Qualified Teachers

Debate between Ian Mearns and Tristram Hunt

Wednesday 30th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Tristram Hunt]

The great thing about qualified teachers is that they can be both qualified and an inspiration. [Interruption.] I know that the Conservative party is developing something of an obsession with me, so let me say that if Conservative Members want to invite me to a special session of the 1922 Committee to talk about my past and history, I shall be more than willing to take up their invitation.

Why does the Labour party believe in having qualified teachers in our classrooms? The Secretary of State’s 2010 White Paper put it best:

“The first and most important lesson is that no education system can be better than the quality of its teachers. The most successful countries…are those where teaching has the highest status as a profession’’.

In Finland, the world’s highest-performing education system, teacher education is led by universities, and all teachers are qualified to Master’s level. In Singapore, all teachers are fully trained and have annual training entitlements. The most effective way in which to improve our children’s education is to boost the quality, elevate the standing, and raise the standards of our teaching profession. We need to train teachers up, not talk them down.

[Ian Mearns (Gateshead) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend has just alluded to the very point that I wanted to make. The Secretary of State thinks that it is okay for us to have unqualified teachers, but also lauds the Finnish system, under which the minimum retirement for a teacher is to be a qualified professional with a Master’s degree.

[Tristram Hunt]

That is exactly the difference between the parties. We believe in professionalisation rather than deregulation. We believe in going up the value chain rather than deskilling. The point is simple: good teachers change lives. They engender aspiration, curiosity, self-improvement and a hunger for knowledge. It is teaching that awakens the passion for learning that a prosperous society and a vibrant economy so desperately need. The Secretary of State should heed the words of Andreas Schleicher of the OECD, who has argued for teaching to be elevated

“to a profession of high-level knowledge workers, who work autonomously and contribute to the profession within a collaborative culture.”

Arts and Creative Industries

Debate between Ian Mearns and Tristram Hunt

Wednesday 19th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Tristram Hunt (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins). His was a masterclass in how to get ahead in advertising.

It is even more of a pleasure to follow my right hon. Friend the Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw), who is no longer in his place, because last year his constituency won the museum of the year award. I must declare an interest in that I sat as a judge on the museum of the year award this year. We visited the great Narberth museum, the great Horniman museum, close to the constituency of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), and the William Morris gallery, in the north of London, the latter winning with a great display of excellence, scholarship and curatorial skill—and this was a museum that was threatened with closure in 2007 on the grounds that William Morris had nothing to offer the modern, multicultural, urban community of Walthamstow. How wrong they were!

Arts for all is the Labour tradition. As William Morris put it in 1877:

“I do not want art for a few, any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few.”

What we achieved in government was for the many: we increased visits by children to museums and galleries by more than 2 million; provided a solid funding infrastructure for both national and regional arts organisations; supported creativity in education through creativity partnerships; and established the spectacularly successful UK city of culture, which my hon. Friends from Liverpool will no doubt explore in greater detail.

[Ian Mearns]

Rather than doom and gloom, we need to celebrate the previous Government’s achievement in the arts. I remind the House that the Conservative party visited the Sage Gateshead, and that the Northern Sinfonia was last week granted the title “Royal” by Her Majesty the Queen.

[Tristram Hunt]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. One had only to read Bagehot in The Economist last week to know of the great economic impact of the arts in the north-east, exactly on the template that Richard Florida has explained for urban economies.

Sadly, much of that achievement has been undermined by the current Government. Their assault on the British economy—stripping out demand and growth and fomenting unemployment—has hit the arts hard. They have cut the Arts Council budget by 35%, condemned philanthropists as tax dodgers and abolished the future jobs fund, which did so much to bring new talent into the arts. Meanwhile, their assault on local authority budgets has been passed down to the arts, libraries and galleries.

It is a question not just of funding, but of ethos. We have a Government who give a direct subsidy to local authorities to ensure that they can empty dustbins rather than keep galleries and libraries open—it is garbage not galleries under this Government. We have a Government who think libraries are only for luvvies and that those who are campaigning to save them are somehow misguided. What we also have is a dramatic and, frankly, Stalinist purge of personnel in the arts community. Sadly, we know that the Prime Minister has a terrible problem with women. We have seen the purge of Liz Forgan from the Arts Council and Baroness Andrews from English Heritage. Many of us now worry about the future of Jenny Abramsky at the Heritage Lottery Fund, who has done a great job.