Initial Teacher Training

Lord Storey Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a vice-president of the LGA. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, for opening this important debate.

It is a pleasure to speak on the Government’s policy on initial teaching training and how to ensure that every school in every part of the country can confidently appoint the teachers it needs to deliver an excellent education to every child and young person. As the noble Lord, Lord Kirkham, rightly said, the quality of our teachers must be paramount in our education system. If a primary pupil has a poor teacher, they cannot repeat that year. If a secondary student has a poor subject teacher, they have lost a year of learning and understanding.

We need to ensure that our teachers are highly trained, highly motivated and have the pedagogical skills to enable them to teach and relate to children. Children need teachers who can teach, enrich their learning, motivate and give them the confidence that education is all about. As a nation, we need teachers who are well trained, well respected—and well paid. As a historical footnote, it is interesting to observe that, when Margaret Thatcher was Secretary of State for Education, she implemented in full the Houghton review—the largest ever increase in teachers’ salaries.

As I listened to the cogent arguments made by my learned friends in this House, I reflected on my own teacher training. The world has changed considerably since I started at St Katharine’s Church of England Teacher Training College in Liverpool—now Liverpool Hope University. As another historical footnote, the principal, as he was called, discovered in the Times Higher Education Supplement that his college was about to be closed down by the then Wilson Government, as was the Roman Catholic Christ’s College across the road. They had the political nous to join together, daring the Secretary of State for Education to close an ecumenical establishment—which, of course, he did not. Now Liverpool Hope University is flourishing. It is a gold standard university and the only ecumenical university in Europe.

The pattern of teacher training was much simpler then. The majority of teachers went to what was known as a teacher training college to do a three-year course, until, in the 1990s, the four-year B.Ed. was introduced. Another route into teaching was for graduates, who took a one-year postgraduate certificate in education at university. The third route was to go straight into teaching with a degree in the subject you intended to teach; this happened in many secondary and independent schools. Such people learned their teaching on the job.

In the last decade, as we have heard from the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, there has been a steady growth of different routes into teaching, and ITT has become very fragmented. Teaching is now pretty much a graduate profession, with most teachers getting their degree before deciding which route to take. In addition to the traditional degree plus PGCE route, the balance has swung very much towards school-based initial teacher training. The traditional years spent at university, with a placement in a school for an extended teaching practice, has been replaced for many students with a year based in a school, with the school buying in the pedagogical element from a university.

Teach First—the implication being that teaching will be the first of many careers—has grown enormously in recent years, with good honours graduates going into challenging schools after a six-week summer school camp and very much learning on the job. I still have grave reservations about whether you can learn to be a school- based teacher after just six weeks in a summer school.

All the while, there has been a range of initiatives to try to recruit teachers of so-called shortage subjects, particularly maths and physics, with bursaries—the equivalent of a golden handshake—offered to encourage applicants. The reaction of the university sector to the market review of teacher training, as the noble Lord, Lord Knight, has told us, was, by and large, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” But I welcome the opportunity to look at the sector. Given the multiplicity of routes into teaching, the quality of the training offered has been patchy, to say the least.

The Liberal Democrats have consistently emphasised that our teachers are the greatest asset of our education system. The disruption to our children’s education caused by the pandemic, with long periods of enforced absence from school, has served to emphasise how valuable face-to-face teaching is. However good the technology, however well planned the lessons, virtual lessons are a pale shadow of an excellent school education.

I welcome any and every attempt by the Government to attract high-quality graduates to the teaching profession and will support the proposals to make teaching an attractive profession. I can see some merit in the Government’s attempt to improve the quality of initial teacher training. There does seem to be a need to ensure that every trainee teacher, at the end of their professional training, is confident and well equipped to face what is the one of the best, but most challenging, jobs in the world.

I also believe it important that certain elements are mandatory in teacher training. We heard from my noble friend Lord Addington about the importance of special needs. Every primary school teacher needs to do a unit on child development. If they do not know how a child develops from a very young age, how can they really have the rapport to teach them? Every teacher, whether in the primary or secondary phase, needs to know how to identify a child who suffers from dyslexia. It seems crazy to me that that does not happen. When I was doing my degree after my teacher training, my education tutor told me that there was no such thing as dyslexia. That was in the early 1980s.

Universities do have an important role in teacher training, as I have said. However, the emphasis of the Government’s market review of teacher training seems to be on the market aspect. The noble Baroness, Lady Blower, emphasised this, and she is right: it is a pity that the Government’s consultation on the future of initial teacher training was carried out in the summer, between early June and the end of August. The Government maintain that delaying the consultation until this autumn would have delayed plans to push forward with the reforms. Although the consultation ended on 22 August, almost three months ago, we have not yet had any information on the response to it. Maybe we can blame the pandemic; I do not know.

Teachers are the lifeblood of our education system and we must recruit and retain the very best teachers. We can do this only if we can offer them an excellent preparation for the role, support them during the early years of teaching and enable them to flourish in their chosen profession.

A number of questions have arisen during the course of this debate and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s answers. I am concerned that we are still waiting to hear what will emerge from the market review and how much of teacher training will be to do with the market. We have heard today about the Institute of Teaching, with a £122 million contract up for grabs to run the flagship teacher training establishment. Will that be run by a private provider? The top priority of teacher training is the quality and, as in many areas, there is a mixed economy of providers, but I am concerned that we do not throw the HEI baby out with the bathwater. How will the Government ensure that the market is managed so that every teacher benefits from the teacher training experience?

I end by saying that teacher training does not just start before they go into schools, or however they do that; the training of a teacher goes throughout their teaching career, and continuing professional development has to be a hugely important part of the role of schools and, indeed, of government.