| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. Hawkins: Does my hon. Friend recognise that, on school visit after school visit, I have been told by head teachers and chairmen of governors in my constituency that the one thing that they pray for is that the Government will stop burying them in paper? My hon. Friend has met head teachers in my constituency. Does she agree that that is one thing that heads and other teachers are telling the Government?
Mrs. May: I thank my hon. Friend for that excellent intervention. He is right. He shows how much closer Conservative Members are to understanding what teachers and head teachers say about the work load introduced by the Government than are Ministers and Labour Members. As he said, it is precisely because teachers and head teachers complain about the work load that we have chosen to debate the matter today.
Helen Jones: Will the hon. Lady give way?
Mrs. May: No, the hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Miss Johnson) made rather a long intervention.
It is not just teachers and head teachers who are complaining about the work load and paperwork. Labour Members of Parliament are also doing so. In an Adjournment debate on 11 January, the hon. Member for North-West Leicestershire (Mr. Taylor), who was in his place earlier today, referring to schools that he had visited in his constituency, said:
I want to touch on four particular burdens impacting on schools. One is the bidding process, the problems of which were ably described by the hon. Member for Bath (Mr. Foster). The Government's obsession with targets, as shown in one of the comments that I have just quoted,
is another problem impacting on schools. I welcome the Minister's statement that her entire Front-Bench team will resign if the literacy and numeracy targets are not reached by 2010. [Interruption.] She obviously has not told all her hon. Friends of that intention. The Minister with responsibility for higher education might be a little worried because standards are falling and the targets are even further from being reached than they were when the Secretary of State first said that he would offer his resignation.
A lot has been said about the literacy hour, which is placing real burdens on teachers. The hon. Member for Blackpool, South (Mr. Marsden) claimed that the Government would not intervene where schools were achieving and raising standards, but the point about the literacy hour is that the Government are intervening regardless of the standards that are being achieved by schools. The hon. Gentleman said that the Government were enabling and empowering, but, in the literacy hour, they are directing.
A primary school teacher in the north of England said:
For the future, we have performance-related pay, with its cumbersome, unwieldy and bureaucratic proposals. The NAHT has calculated that, in the first year, the administration of the system will cost £250 million before a single pound has reached the pocket of a single teacher. It will create a two-tier teaching profession. It was sold on the basis that teachers would be rewarded for good performance but, as the Minister for School Standards made clear in Essex at the launch of the Green Paper, she did not think it right to pay people extra "for just teaching". This is not about giving teachers money for good performance; it is about requiring them to take on extra responsibilities and new contracts.
The NAS/UWT says that performance-related pay is woefully unmanageable and monstrously bureaucratic. Linda McMillan, a deputy head from Blackpool, said:
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education and Employment (Mr. Charles Clarke):
It is extraordinary that the hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May) made that speech without any mention of parents, employers, governors or children. It is clear to me that she is now the teacher unions' friend, as I remarked to her at a National Union of Teachers conference on education action zones. I am not quite sure how well that goes down with her hon. Friends on the Back Benches. The vigour of her speech led me to think, yet again, that she is more than the shadow Secretary of State's third brain. Her one brain adds up to more than his two put together.
I was struck by the speech of the hon. Member for Bath (Mr. Foster). When pressed, he sought to explain and justify his alliance with the Tories on this significant occasion by reference to two specific points with which he had difficulty: the bidding process, to which the hon. Member for Maidenhead also referred, and the children's Parliament. He could bring nothing else to bear. I am disappointed that he has not associated himself with our drive to raise standards, because I had hoped that the Liberal Democrats would do so.
I was delighted to receive--contrary to what the hon. Member for Maidenhead said--my hon. Friends' strong support for the Government's programme. It ranged from the philosophical run through Mao, Stalin and Hobbes by my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool, South (Mr. Marsden) to the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Redditch (Jacqui Smith), who gave specific and powerful attention to the flimsy Tory document and list, and the excellent intervention of my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Mr. Coaker), which brought us back to standards and achievement and the comprehensive principle.
I was less convinced by the remarks of the hon. Member for Guildford (Mr. St. Aubyn) and his appeal for permanent revolution, and by the discourse of the hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Miss Kirkbride) on the funding system in Worcestershire, although I was flattered that my meeting with her caused her such excitement.
Jacqui Smith:
In the light of the confusion thrown into the debate by the hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Miss Kirkbride), would it be helpful if I told my hon. Friend that in the financial year 1998-99 Worcestershire received £1.637 million under the new deal, including money for schemes in Bromsgrove, £3.796 million in a standards fund, and £600,000 towards the national grid for learning, on top of the £2,000 for each school for extra books?
Mr. Clarke:
Now we know who the truly well-informed Member for the county of Worcestershire is.
Miss Kirkbride:
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Clarke:
No, I shall not give way.
I shall begin the substance of my speech by reference to the common ground between Members on the two Front Benches. It is common ground that we need to reduce the bureaucratic burden in schools.
Miss Kirkbride:
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Clarke:
No, I shall not give way, because I will not allow the debate on bureaucratic burdens in schools to be hijacked. If the hon. Lady wants to have her discourse, she is welcome to have it.
It is common ground that it is necessary to reduce the quantity of paper going to schools.
"The chairs of governors of the schools . . . often said that they were drowning in a sea of paper . . . The continuing inflow of documents for the attention of chairs and members of governing bodies is reaching alarming proportions".--[Official Report, 11 January 1999; Vol. 323, c. 76-77.]
Perhaps the hon. Gentleman should discuss that with the hon. Member for Redditch (Jacqui Smith) who, in an extraordinary contribution to the debate, said that it was all the fault of teachers and nothing whatever to do with the Government.
"I feel like an NQT in minute one of my career, not a seasoned professional who has ridden every merry-go-round that has been introduced and got off them again. All the things that have worked for me, the experience built up over those 25 years in the primary classroom have been replaced by a strategy that is too bulky to deliver, too onerous to plan and that has a 'knock-on' effect for the use of teaching areas, hall, quiet rooms etc . . . We know the stress that we feel and how we dread the job we once enjoyed, but no-one asks us or listens to us. We also know that when it fails it will be our fault. We dare not contemplate the Numeracy Hour. As our area secretary said, 'This is the stuff nervous breakdowns are made of.'"
That is the teachers' reaction to the Government's imposition of the prescriptive literacy hour.
"They stood there asking us how we could make something unworkable work."
The Government are inundating schools, teachers and governors with directives, diktats, guidance notes, information notes and paper after paper. The Government should rethink the timing of their teachers' pay proposals. They need to reconsider what they are doing, and ensure that they introduce compliance cost assessments for every directive, piece of paper and regulation that goes out from the Department for Education and Employment.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |