towards the end of October. The shadow Minister will be aware from his own experiences in Government that the report will be made initially to the Secretary of State, who will then have to decide when to publish the evidence, alongside the Government’s response to the recommendations. I have no doubt that my hon. Friend and the shadow Minister will be assiduous in considering the evidence base and the response and following up with any issues and observations they have.

Before I go into the detail of my response to my hon. Friend, I should say that I agree with him on two strategic observations that he made about this debate. It is incredibly important that measures should be evidence-based. There is a lot of prejudice on different sides of the debate about issues of flexibility in pay, regional pay and local pay, but there is complete agreement between my hon. Friend and the Government that it must be evidence-based. He mentioned that he published his own report on the issues, bringing to the surface some of the evidence available on the issue of regional and local pay, even though it is not uncontested territory.

My hon. Friend referred earlier to having tabled a question to the Department about the regional variations in quality of teaching measured by the Ofsted framework. From my recollection of the last few days, he can expect a letter from the chief inspector on that issue pretty soon. I will be interested to hear his analysis after he has looked through the information, which I think will be quite detailed. It will perhaps take the debate further.

He and the shadow Minister made an important point. We acknowledge that education is an area in which the Government cannot simply press a button in Westminster or Whitehall and create particular policy responses across the country. There are 23,500 schools in this country, and education is delivered not by Ministers but by the people who teach in schools, head teachers and all the others who contribute in educational settings. Motivating and inspiring those people, and supporting them in the common aspiration of improving the education of young people, involves a partnership between the Government and those who serve in education. We are conscious of the need to keep them motivated and to make them understand that the Government want to support them in doing their job as effectively as possible.

The shadow Minister indicated that he is concerned about morale in some areas of the teaching profession. I have no doubt that there are various different propositions to make in this area. From my own visits to many schools across the country, particularly in my own constituency having taken on this role only recently, I think a lot of teachers and head teachers acknowledge that the Government, in difficult financial times, have put in place a good financial settlement for schools, given the pressures on other areas, including the pupil premium, which is ensuring that schools, particularly in disadvantaged areas, have the funding needed to tackle some of the challenges they face.

Before I respond to my hon. Friend, I would like to say that I am grateful to the shadow Minister for his kind comments about me taking up this role. I look forward to working with him as co-operatively as I can, and as the usual cross-party niceties allow. I would also like, as I did when I spoke a few days ago in the House, to pick up on his comments about the three Education Ministers who left in the reshuffle. I think he was indicating and hinting that those three individuals were passionate about their work and were regarded as very strong in the areas they championed. I think all hon. Members wish them all the best for the future, whether they agreed with every one of their policy proposals or not. I have no doubt that all three will go on contributing to the debate about education and children’s services.

In preparation for the debate, I read with interest my hon. Friend’s recent paper on the subject of regional and local pay. As I indicated, it is an important and timely contribution to a timely and topical debate. I will address some of the points he raised in that paper, as well as the points that came up in his speech. First, however, it is important and useful to set out, to some extent, the approach the Government are taking on reforms to teachers pay and the debate about regional and local pay across the public sector.

In the autumn statement in November 2011, the Chancellor said that pay review bodies would be asked to consider how and if public sector pay could be made more responsive to local labour markets. He then wrote to pay review bodies in December 2011. His letter to the School Teachers Review Body said:

“there is substantial evidence that the difference between public and private sector wages varies considerably between local labour markets. This has the potential to hurt private sector businesses that need to compete with higher public wages; lead to unfair variations in public sector service quality; and reduce the number of jobs that the public sector can support for any given level of expenditure.”

Those are some of the suggestions that my hon. Friend was commenting on in the debate and in his paper.

As my hon. Friend will be aware, there are already four geographical pay bands—the shadow Minister commented on this—that apply to teachers pay: inner London, outer London, the London fringe, and the rest of England and Wales. The current pay bands have rigid boundaries, which at the point they were devised took account of areas that historically had higher teacher vacancy rates and costs of living. The starting salary for classroom teachers is £21,588 in the England and Wales pay band and £27,000 in the inner London pay band. I think I am right in saying that all parties across the House, and my hon. Friend, acknowledge that there are some areas where there are very high costs, and where not having a degree of flexibility in pay would mean that it would be very difficult to recruit people who worked in those areas. Many of us are very passionate about ensuring that young people, particularly in areas such as inner London where there are big challenges in many schools, should have very high quality teachers and they should not be penalised as a consequence of teachers not being able to live and teach in those areas. The debate, then, is not whether there should be any element of regional variation within the system of teachers pay, but whether we should have different or greater variation.

The single most important determinant of a good education is for every child to have access to a good teacher. The available evidence suggests that the main driver of variation in student achievement at school is the quality of the teachers. The effects of high-quality teaching are especially significant for pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds, and research from the Sutton Trust has suggested that poor pupils may lose out on a whole year’s worth of education if they spend a year in a class with a poorly performing teacher, when compared with the education that they would have received from a very good teacher. International evidence shows that the top performing school systems consistently attract more able people into the teaching profession, leading to better pupil outcomes. That is a reason why the pay incentives and the overall levels of pay have to be right, as my hon. Friend would agree. Competitive salaries, in line with other local graduate professions, help to ensure that high-quality graduates are attracted into and retained within the teaching profession across the country.

[John Pugh]

The Minister is suggesting, and I agree, that teachers in disadvantaged areas have probably greater potential to make a difference to children’s lives. It is relatively unsurprising, then, that value added is identified in those areas of relative deprivation, as the Propper data show.

[Mr Laws]

That is a good point, but it is perhaps not the whole debate. I will explain why as I proceed through the comments that I have to make.

Recent research from the OECD showed that our teachers are amongst the best paid of all OECD countries. There was an improvement under the previous Government, which we welcome—that is good news. However, alongside ensuring that salaries are competitive we need to consider the case for arrangements for teachers pay that drive up the quality of teaching by rewarding good performance; giving schools as much freedom as possible to spend their money sensibly as they see fit to meet their pupils’ needs; ensuring the best teachers are incentivised to work in the most challenging schools, as my hon. Friend has acknowledged; and ensuring—an important point both for and against the argument for regional pay—the best value for money for the taxpayer in the money that it is allocated. That is why the Secretary of State, responding to the Chancellor, has asked the experts, the School Teachers Review Body, to consider how reforms to the teachers pay system might support schools and head teachers to recruit and retain the best quality teachers. That is in line with the approach being taken for other public sector work forces and will ensure that any changes that are made—this is my hon. Friend’s concern—must be based on the best evidence available.

In his remit letter to the STRB, the Secretary of State asked it to consider a number of factors: first, how we might reduce rigidity within the pay system so that it best supports the recruitment and retention of high quality teachers in all schools; secondly, how teachers pay could be better linked to performance and whether there are existing barriers to that within the current system; and thirdly, whether to make teachers pay more flexible following the commitment in the 2011 autumn statement to ask pay review bodies to consider how public sector pay can be made more responsive to local market conditions. The question of how teachers’ pay can be made more responsive to local labour markets is only one of the things—an important point that I want to draw out from today’s debate—that the Secretary of State has asked the STRB to consider, and it is important that I set out all of the issues on which the Secretary of State has asked for recommendations.

To support the STRB’s consideration of its remit, the Secretary of State submitted written evidence. The STRB has also taken into account evidence from bodies representing employers of teachers, school governors, and teacher and head teacher unions. The Secretary of State’s evidence raised concerns that under the current system the rate at which teachers are paid is more closely associated with the time they have served as a teacher than it is with their performance in the classroom. Almost every teacher on the main pay scale progresses to the next spine point each year, and almost half of qualified teachers across all pay scales are on a higher spine point than the previous year.

Our analysis of vacancy rates shows that some schools find it more difficult to recruit and retain teachers than others. There are different vacancy rates between different regions, between local authorities in the same region, and between schools in the same local authority. There are also differences in vacancy rates between subjects, as my hon. Friend is aware. For example, there are above average vacancies in English and mathematics posts, but below average vacancy rates in the arts and humanities. Where vacancies are filled, some subjects are significantly more likely to be taught by non-specialist teachers, which is a major concern. For example, 21% of physics lessons are taught by non-specialist teachers, compared with 10% of history lessons.

The Secretary of State’s evidence to the STRB suggested five options for reform that it may wish to consider, illustrating the range of approaches that are available to it when making its recommendations. In late October, following careful consideration of all the evidence submitted, the STRB will make its recommendations to the Secretary of State. The Secretary of State has stated his intention to then issue a second remit to the STRB that may ask it to produce more detailed recommendations, or to consider further issues on which it has not yet reported. Hon. Members will be pleased to know that no decisions have been made and the Government remain open-minded about these reforms.

My hon. Friend’s paper and his speech clearly set out a number of key arguments made in the recent debate about regional pay for public sector workers. I should like briefly to touch on some of the issues that he highlighted. I remind him that issues relating to how public sector pay reflects the local labour market will be considered alongside other priorities, which I mentioned earlier.

[John Pugh]

Will the Minister consider the following point? We have used the expression “responsive to the local labour market” all the way through, as though we know in every case what the local labour market or the pool of workers is that we are pulling from. It would be useful to have an additional piece of research figuring out, when, say, a school head teacher or head of department post is advertised, the actual field of applicants. Where do they come from and how do people move between one area and another? In teaching, people at a certain level are prepared to move appreciable distances. Often in an advertisement in the paper, a school is appealing to the labour market of the whole nation, not just the local labour market. We cannot talk as though the local labour market is a fixed thing that we always understand.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Laws]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. He will also appreciate that the reasons that motivate people to take on particular posts or to stay within geographic communities are based not just on pay, but on other connections that individuals may have with an area.

The first of my hon. Friend’s arguments was that the private sector might be disadvantaged in local labour markets where public sector workers are relatively highly paid. He referred to this as the crowding-out hypothesis. As the Secretary of State’s evidence to the STRB showed, there is variety in supply and demand within the teacher labour market, including in the relative pay of public and private sector workers. This appears to be reflected in vacancy rates, with schools in some regions finding it more difficult to attract candidates into vacancies. However, as the Secretary of State’s evidence also shows, there is variation between regions, between local authorities and between schools in the same local authority. Schools also appear to experience greater difficulty appointing specialists in some subjects compared with others. Stakeholders have submitted a large amount of evidence to the STRB and the other pay review bodies in this regard and detailed representations have been made on crowding out. I am confident that the experts will therefore have all the information they need to consider this specific issue carefully when making its recommendations.

My hon. Friend’s paper also considers whether the Government could make savings by reducing the pay of public sector workers in line with local labour markets. Increasing autonomy for schools is central to the Government’s education reforms. Although of course we wish to achieve value for money in all public spending decisions, we have clearly prioritised autonomy for head teachers to allocate the funds available to them in the way that they think is most appropriate to provide for the needs of their pupils, subject to the disciplines that any of us would expect in the public sector. Where pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds attend school, we have made sure that there is additional money through the pupil premium, which my hon. Friend strongly supports, for head teachers to spend on the additional support that they think is necessary. However, there are always advantages and disadvantages in such an approach—my hon. Friend set them out carefully—and those matters will be carefully considered by the STRB in its deliberations.

The final point mentioned by my hon. Friend was public sector pay in other countries. He specifically mentioned in his paper the experience in Sweden. As is well documented, the Secretary of State and the Government wish to learn carefully the right lessons from all education systems that perform most strongly in international comparisons. We have considered the Swedish system, but we are interested in all public education systems where pupils perform well compared with their counterparts in other countries, particularly where the attainment gap between the least and most advantaged children is small compared with the large gap that still exists in this country. We trust that the STRB will take into account systems employed in Sweden and elsewhere in the world. These will inform its recommendations to the Secretary of State.

Regional pay has been at the forefront of recent debates about public sector pay reform. However, my honourable Friend will recognise that, although we have asked the STRB to consider how teachers pay could be made more flexible locally or regionally, there are issues other than regional pay under consideration when it comes to teachers specifically. Increasing the flexibility that head teachers have to determine the pay arrangements suited to their school could be a key element of the drive to increase autonomy from government. We want head teachers, particularly in the most disadvantaged schools, to be able to use the additional funding that they have through the pupil premium to attract and retain top quality teachers to work where the pupils need them most. We need carefully to consider whether the current system enables them to do that.

Our approach all along has been to provide the STRB with the evidence that we think is most relevant to its deliberations and to encourage others to do the same. We are encouraged that contributions to the debate are being made by organisations and individuals who are not among the statutory consultees of the STRB. My hon. Friend has made his case clearly and publicly.

In setting out the Government’s approach after the Chancellor made his statement last year, my hon. Friend will be aware that the Chief Secretary to the Treasury made a speech at a union conference in June, saying:

“Despite some of the more excited press reporting, the only thing we have decided is to look at the evidence…before we decide anything, we want to hear from everyone with a contribution to make to this debate—employers, academics and, yes of course, the Trades Unions. There will be no change unless there is strong evidence to support it and a rational case for proceeding.”

I thank my hon. Friend for his contribution to this important debate. I am sure that, like me, he looks forward to reading the STRB’s report and the Government’s response, and I have no doubt that he will respond again in detail to those.