Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Julie Elliott and Nick Gibb

Monday 12th November 2018 Commons Chamber

[Julie Elliott (Sunderland Central) (Lab)]

7. What recent assessment his Department has made of trends in the level of teacher recruitment and retention.

[The Minister for School Standards (Nick Gibb)]

The number of teachers remains high, with more than 450,000 in schools across the country—that is over 10,000 more than in 2010. With a strong economy and the lowest unemployment for over 40 years, competition with other professions, industry and commerce for the best graduates is fierce. That is why we have generous tax-free bursaries of up to £26,000 in certain subjects to attract high-performing graduates into teacher training and into the profession.

[Julie Elliott]

I thank the Minister for that answer, but teachers are leaving the profession in droves. In the north-east, over 500 teachers left last year. In real terms, teachers are thousands of pounds worse off than in 2010. Why is the Minister still imposing a real-terms pay cut on the majority of teachers?

[Nick Gibb]

We agreed the School Teachers Review Body recommendations for a 3.5% rise in the pay ranges for the main scale of teachers, a 2% rise in the upper pay scale and a 1.5% rise for the leadership range. We are funding that to schools through a teachers’ pay grant over and above the 1% they will already have budgeted. Earlier this year, we announced the new recruitment and retention strategy, building on existing work to boost marketing and support to applicants. The strategy seeks to increase retention rates by streamlining accountability and stripping away unnecessary workload, which the evidence suggests does not improve children’s outcomes.

Key Stage 2 Tests

Debate between Julie Elliott and Nick Gibb

Tuesday 10th May 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gibb]

The hon. Lady simply overstates her case. Our plan for reforming the education system was put in place in 2010. We have reviewed the curriculum. That was overseen by a national curriculum review panel of experienced teachers and headteachers. The new curriculum was advised on by a panel of curriculum experts. It was consulted on widely between 2012 and 2013, informally and then formally. It was published in final draft in July 2013, giving schools over a year to prepare for the first teaching of it in September 2014. This has been a carefully planned review and reform of the curriculum. It has been as swift as it can be, because children need the best education possible, as quickly as possible. This is an important reform. This was always going to be a difficult month, as children were assessed for the first time on the new curriculum. However, schools have had a significant amount of material since July 2013, and they are ready—all our surveys have shown that they are confident about teaching the new curriculum.

[Julie Elliott (Sunderland Central) (Lab)]

I hope the Minister will agree that stability is key to a child thriving at primary school. As has been said, however, the Department for Education has changed documents and resources almost every other day recently, and that has been compounded by the disgraceful leak of the tests. Government Members are rewriting history—something the UK Statistics Authority told them to stop doing—because the Labour Government improved standards from 1997 to 2010. I will give the Minister another chance to apologise to teachers, parents and pupils, and to allow teachers to get on with teaching and children to thrive. Apologise!

[Mr Gibb]

Again, I think the hon. Lady overstates her case. The primary curriculum was published in final form in July 2013, sample questions were available as early as March 2014, and there were later sample questions in 2015. In reference to her point about changes being made to materials on-site, the Standards and Testing Agency has responded to telephone queries from teachers about certain aspects of the curriculum and the sample materials. To help teachers, it revised some of that material so that it responded to those concerns. There were other, very minor changes—for example, when, in response to representations from the NAHT, I changed the date on which the STA collected the teacher assessment materials. That decision was taken in response to the concerns expressed. There were real reasons why we wanted the date to be earlier to ensure fairness between the schools that were moderated by the local authority and those that were not. Of course, that required all the documents online to have a date change. The hon. Lady can make a song and dance about these changes, but they were all done for professional reasons by the very experienced professionals of the Standards and Testing Agency, and they were the right thing to do.