Teaching Quality

Yasmin Qureshi Excerpts

Wednesday 29th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South East) (Lab)]

In 1997, when the Labour party came to power, one of its key mantras was “education, education, education”. In the years to 2010, the Labour party spent an enormous amount of money investing in education: on schools, textbooks and pay to raise teachers’ morale. The educational qualifications and standards in our schools improved tremendously. That is not the end of the story, however, and there is still more to be done. This debate on the training of teachers should be seen in the context of the continuous need to improve the education of our children.

The Secretary of State started his speech by going through a literal interpretation of the Opposition motion. When I trained as a lawyer, we were told that judges have three approaches to interpreting legislation: the literal interpretation, which the Secretary of State was alluding to; the golden principle, where legislation is applied in a liberal way; and the mischief rule, which asks, “What is the mischief that the law intends to deal with?” The mischief we want to deal with in this debate is that we have teachers in our schools who are not qualified properly.

I accept fully that there are some teachers without qualifications who are brilliant. I also accept that there are people with qualifications who may not be as good, or even competent. That does not mean, however, that we should not continue to strive for what I call the gold standard, which is providing training to our teachers. A young teacher, or someone who has just qualified or graduated, may be excellent in their subject matter and have a first class honours degree, but the reality is that in most of our junior and secondary schools they will be faced with classes of 25 to 30 children, perhaps with various levels of learning. To set their classes, to deal with the issue of how to control the classroom, to identify which child may need extra help, and to look at pastoral care and whether a child is being neglected at home—those are all part and parcel of a teacher’s work. If teachers are not qualified and have not received training on these issues, how will they be able to identify them? How will they automatically be aware of what to do? That is where the importance of having some kind of training—we could have a debate on how long training should last—is surely crucial. I am therefore surprised that Government Members, in particular, are deriding the idea that teachers should be trained.

Members might think this is a bizarre example, but we would not let people operate on us if they were not fully qualified. A person might say, “Look, I’ve been in hospital for 10 years and guess what? I’ve done all sorts of things. I didn’t pass my exam, but, because I know what I’m talking about, allow me to operate on you.” We would not accept that, so why are we willing to make that compromise with our children’s education? We accept that what we are trying to achieve will not stop the expert, the talented musician or the singer coming in and giving children lessons, but our provisions concern day-to-day teaching in a classroom, where the teacher will be there for a long time working with the children. The qualification needs to be good.

Members talked ad nauseam about private schools not having that many qualified teachers, or that they can do without them. One has to understand that private schools have a different standing. Most of the kids come from middle class, well-educated families who look after them at home. Those children are going to do very well most of the time in any event, so comparing private sector schools with state schools is wrong.