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Teachers
3.31 pm
The Secretary of State for Education and Employment (Mr. David Blunkett): With permission, Madam Speaker, I wish to make a statement about the Government's consultation on the reform of the teaching profession. This statement relates to England: my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Wales will report separately in the new year.
Over the past eighteen months, the Government have shown their determination to raise standards. Children are learning to read effectively in the new literacy hour. Infant class sizes are falling for the first time in a decade. We are rapidly expanding specialist schools and developing education action zones. We have tackled failure whenever and wherever it exists and we are providing £19 billion of investment to improve education across the United Kingdom over the next three years. That money for reform and modernisation is to give our children opportunities denied for far too long.
Teaching is at the heart of our drive to raise standards. Good teachers are our most precious asset in raising aspirations and achievement. That is why today I am proposing a fundamental step forward for the profession. Our first objective is to develop a new career structure that will recruit, retain and reward the teachers we need.
Under the present system, after seven years, a good classroom teacher earns around £22,500. Further reward is paid only for responsibility, rarely for performance. The Government believe that must change; that is why we are proposing two new pay scales for teachers, separated by a new performance threshold. There will be a tough new appraisal system. Up to the threshold, teachers would progress as now. To cross the threshold, teachers will need to demonstrate high and sustained levels of achievement and commitment. Heads will appraise and review teachers' progress, underpinned by external assessment. That will ensure credibility and consistency.
Success in crossing the threshold would mean an initial salary increase of up to 10 per cent., or around £2,000 a year, and access to further pay steps on the higher scale, based on appraisal of performance. Teachers could then either take on more leadership responsibilities or concentrate on high performance in classroom teaching. Over time, we would expect a majority of teachers to be of a standard to cross the threshold.
Our second objective is to strengthen school leadership. Good heads are the key to success. We need to develop strong leaders, reward them well and give them the freedom to manage. Successful heads who have turned around the most challenging schools could earn up to £70,000 a year, with strengthened appraisal and the option of fixed-term contracts. We also propose to set up a national college for school leadership, drawing on the best that education and business have to offer.
We also want to reward staff for teamwork in raising standards. Our new annual school performance bonus would provide a significant number of schools with a financial reward--payable as a bonus available to all staff--for improved performance achieved year on year and for sustained good results.
Our third objective is to have a well trained profession. We are establishing the General Teaching Council, and have introduced a curriculum for initial teacher
training--with Ofsted inspection--and the induction year for newly qualified teachers. I can announce that we intend to go further by introducing a new national test for all trainee teachers in numeracy, literacy and information technology. Additional help in achieving the standard will be available for mature entrants.
It is vital that we attract the best graduates into teaching to ensure that our most outstanding teachers can move quickly up the profession. Industry and the civil service have fast tracks. We plan to introduce a fast track for teaching to enable good new teachers to make rapid progress. All teachers should keep their expertise up to date. To help them to do so, we are investing in better training in literacy, numeracy and information technology, and in improving the quality and availability of teachers' professional development. A pilot scheme of individual learning accounts will encourage all school staff to invest in their skills over and above Government funding. We will enable more training to take place out of school hours, to minimise disruption to pupils' education through over-reliance on supply cover.
Our final objective is to provide better support for teachers in the classroom. From the investment in repair and renewal through to the learning grid, we are committed to creating the classroom of the future. Today I propose a new targeted fund to improve the working environment for all staff, giving teachers access to the equipment that they need.
The teacher of the future will also make better use of the talent of support staff in schools. Many teachers already use teaching assistants to help with literacy and numeracy, or to support children with special needs. Over the next three years, we will fund at least20,000 additional qualified teaching assistants with improved training, qualifications and opportunities. We are also keen to see the use of undergraduate and postgraduate students earning while learning, together with those from the wider community.
We also want to support small schools in sharing facilities, technicians or bursary support. I can announce today that a new small school support fund will pilot new ways of working together. It will benefit many rural schools.
The Green Paper contains radical and modernising proposals that will help to transform the standards and status of teaching in this country. It is about something for something. For the first time in years, a commitment has been made to invest and reward teachers in return for a new professionalism. That will mean greater individual accountability, more flexibility and higher standards.
We intend to consult widely with teachers, parents, local authorities and governors, for whom we will provide support and expert guidance to help them implement our proposals.
The vision of a world-class service for our children in the next century is one I believe we all share. Good teachers and support staff are the key to achieving that vision. It is to prepare for that new century, to celebrate the value and worth of our teachers, and for the sake of our children, that I commend these proposals to the House today.
Mr. David Willetts (Havant):
May I begin by putting it on record that the Opposition believe in proper rewards for good teachers, and that we agree with the Secretary of
How does the right hon. Gentleman expect to recruit more people to the teaching profession if he does not treat them like professionals, instead denouncing them as "sneering cynics"? Now, he wants to test them for basic literacy and numeracy. Will he estimate how many of the teachers who are currently being recruited would fail his new test? What has happened to the advanced skills teachers scheme, which only this morning the Prime Minister put at the heart of the Government's proposals? Perhaps even the Secretary of State could not face relaunching it yet again. On 30 March, he claimed that there would be 5,000 so-called super-teachers. Will he confirm that, so far, only 50 have been recruited?
The Secretary of State talks about paying teachers properly. Teachers would regard it as hypocritical of the Government to launch this exercise today and then fail to implement the recommendations of the pay review body, which are due next year. Will the right hon. Gentleman assure teachers that he will accept its recommendations in full? Can he confirm that his Department wrote recently to that body to urge it to hold down teachers' pay; and will he place in the Library a copy of his correspondence with it?
The right hon. Gentleman mentioned a new threshold for a new structure of teachers' pay, but how quickly will a teacher reach it? How long will it take for the majority of teachers to cross it? He says that he wants to strengthen school leadership, but he well knows that there has been a disastrous decline in the number of teachers applying for the national professional qualification for headship. Does he agree that the reason is that they are all too busy responding to his instructions and initiatives?
We need better ways to encourage top-quality graduates into the profession, but the right hon. Gentleman's fast-track scheme is a vague plan, which gets five paragraphs in a 72-page document. Will he confirm that his fast-track scheme applies only to a small percentage of the 450,000 members of the teaching profession? As the Prime Minister might say, these are policies for the few, not the many.
Once more, the Secretary of State puts his trust in plans and targets, rather than the professionalism of teachers and the judgments of parents. Does he know what is already happening to his grand plans in practice? Only yesterday, I came across a school that has set targets in its educational development plan which are lower than its current level of attainment. Is the Secretary of State proposing a crude tick-in-the-box school performance awards scheme, with every incentive to set soft targets without any fear of being challenged; or will he rely on outside consultants--and how much will that cost?
Will the Secretary of State also confirm that the initiatives are to be paid for out of central funds, bypassing local education authorities? Will he confirm that the proportion of school funding from standard spending assessments is steadily falling as, instead, head teachers have to spend all their time applying for individual packets of money, under his personal control? The Secretary of State is exasperating teachers with his
ceaseless flow of initiatives. At the last count, schools and LEAs were having to submit 17 plans to him. Now he even has a working party to cut the paperwork produced by all the other working parties.
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