Teachers: Academies and Free Schools

Lord Storey Excerpts

Monday 12th September 2016 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Storey]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government how they intend to ensure that all teachers at academies and free schools are fully qualified.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have put their name down to speak in this debate.

There was a record number of 456,000 full-time equivalent teachers in state-funded schools in 2015, but retaining working-age teachers is becoming harder. The proportion of teachers leaving for reasons other than retirement is increasing. The number of teachers entering initial teacher training has been below the Government’s annual target for the past four years. In certain subjects, such as maths and physics, there has been a real problem of recruitment. The number of pupils is projected to grow by 13% between 2015 and 2024, adding another 900,000 pupils to the school system, so 50,000 new teachers will be required on top of those trainee teachers replacing leaving or retiring teachers. As I said, secondary schools face particular challenges in retaining teachers in sciences, languages and geography. However, Governments have always got it wrong on rising and falling birth rates—they have never been able to manage it properly.

Perhaps the most worrying aspect is not just recruitment and retention—it is how teachers feel about their jobs. The National Foundation for Educational Research has just published a report entitled Engaging Teachers: NFER Analysis of Teacher Retention. Every time we reorganise a school, bring in a new curriculum, change the exam system or alter the testing regime, it has an effect on teacher morale; it has an effect on their confidence and, actually, their well-being. It goes without saying that teachers who have had their morale knocked out of them will feel undervalued and not give of their best or be the excellent teachers that they should be. What can we do about it? Every time there is a minor change in your Lordships’ House many Peers are incensed. Imagine how we would feel if we had constant change here, and imagine how teachers feel.

In its February 2016 report, Training New Teachers, the National Audit Office called on the Department for Education to show that arrangements for training teachers,

“are more cost-effective than alternative expenditure, for instance on improving retention”.

It is not very cost-effective to spend considerable sums on training someone to be a teacher if they resign a few years later, when there will be the additional cost of training a new teacher to replace them.

I was recollecting—which is perhaps dangerous for me—that when I first started teaching I was responsible for what were called “top juniors”, the group of young pupils who would be entered for the 11-plus. In those days, there were grammar schools, secondary moderns and technical colleges, and then comprehensives were established. Then schools and colleges were allowed to develop specialisms, whether in languages, sciences or PE. My wife’s school became a specialist PE college, and luckily for her she was a PE teacher. Then there were academies: city academies and then academies—standalone or in multi-academy chains. As we know, 70% of our non-selective or independent schools are academies. You can give schools different names or different structures but what really matters is not the type of school but the quality of the school leadership and—most important of all—the quality and professional expertise of the teachers.

I have often said in this House that if a pupil in a primary school has a poor or mediocre teacher one year, they will not be able to repeat that year. If the pupil is learning a subject in secondary school and has a poor or mediocre teacher, he or she will probably be in danger of failing that subject.

In recent years, every time the PISA tables were announced, perhaps our most radical Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove—perhaps I do him a disservice—constantly lauded the Finnish education system for its approach to education and learning. Great! In Finland, they recognise the importance of teachers. Teachers are valued and respected and, importantly, are not allowed to teach unless they have a master’s degree. By the way, in Finland there are no tests and testing regimes until pupils reach the age of 16. In this country, whether you are a pupil in an academy, a maintained school, a church school or a grammar school, the quality of the teacher really matters.

As I said, academies were first set up by the last Labour Government as an education strategy to improve educational standards, particularly in disadvantaged communities and areas of poor education, and drive up standards by replacing failing schools in struggling LAs. Originally, they were called city academies. Academies are not obliged to follow the national curriculum and are not accountable to their local community but directly to the Minister’s department via eight regional commissioners. They are not obliged to include parents or teachers as governors, can set their own salary scales and terms and conditions for staff and can employ unqualified teachers.

Pay and conditions are about not just the amount that teachers get paid but include sick pay, the structure of school holidays, starting salaries, salary structure, pay progression, chief executive salaries, probationary arrangements, teacher qualifications, rules about people taking redundancy pay and disciplinary and grievance procedures. If we do not have a nationally agreed scheme which applies to every type of school, we will end up with a free-for-all in education and—some with a particular political bent might like this—a free market economy. We have already seen that some academies are paying differential rates of pay so they can attract teachers in shortage subjects. However, if you pay more salary to one type of teacher, other teachers will get less. Just as the coalition Government fought against regional pay, so we should fight against a divisive system in pay.

Academies’ freedom to control staff pay has resulted in many senior staff receiving bloated six-figure salaries. Indeed, chief executives of academies are on a financial wheel of fortune for their remuneration, with a salary of £300,000-plus having been paid. Perhaps those Conservative Back-Benchers in the other place who want the salaries of the BBC’s top earners to be published should insist that the salaries of the top earners in academies are published as well.

Free schools and academies have been able to employ teachers without academic or professional qualifications since 2012. Since June 2015, the number of unqualified teachers working in academies has risen by 20%. In 2012, 2,320 academies that opened had funding arrangements requiring them to employ only teachers with qualified teacher status, similar to maintained schools. However, in September 2015, Schools Week reported that 34 academies had been granted permission to amend their agreements so that they could take unqualified staff. Will the Minister please ensure that all new academies have funding arrangements requiring them to employ fully qualified staff, and that any chances are taken only in exceptional circumstances?

There are a variety of different routes into the teaching profession, ranging from postgraduate certificates based at universities to School Direct, which, as the name suggests, focuses on training at the chalkface, to Teach First. Making sure that you are properly trained and qualified before you step into the classroom and have responsibility for the minds of children and young people must be an essential requirement. Teaching is not something that you just drift into without fully understanding what you are doing. Like any other profession, teaching requires a bank of knowledge and skills that cannot just be picked up as you go along. If you teach young children, you need to understand child development. Every teacher needs to be able to identify different special educational needs, and to understand child behaviour management and safeguarding —the list goes on.

If I go into a hospital, I want the doctors who treat me to have completed their training before they turn their attention to me. If one of them says, “I have a great bedside manner but haven’t yet finished the section on anatomy”, that will not fill me with great confidence. To be thrown in at the deep end is a route to frustration and uncertainty. Students deserve the best we can offer. We definitely want those with natural aptitude to go into teaching, but that aptitude needs to be refined and developed through proper training. I suspect that if it was a legal requirement for academies, or indeed any school, to have to identify in their school prospectus those teachers who had not been fully trained, there would be a sharp reduction in the number of unqualified teachers.

In my remaining time I will quickly mention two other things. We also need—perhaps the Minister could address this—first-class professional development for all teachers. Once you qualify or start teaching, we need to ensure that that professional development is not left to an academy chain or individuals. We need to look at a proper system of professional development for all our teachers. What happened to the idea of a royal college for teachers?

I end with a quote I picked up the other day, from a teacher, Mike Britland, who said:

“Every time the government opens its mouth about education, every teacher cringes”.

Let government open its mouth with care and consideration and in the interests of all teachers and children.