Education Bill

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Tuesday 1st November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

My Lords, this is an important amendment and it is important for the Minister to respond to the questions that have been raised. When the Government were first formed, they made great store of talking up the importance of teaching. Indeed, the title of the first White Paper that the new department published was The Importance of Teaching. Just now, I looked up the discussion document on teacher training published in June this year, where the Secretary of State, Michael Gove, begins his foreword:

“If we want to have an education system that ranks with the best in the world, then we need to attract the best people and we need to give them outstanding training”.

Clearly, if we believe what the Secretary of State is saying on that aspect of the Government's policy, the Secretary of State understands the importance of trained, qualified teachers.

I listened carefully to what the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, said in preceding me and it is important to offer people the opportunity to come in with other expertise and knowledge. However, there are ways of doing that while still preserving the importance of qualified teachers. For example, it should be easier for people to become qualified and to train on the job in terms of pedagogy. What I would not want to see is this opening the door to a sort-of “Jamie's Dream School” approach. Just because you are brilliant in your field—you might even be a brilliant noble Lord—it does not mean that you are necessarily going to be a brilliant teacher. I think that those of us who watched any of the episodes of “Jamie's Dream School” will have been appalled at times by the inability of some of those people, brilliant in their subject, to relate to children and to teach them. It needs some training so, yes, we should allow some of those brilliant people to enter the teaching profession but we should also allow them an opportunity to train and gain pedagogical understanding as they do so, under the supervision of a qualified teacher. That is what this amendment offers.

I am concerned that as the free school policy develops, it is being informed by a belief on the part of some in the department that if it works in independent schools, it must work in free schools and in the maintained sector—because independent schools can have non-qualified teachers, it must be fine. We have heard the parallels with health, for example, and about whether it is fair to presume that if I bowl up to a hospital and it has let somebody practise, it will be all right and it does not really matter whether they are qualified. I do not like that idea. I would not trust someone to treat me as a medical practitioner unless they were qualified and I would not want to trust my children to a teacher unless that practitioner was qualified.

Many or most independent schools do a great job but they do that with a very narrow set of pupils. I know that if my friends in the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference were listening, they would be shouting at me but it is fair to say that it is often the case that those pupils are from fairly narrow backgrounds and do not, by and large, have quite the same behavioural challenges or some of the obstacles that have to be overcome in the maintained sector. I would be looking for training to inculcate those sorts of skills in teachers.

This is a good amendment. It seeks to give some guarantees on quality. We have had debates during this Report stage on the weakening of admissions and on some schools being exempted from inspection by Ofsted. We seem consistently to be weakening some of the measures and guarantees of quality in order to pursue and make a success of this free school policy in terms of numbers and flexibility. If we are to go with the free-market approach to education, we need to hang on all the more tightly to guarantees of the quality of the workforce, the quality of the inspection and fair admissions. We have also talked about fair funding. In the end, I will always come back to this in debates on this Bill: I fear that unless we can give some guarantees about the workforce being qualified, we will lose quality in some of these free schools.

In the United States, some of the charter schools were set up with the best of intentions by parents who were dissatisfied with what was going on locally. They might think, “Well, I’m okay as I have done a bit of home education myself. I’ll rock up and teach—it’ll be fine”. They are very well intentioned, and it might be fine for their kids, but I am not persuaded that it is fine. The experience of so many charter schools in the United States is that it is not fine; so many of them have failed. There are some great ones, but many of them are not great. I do not want to take that risk in this country.

[Lord Northbourne]

My Lords, this suggests that teaching is not entirely about qualifications; it is also a gift of God. However, that was not what I intended to ask. I wanted to ask the mover of the amendment what is meant by “non-specified work.” I am concerned —so are the Government, and indeed we should all be concerned—about, for example, those who do not have a tendency to be very successful in academic qualifications and who need to get fulfilment in life from their work, or from other skills. Why should not someone be taught to use a lathe by someone who is brilliant at using a lathe, rather than by someone who has an academic education? Or perhaps I have got it wrong.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

My Lords, I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, that this has been an extremely good and interesting debate, and I am grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken from a range of different perspectives, and for some of the advice that I have received, which is helpful. At issue here is, in some way, a distinction between quality and qualification. There is complete agreement that we want the highest possible quality; the difference of opinion is whether the only way that the highest possible quality can be secured is through a specific qualification. I think I sum the mood up accurately by saying there is a feeling that quality is not defined only by one specific qualification.

It is certainly the case that improving overall teacher quality is very much at the heart of what the Government are trying to achieve through their education reforms. I agree with what all noble Lords and the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, have said about the importance of teacher professionalism. Across the piece, the Government are introducing a range of reforms to try and raise the status of the profession. We are reforming initial teacher training, trying to ensure that we attract more top graduates, strengthening teachers’ powers and authority in the classroom, and streamlining performance management arrangements.

We think that qualified teacher status has an important part to play in the teaching profession. That is why, in March, we set up a review of teacher standards, led by Sally Coates, to make all teacher standards, including those that underpin QTS, clearer and more focused. The review recommended revised standards that will take effect from September 2012 and raise the bar for entry to the profession.

We certainly think that qualified teacher status has an important role in the system, but we think that it is possible to be an outstanding teacher without having QTS. A number of noble Lords spoke during our debate in Committee and again this afternoon about the value that individuals from a range of backgrounds, experience and expertise can bring to the classroom. It is true that under current arrangements such individuals can already bring their experience to bear in the classroom, but to a limited extent. Broadly speaking, they may only assist or support the work of a teacher with QTS and must be directed and supervised in doing so.

The core purpose of the free schools programme that lies at the heart of the issue is to make it easier for parents, teachers and others to set up new schools in response to demand from their local community for change in education provision in their area. That is the basis upon which free school proposers set out their educational vision. We want to give them the ability draw on as wide a pool of talent as possible to deliver that vision. If a free school believes that that means including among its staff a teacher who has a wealth of qualifications, experience and expertise, but who does not have QTS, we do not want to prohibit the free school from doing so.

My noble friend Lady Perry, the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland of Houndwood, the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, and my noble friend Lady Benjamin all spoke persuasively about the need for some degree of flexibility. The kind of example that we have in mind would be that a free school might want to employ an experienced science teacher from the independent sector who has a strong track record of preparing pupils for top universities. That would be one example. We have a free school proposal from a group of independent schools that wants to set up a sixth-form college in Newham to try to get more children from disadvantaged backgrounds to go to top universities. My noble friend Lord Lucas mentioned another example in which the former head of Westminster School was caught by the rules. A free school might want to employ an engineer with a background in training and instruction to teach an engineering technical specialism.

Free schools know that recruiting high-quality teachers will make the biggest difference to the quality of education that they can provide for their pupils. Therefore, I believe that they will themselves want to ensure that the staff that they recruit have the right knowledge and skills, and that relates to the point that my noble friend Lord Storey made about how free schools will be accountable and what mechanisms will be in place to make sure that they want to employ the best possible teachers. As part of their application to the department to set up a free school, proposers have to set out how they will deliver the highest quality of teaching and leadership in their schools, and no school is allowed to proceed without robust plans for doing so.

Because they are new schools set up in response to parental demand, free schools are likely to have a particularly close relationship with parents, who, we believe, will hold them sharply to account for the quality of teaching. They will be subject to the same Ofsted inspection regime as all maintained schools. They will have a pre-registration inspection before they open and a full inspection by the end of their second year of being open.

My noble friend Lady Walmsley, with support from the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland of Houndwood, asked, importantly, how we would know what was going on. I would answer that, in part, by talking about the publication of results and parents holding to account, but it is also the case that staff employed in free schools who do not have QTS will be monitored through the school workforce census, which takes place once a year. The results of that will be published on the department’s website and we will all be able to see the extent to which this is happening or not happening.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

Beyond saying that there is quite a lot of flexibility in the proposal, can the Minister tell us whether the publication of the number of unqualified teachers in free schools would feature on the Ofsted risk assessment that we talked about last week? If there were a large number of unqualified teachers in a free school, that would mean that Ofsted would be keeping a closer eye on them.