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8.51 pm

Mr. George Walden (Buckingham) : I hope that the hon. Member for Bradford, South (Mr. Cryer) will excuse me if I do not approach the problems of education in Britain from the prism of the Gulf and the United Nations. There are other slightly more relevant approaches. I apologise to Front Benchers for my absence from the debate for the past couple of hours—there have been external distractions.

I congratulate my right hon. and learned Friend the Secretary of State on the wisdom of the Bill, which to some extent he owes to his predecessor, and particularly on the persuasive way in which he presented it to the House. The teaching profession has had to wait a long time to have its pay arrangements modified and updated. During that period, it has had to undergo a series of reforms, with all the strains that that involves.

Unlike some hon. Members, I believe that it is necessary to be frank about what we are discussing. We are talking not only about pay but, by the Government's definition, about recruitment, retention and motivation. I was glad that my right hon. and learned Friend the Secretary of State placed some stress on quality. To discuss the teaching profession and its pay purely in terms of recruitment, retention and motivation without any emphasis on quality is to misjudge the basis of the issue.

In his previous incarnation, my right hon. and learned Friend the Secretary of State—he is not here, for reasons which I understand—was Secretary of State for Health. I wish to say something that will not please the Opposition but it reflects the truth, which is what we are here to discuss. When my right hon. and learned Friend was in charge of nurses, he had problems of recruitment and retention, but not of quality. I, for one, have never heard any of my constituents complain or seen any reports in the press about the inadequate quality of nurses. As a user of the national health service, I have nothing to complain about in that respect.

The Opposition know as well as I do that it is a fact of life that there is a problem with the quality of teachers. It afflicts those with the least social and economic advantages much more than it afflicts people like me who send their children to private schools, for reasons which I would be happy to defend. In addressing pay, recruitment, retention and motivation, we must lay the emphasis on quality because that problem is clearly perceived by ordinary people.

To begin with the mechanics of the Bill, it is natural that the Opposition should query the insistence by my right hon. and learned Friend the Secretary of State on the need for regional pay bargaining and opt-out arrangements. I do not want to enter into any great controversy. Apart from anything else, it might be difficult to steam up the Chamber on this issue as I seem to be the only person on the Conservative Benches.

The philosophy of the hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw) seems to fit naturally with his philosophy on the uniformity and homogeneity of the comprehensive system. That is not a contentious statement but an objective observation. It is a fact of Labour party policy to want to have—I do not say "impose"—a uniform comprehensive system, but that is another issue. It is natural that the hon. Member for Blackburn should want uniform national pay bargaining to go with that system. I listened to what he said about the need for some local

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variation, but the emphasis of his speech and philosophical approach was, naturally and legitimately from his point of view, on uniformity and socialist neatness and tidiness.

I do not happen to agree. I agree with my right hon. and learned Friend the Secretary of State about the much harsher and more difficult course of differentiation. It is rational that, in favouring the opting out of schools, my right hon. and learned Friend should favour the opting out of pay negotiations, because the two go together. The hon. Member for Blackburn talked about the divisive nature of opting out of schools and of pay negotiations. I urge him to look more in terms of a variegated and richer system, offering more opportunities to those deprived of them—including, lamentably, large numbers of people.

I congratulate my right hon. and learned Friend the Secretary of State both on his insistence on opting-out pay negotiations and on his caution. The hon. Member for Blackburn was, I think, right to draw attention to the possibility of the risk of inflation in teachers' pay accompanied by no compensating gain in the quality of teaching or management ; that, at any rate, was how I interpreted his remarks. In the course of what struck me as a very responsible exchange between the two Front Benches, my right hon. and learned Friend replied with no demonstration of naive enthusiasm. On the contrary, he appeared prudently to recognise the possible risk.

As I have explained, I believe that the Bill is necessary if people are to be offered the choice that I believe is crucial. I agree with my right hon. and learned Friend—it is necessary to run the risk, but to run it prudently. The last thing that we need is a system which will lead to leapfrogging local authority teachers' pay without any compensating improvement in quality.

That brings me back to the central theme of quality. At the risk of being divisive, or what the Americans call a party-pooper, I must say that quality strikes me as the key to the problem. I was encouraged by what my right hon. and learned Friend the Secretary of State had to say about the latest recruitment statistics. I know that the Government say that teacher shortages are regional and confined to certain subjects ; nevertheless, there is disturbing evidence that the problem may extend rather further.

If the shortages begin to bite harder as the demographic dip deepens, we may experience a nightmare. The recruiters may be driven, to put it crudely, to take anyone who offers to do the job.

I am aware that we have not reached that stage yet, but it really is a nightmare. If it becomes reality, those who are recruited will, by definition, be given the equivalent of jobs for life, and once in the profession may be very difficult to remove ; moreover, it is a sociological inevitability that they will find themselves teaching in the most deprived parts of the country. Time and again, we risk a return to the inequality of opportunity that has so beset the system in the past.

As the years go by, we must monitor closely not only the mere mechanics of recruitment and retention, but the quality of those recruited. I hope that my. hon. Friend the Minister will be able to satisfy my curiosity about the pattern of A-level scores achieved by those recruited into teaching over the past few years. I acknowledge that that is a rough-and-ready guide, but at least it is a guide of some sort to the quality of new recruits.

It is not enough for my right hon. and learned Friend the Secretary of State simply to say that those now

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entering the profession are sufficient to staff the profession. We are asking more of teachers. We are not only placing more responsibility on them in connection with the GCSE examinations—we are asking them to make more judgments about the pupils. That, of course, is in the nature of the the examinations. We must ensure that quality is not only maintained but improved, because children's futures depend increasingly on the judgments of individual teachers.

Another reason not only to maintain but to improve the quality of teaching relates to international comparisons. I hope that the traumas of the past few years have taught us one thing—that we cannot think only in terms of our own national performance. We must watch with a keen eye the quality of teaching in other countries and make comparisons, however disturbing they may occasionally be.

If we are to get teachers of quality, it is not enough to offer them good pay, although that is essential ; we must also offer them good conditions. To put it simply, we must also offer them good children. When I say that, I am thinking of children starting school at the age of five. Are they children whom teachers will find it easy to handle? These children are not always easy to handle. I am not talking merely about children in deprived areas, but about those in my own area, where in many classes a third or more of the children come from broken homes.

I apologise to my hon. Friend the Minister for reverting to the subject of nursery schools. To improve the quality of education in the country as a whole, and to attract higher-quality graduates and teachers to the profession, it is essential that the Government have a plan, however long term, to introduce uniform, high-quality nursery education for people of all social backgrounds—and not only for those able to pay for it. If the Government do that, they will—overnight—make the teaching profession far more attractive because teachers will inherit children who, from the age of five, are less likely to suffer from behavioural problems and who are far more adapted to learning.

Any hon. Member who has talked to teachers will have heard them explain in graphic detail how difficult it is to start teaching a child of five who has behavioural problems, who cannot tie his or her shoe laces and who has not even a minimal sense of discipline. Nursery schools will have an important influence on the recruitment, motivation and retention of teachers. I urge the Government to keep that necessity closely in mind, quite apart from all the other self-evident educational benefits that flow from high-quality nursery education.

The final thought with which I leave my hon. Friend is that, when one looks in detail at the Government's proposals, and at the intricate and subtly elastic formulae by which teachers will be able to get a little bit ahead of the annual increases for non-manual workers, one is encouraged in as much as they allow the possibility of recognition by the Government that there is a problem not only in terms of recruitment, but perhaps also in terms of recruitment of the necessary quality. However, the proposals are a little over-prudent in the sense that slightly more dramatic measures will be needed in the years to come. If we are to attempt to bring ourselves up to the standards achieved in some continental countries, we must face the country with the need for some transfer of resources—I know that there is no easy new money available—from other areas of government to education,

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to achieve a high-quality teaching profession. It will prove necessary to raise teachers's pay more dramatically than is implied by the present cautious formulae.

The Bill presents a sensible new system for deciding teachers' pay, but there will have to be a national will to put more effort and resources into education. It will be necessary to explain to the public why there have to be transfers from other areas—I have my own views about where they should come from—to raise the quality of the profession. Even the hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw) in his Walden interview was driven to recognise that that may be a problem. This is a satisfactory Bill, but the Government will have to recognise that the centre of the debate is and will remain the issue of teacher quality.

9.10 pm

Mr. Edward O'Hara (Knowsley, South) : Like the hon. Member for Buckingham (Mr. Walden) I apologise for having been unable to attend the whole debate, and I apologise in advance if I am therefore slightly repetitious of matters covered earlier. I had a long-standing commitment this morning to support pupils from a special school in my authority's area who were recipients of one of the schools curriculum awards. I then entertained them—it was a learning experience for them—in the House this afternoon. I am sure that hon. Members who have attended this debate will applaud such an active expression of commitment and support for the staff and pupils of Cartbridge special school in Knowsley. I pay tribute to those pupils—they are designated as having behavioural difficulties—for the impeccable way in which they represented their school today in trying circumstances in the capital.

At one point during the afternoon, when my guests were in the Gallery listening to a sample of the debate, I heard the Secretary of State list the purposes behind the Bill. The Bill must be judged in the light of how it deals with those purposes, which were to improve the quality of entrants to the profession, to improve retention in the profession, to find teachers of specific subjects to fill posts where they are needed, to raise morale and to motivate the profession, which I hope means to motivate them to give of their best to all the nation's children.

I wish to discuss the provisions of opting out of the national pay negotiations and to discover how adequately the Bill deals with the purposes listed by the Secretary of State. The Bill is based on a cruel deceit, speciously justified in the Secretary of State's speech by a misrepresentative stereotype : of the irresponsible Labour authority unable to compete in the wages free-for-all due to extravagance with its resources. Most Labour authorities are voted into office because their electorates trust them to take responsibility for the services that they need, and in the main those authorities acquit themselves honourably of their responsibilities.

The deceit lies in the suggestion that differential payments of salary can be allowed without engendering division between schools and between the haves and the have-nots in society—all from a party which in the past week or so has had a sudden excess of enthusiasm for the classless society. The deceit is cruel because it will compound the problems of the authorities which have the greatest problems and therefore need the best qualified and best motivated teachers.

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What are the extravagances upon which those authorities expend their scarce resources? Plenty of Labour-controlled authorities such as mine in Knowsley have to struggle with the resources available at their disposal to provide educational guidance services, necessitous clothing and free school meals. They must also provide a careers service—and there is a paradox, because the more depressed the economy, the less optimistic are the job prospects for young people. The careers guidance service must therefore work harder, which in turn must have resource implications.

The extravagances also include nursery education—here I agree with the hon. Member for Buckingham (Mr. Walden)—and provision for special educational needs such as that expended on pupils whom I entertained today. It also includes the provision of speech therapists.

Those authorities recruit, retain and motivate their teachers through their proven commitment to the education service and to the support services that their teachers need—services which certain tabloids present as an extravagant use of resources. The efforts of those authorities and the loyalty of their teachers are undermined by the Government's patent lack of commitment, as shown by their refusal to put resources into the education service.

The statistics may have been referred to earlier. We may talk about a 10 per cent. increase in expenditure, but there has been a decline in central Government input while local government input into the education service has increased. There has also been a fall in the share of gross domestic product going to education, and in the next spending round there is a clear lack of commitment to maintaining spending on education relative to other services. The Bill will further undermine the loyalty of teachers in those authorities.

Will the Bill improve quality at entry or improve retention and morale? No, it will not do that for the profession or for the teachers of all the nation's children. If it achieves anything, it may concentrate the best that is available in the few authorities most able to pay because they have fewer attendant and legitimate calls on their resources, or in the few schools fortunate enough to have children whose parents can contribute if they are not already adequately bankrolled by the Government.

The Bill ignores the real measures which might achieve the purposes that the Secretary of State set out. It ignores measures to improve the quality of teacher education and a scheme of teacher appraisal as an instrument of professional development. It ignores the possibility of a general teachers' council to underpin the status and self-esteem of teachers and their control of the quality of the teaching profession. Above all, it ignores a commitment of adequate resources to the service and to teachers' salaries as a whole.

The Bill is built on the familiar fallacy so evident in the city technology colleges and the grant-maintained schools—that the success of the advantaged few can benefit the many by example. The Bill contains the same inbuilt dynamic. In fact, the success of the few can be achieved only at the expense of the majority. The Bill does not begin to address the problems that it should address, and it should be rejected.

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9.19 pm

Mr. Derek Fatchett (Leeds, Central) : I should probably start by congratulating those who have participated in the debate on having the strength to resist other temptations around the building. My hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Hillsborough (Mr. Flannery) has participated in virtually all the debate, and others who achieved the same target have shown aspects of democracy at its very best on what may be remembered as an historic occasion.

It is not without significance that this is the first education debate with the new Secretary of State who, together with the rest of the country, is aware that the Labour party is putting forward positive policies on education and enjoys a 30 per cent. lead in the opinion polls. So worried was the Conservative party about Labour's education lead that, in order to divert public attention from our sensible education policies today, it organised a leadership election. They were so desperate to keep the debate away from the media's attention.

May I say, in parenthesis, that I acknowledge the wisdom of the choice of Education Ministers. I suspect that, at some later stage, they will not be in a position to come back and lecture us about backing winners. It is good to see unanimity in the Department of Education and Science for once. Given that Department's track record, it is not surprising that it got the result totally wrong.

I suspect that today's election will be remembered in future history classes because it offers an interesting question—when was the first time that a political party could organise an election system in which a candidate who gained a majority was ejected from office and a subsequent candidate who did not gain a majority was then declared the winner? It may well be the first time in history that a person with a majority has been rejected and someone without a majority has been acclaimed the victor.

That election system will appeal to the Liberal party, representatives of which are not here at present. Those of us who listened to all the debate enjoyed the Liberal cameo from the hon. Member for Truro (Mr. Taylor), which was a typical Liberal Democrat speech. I noted virtually all his comments for 15 minutes, and every one was a criticism of the Bill. He then said that he was going to vote for it and would recommend to his hon. Friends that they do exactly the same. He also said that they would demand that certain conditions should be met, or they would not vote with the Government on Third Reading. I am sure that the right hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr. Major) will lose a night's sleep tonight with that threat from the Liberal Democrats, whose spokesman gave us a typical performance.

A backcloth to this debate was provided by discussions on teacher morale. It was interesting that all speakers recognised that there is a problem of low teacher morale. The Secretary of State, and one or two of his colleagues, presumably working from the same central office brief, argued that the collapse in teacher morale was somehow attributable to the teachers' pay disputes of the mid-1980s. I find that a strange argument. I notice that the Parliamentary Private Secretary, the hon. Member for Chelmsford (Mr. Burns), nods away sagely behind the Ministers. He, too, can read the brief.

Members of the interim advisory committee responsible for writing this year's report said that there had been a further collapse in teacher morale in the past two years. My sense of history may not be great, but it is sufficient to

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tell me that there have been no teacher disputes during the past two years. Teacher morale has fallen for a number of other reasons. If Conservative Members do not understand that, they simply do not understand the current problems facing teachers trying to perform their roles as classroom teachers and as part of the education system. One can list those problems.

All primary schoolteachers have been worried by the weight and pace of the introduction of the national curriculum. It is difficult for them to know what will happen next year about testing at the age of seven. Conservative Members may ask, why should they know, when even the Secretary of State does not know what will happen about testing? The difference is that primary teachers have a direct responsibility for their children and would like to know what will happen about testing.

We have heard about morale. Many teachers are trying to carry out difficult tasks in crumbling schools but Conservative Members say that that does not matter. For reasons that will be apparent to hon. Members, I recently spent a few weeks in Bradford, where we mounted a successful campaign. While there, I saw schools in which it was extremely difficult for teachers and children to perform to the top of their ability and to extend their talents. One of the schools that I visited had been in temporary buildings for seven years. The head teacher told me that it was so cold moving from one temporary classroom to another that the authority provided the teachers with thermal underwear. It would be much better if the Government provided those children with a proper school so that they could get on with the real job of learning.

The local authority in Bradford was the Thatcher experiment in the north of England. I do not know whether the new leader of the Conservative party approves of what went on in Bradford, but the people there did not approve of that experiment with their children, and nor do they approve for one moment of a reduction this year of £13 million in the education budget. That is a sign of the education priorities of Bradford's Conservatives.

My hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley, South (Mr. O'Hara) said that one or two people in the Conservative party have suddenly discovered education. That is a thin commitment, especially when judged against the record of what Conservatives in local government in places such as Bradford have done to the education system. I visited in Bedworth a secondary school which was under local management, and the head teacher told me that he was to lose two and a half teaching posts. How can we maintain morale and improve standards in schools that are faced with such cuts, and what are the implications for the delivery of the curriculum and good quality education?

Morale in the teaching profession is at an all-time low. That is not a criticism of teachers and their performance—quite the opposite : they are doing an excellent job in difficult circumstances. A real partnership in education must be built between Government and teachers. Government should provide teachers with the tools, resources and ability to allow them to get on with the job of providing our children with the education that they deserve and the country needs for the future. The Government have failed to keep their part of the bargain.

The Bill will do little to raise the morale of teachers. My hon. Friends the Members for Sheffield, Hillsborough (Mr. Flannery) and for City of Durham (Mr. Steinberg) spoke about the machinery introduced by the Bill, which

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will add yet again to the centralised powers of the Department of Education and Science. My hon. Friend the Member for Bradford, South (Mr. Cryer) chastised the Department for its use of those powers. One of the Secretary of State's predecessors took for the holder of that office more than 400 powers in the Education Reform Act 1988. The Bill adds to those powers. The problem which has been evident in all the speeches in the debate is that they can be used arbitrarily and whimsically in the industrial relations and collective bargaining processes.

Mr. Kenneth Clarke indicated dissent.

Mr. Fatchett : The Secretary of State shakes his head, but as the Bill stands, he can intervene on a negotiated settlement and tell the parties that the settlement is unacceptable. There are no parameters to begin with, yet there is a whimsical and arbitrary decision at the end. If we are to have true negotiations and good industrial relations, surely those involved have a right to expect that they will be provided with clear parameters from the Secretary of State rather than his being allowed simply to intervene in a way that will be totally disruptive.

The other key element of the Bill deals with the opt-out provisions by which grant-maintained schools and local education authorities can opt out of the national pay bargaining procedures. It is absolutely clear from all the speeches from Conservative Members, including those from the hon. Members for Hendon, South (Mr. Marshall) for Epping Forest (Mr. Norris) and for Buckingham (Mr. Walden), that the opt-out mechanism is regarded as the means of introducing competitive bidding for a scarce resource. That scare resource is the teacher.

The Secretary of State made two interesting comments, one of which showed an ignorance of reality and the other his failure to understand the importance of his own role. Taking the second point first, the right hon. and learned Gentleman seemed relaxed about the prospect of individual local authorities opting out of the national agreement. Indeed, he went further and said—I believe that I am quoting him correctly—that he looked forward to a situation in which three quarters of local education authorities will opt out of the national pay bargaining machinery.

The Secretary of State then failed to understand that by allowing, and, indeed, encouraging that process, the Government have no view about and no role in teacher supply or pay, or the distribution of teachers across subjects and local authorities. The Secretary of State has abdicated his own responsibility in the Thatcherite dream of how the free market is supposed to work.

Mr. Walden : I am not seeking to make a mischievous point, but the hon. Gentleman said earlier that my right hon. and learned Friend was centralising powers. He is now saying that my right hon. and learned Friend is irresponsibly throwing his authority to the dogs. Is it not true that, by the very caution of his presentation of this issue, my right hon. and learned Friend is showing that he is aware of the need to encourage local responsibility and devolution, while having some sense of national restraint? Why does the hon. Gentleman not recognise that fact rather than seeking to make mischief on both sides of the argument?

Mr. Fatchett : I was not trying to make mischief, but to point out to the hon. Gentleman and to his right hon. and

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learned Friend that there is a contradiction in the Government's philosophical position, as is so often the case with the Thatcherite philosophy of an autocratic centre combined with a belief in the free market. Both are irresponsible positions.

The other part of the Secretary of State's argument is that opt-out will not lead to leap-frogging, because there are no shortages. Recently, when the teachers' unions published their survey on teacher shortages, the Secretary of State said that there was no problem and that teacher shortages do not exist. The Secretary of State's response was to say that the results of the survey were "ludicrous".

I thought that, instead of relying on the teachers' unions' data, I would go and have a look at the figures produced by the Department of Education and Science. I went back to its recent comprehensive survey which the right hon. and learned Gentleman's predecessor published on 17 July. Over a five-year period by subject, and a shorter period by individual local authorities, the survey showed that the problem of teacher shortages is growing. The subject areas in which teacher shortages have grown in the past five years include French, German, history, geography, craft design and technology, music, physical education, religious education, drama, careers and remedial education——

Mr. Flannery : What is left?

Mr. Fatchett : Yes, not a great deal of the curriculum is left, when all those subjects are taken out.

I repeat that teacher shortages have increased in all those subjects. In addition, the DES provided the figures by region. Not one region has improved on the figures provided by the Department ; indeed, the figures for every region have deteriorated. For example, in the northern region, the number of vacancies trebled during the period 1988-90. That is based not on my statistics, not on the statistics of the teachers' unions, but on the Department's statistics. In the Yorkshire and Humberside region, the number of vacancies increased by 33 per cent. The number of vacancies in London rose by 50 per cent., and in the rest of the south-east by 100 per cent. The reality is that teacher shortages are a serious problem.

The Secretary of State argues that there is not a teacher shortage. He also tries to tell us of another success story—that recruitment for initial teacher training is working so well that we do not need to worry about future teacher shortages. I shall cite figures that were given in Hansard on 26 March for recruitment to the areas of skills shortages, compared with the targets set by the Department. For maths, recruitment was 75 per cent. of the target figure ; for craft, design and technology, it was 70 per cent. ; for chemistry, it was 72 per cent. ; and for physics, it was 55 per cent. The Secretary of State claims that each of those figures is some sort of success. Is not the reality quite different? The truth is that there is an increasing problem of teacher shortages.

Conservative Members advocate the opt-out procedure, but they do so for only one reason. They represent the rich south-east of England, and they want to use the opt-out procedure to buy in teachers, not to add to teacher supply——

Mr. Timothy Wood (Stevenage) : To add to cost.

Mr. Fatchett : The Government Whip is right. He should not have said that. No doubt he will be writing a letter of apology later. He was right to say that the opt-out procedure will add to costs—[Interruption.] The Secretary of State appears to be telling the hon. Gentleman what he should have said, but in fact his remark was true. It will add to costs, but it will not add one additional teacher to the teaching force.

The opting-out procedure will result in a redistribution from the poorer authorities in inner London to the better-off, outer-London authorities. Tonight's Evening Standard highlighted the crisis of teacher shortages in London. The Bill will add to that crisis, to the cost of inner-London boroughs and to the benefit of outer-London boroughs. It is a redistribution from the poor to the rich, and that characterises the Government's record during the past 11 years.

The Bill could have done a great deal for teacher morale if it had dealt with the establishment of a general teacher council and with teacher appraisal, which this Government have decided not to introduce. It would have helped to improve quality in the classroom. The Government could do a great deal more in initial teacher training. It is the Labour party that is advocating a national core curriculum for teacher training and national standards of competence in newly trained teachers.

The Government could have done a great deal more to attract teachers from the pool of qualified teachers that are currently inactive. Indeed, there are as many inactive as there are active teachers. What have the Government done about that pool of teachers, who could be retrained and who could work in the classroom? They are spending no more than the cost of four teachers' salaries in each local authority—hardly a programme designed to attract teachers back to the profession and to give them the confidence, the training and, in many cases, the necessary help with child care to enable them to return to work.

As always, the Government have greatly damaged our education system. They have damaged the morale of teachers. One of their most damaging acts, even for this Government, was to take negotiating rights away from teachers. The Bill does little to rectify that record. It is too late, it does too little, and it does not deal with the major problems in our education system. That is why I shall ask my right hon. and hon. Friends to vote for our amendment, which puts forward a real policy for education and gives hope to parents and children.

9.39 pm

The Minister of State, Department of Education and Science (Mr. Tim Eggar) : We had a wide-ranging debate, and I am sure that we all felt that we were at the centre of the nation's affairs. That was well borne out by the level of attendance throughout the debate.

I particularly welcomed the comments of my hon. Friends the Members for Hendon, South (Mr. Marshall), for Hyndburn (Mr. Hargreaves), and for Basildon (Mr. Amess), of my hon. Friend the Member for Bury, North (Mr. Burt)—whom I welcome with his newly declared interest—and of the hon. Member for Antrim, East (Mr. Beggs). I am grateful for the way in which my hon. Friends praised the professionalism and ability of so many of our teachers, which was in stark contrast to the comments of Opposition Members. It was not until the speech of the

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hon. Member for Leeds, Central (Mr. Fatchett) that we heard any praise for the work that our teachers do in the classrooms.

Mr. Cryer : That is not true. I said that they are dedicated.

Mr. Eggar : I am delighted to hear the hon. Gentleman remark that teachers are dedicated, although he was not present in the Chamber for most of the debate.

I do not recognise from the many visits that I have paid to primary and secondary schools throughout the country over the past two or three months the gloomy picture painted by Opposition Members. I pay my own tribute to teachers' dedication and commitment, and to their achievements in giving effect to many of the far-reaching improvements that we introduced over the past two or three years.

The situation in schools today is very different from four or five years ago. The credit for that transformation belongs to the teachers themselves. Many teachers and their unions recognise the folly of the union action of the 1980s. Great credit is also due to the interim advisory committee, whose reports led to far-reaching improvements to the teachers' pay structure. I noted with interest the remarks of the hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw) about the IAC's role. The Government played their part in rebuilding teachers' self-esteem and in reaffirming to parents the importance and commitment of the teaching profession.

The Bill is an important step forward. By restoring teachers' negotiating rights, we are expressing our confidence that the progress made in recent years will be sustained. The Bill does not look back to the shambles of Burnham, but looks forward——

Mr. Straw : Will the Minister give way?

Mr. Eggar : —to the effective determination of teachers' pay——

Mr. Straw rose——

Mr. Speaker : Order. The hon. Gentleman knows that, if the Minister does not choose to give way, the hon. Gentleman must resume his seat.

Mr. Eggar : I shall give way to the hon. Gentleman.

Mr. Straw : The Minister praises the interim advisory committee and suggests that everything has changed since 1986. If that is true, why does the IAC's third report, published just a few months ago, state :

"We are in no doubt from our schools visits that teacher morale is lower now that in our first two years, and that a number of factors are contributing to this."?

Why is teacher morale lower now than it was before?

Mr. Eggar : One reason why teachers feel undervalued are remarks of the kind just made by the hon. Member for Blackburn, who year after year produces false prospectuses about teacher shortages and makes no apology when his claims are proved wrong. The hon. Gentleman has a role to play in contributing to improving the status of the teaching profession—a role that he has consistently refused to play.

I recognise that every feature of the Bill will not be welcome to every party involved. We have to realise that the divisions between the various teaching unions are as deep as ever. We all know that their own particular

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interests rarely coincide. But the machinery that we are introducing, through the Bill, will give the employers and the six unions the opportunity to discuss, to negotiate and, I hope, to agree. That is what most of those concerned really wanted.

There is a second, perhaps more fundamental, point. It is right that the employers and the teacher unions should have the opportunity to negotiate agreements on pay and conditions. But there are other parties with legitimate interests—notably the Government and the taxpayers. The question of the weight to be attached to the various interests and of how those interests are to be reconciled in the context of new pay machinery, is serious and important.

I am delighted to note that the hon. Member for Blackburn accepts that there is a role for the Government in setting teachers' pay. He recognises that there is a balance to be struck. Any responsible Government must recognise that. We believe that the Bill—the result of much consultation and reflection—does indeed get the balance right.

It is interesting to note that neither the hon. Member for Blackburn nor the hon. Member for Leeds, Central even tried to discuss the core of the Bill, which concerns the machinery for setting pay levels. They did not put forward one serious or constructive suggestion about what they wanted to do. I challenge them to come forward with their proposals in Committee. We shall wait with interest to hear what they have to say.

Most of the debate concentrated on clauses 8 and 9, which cover opting out. My hon. Friends the Members for Dartford (Mr. Dunn), for Rugby and Kenilworth (Mr. Pawsey) and for Hendon, South mentioned the advantages, and the hon. Member for Truro (Mr. Taylor) mentioned the problems, which flow from clauses 8 and 9, covering opting out. LEAs and schools already have considerable flexibility to target payments selectively to tackle any local recruitment or retention difficulties, and to reward good teachers and those teachers who take on additional responsibility. That flexibility has increased significantly over the past few years and, as my right hon. and learned Friend said, it will be extended further when the January payment settlement date is reached.

Let us be clear about one thing. Opting out has nothing to do with the volume of resources available to an LEA or a grant-maintained school, but a great deal to do with the allocation and better management of resources at local level. We have in place already a pay structure that gives wide flexibility to reward, recruit and retain. I am sure that the local authorities' negotiators will be looking to maintain and to extend that existing flexibility, but I firmly believe that individual LEAs, which must answer to parents and community charge payers for the effective delivery of the education service in their areas, must be able to go their own way if, and only if, they conclude that the national pay and conditions arrangements do not provide the framework they need.

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