Oral Answers to Questions

Fiona Mactaggart Excerpts

Monday 25th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Nicky Morgan]

I thank the Chair of the Education Committee very much for that question; I am looking forward to appearing before his Committee later this week. He is absolutely right to talk about the importance of STEM subjects. Of course, the EBacc includes modern foreign languages. I am sure that Members on both sides of the House will have been pleased to hear the announcement last week about securing the future examinations of all modern foreign languages and lesser-taught languages, including Gujarati, biblical Hebrew and Japanese, which is very important for the future competitiveness of our country.

[Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)]

But I hope that the Secretary of State agrees that the critical thing in improving standards of education is good-quality teachers. Will she listen to the schools in Slough, 13 of which have been in touch with me about the fact that secondary schools in a small town have already spent half a million pounds in the past year attempting to recruit teachers, yet, as the head teacher at an excellent grammar school in Slough has said,

“we are now appointing teachers who we would arguably not have considered 5 years ago”?

What is the Secretary of State doing to help schools get high-quality teachers in front of children so that they can learn?

[Nicky Morgan]

I agree that the most important thing is the quality of the teachers in our classrooms, which of course is why we have more teachers coming back into teaching. In the White Paper we mentioned that we want to set up a website to save schools the high recruitment costs so that they can reward excellent teachers at the frontline. The most important thing from the recent TES global recruitment survey is that 31% of teachers said that talk of a recruitment crisis was doing their profession down. We want to focus on the important things that make a difference, talking up the profession, not always talking it down.