Oral evidence

Taken before the Education and Skills Committee

on Monday 19 May 2003

Members present:

Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair
Mr David Chaytor
Valerie Davey
Paul Holmes
Ms Meg Munn
Mr Kerry Pollard
Jonathan Shaw
Mr Mark Simmonds
Mr Andrew Turner

__________

Memorandum submitted by General Teaching Council for England

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: MR JOHN BEATTIE, Chairman, MS SARAH STEPHENS, Director of Policy, MR ALAN MEYRICK, Registrar and MR KEITH HILL, Link Adviser, Teacher Retention and Continuing Professional Development, General Teaching Council, examined.

Q1  Chairman: May I both welcome and apologise to our witnesses for a slightly late start because of the division? May I welcome John Beattie, Chairman of the GTC, Alan Meyrick, Sarah Stephens and Keith Hill? We are very pleased you could come and we do hope your chief executive is back and in full operation as soon as her health is recovered. Would you please send our best wishes to her. We really want to ask you a range of questions about GTC but would you like to open up with a couple of words - not too many - about how GTC Mark II, or GTC sans Puttnam, post Puttnam, is different to the GTC which was there a year or six months ago?

Mr Beattie: Thank you, Chairman. May I begin by reciprocating on behalf of my colleagues and myself? We are very pleased to be here and welcome this opportunity. To start with I will identify their particular areas of expertise within the Council so that later on you will know to whom to address particular questions. Keith Hill, on my far right, is one of a group of what we call Link Advisers. He has been a practising teacher and head teacher and is at the moment concentrating on the issues of retention and professional development and that sort of thing. On my right is Sarah Stephens, our Director of Policy. On my left is Alan who is our Registrar, so that is his area of expertise. Never having been in this situation before, I fear I over-prepared, as school teachers are wont to do sometimes. Now that I know the real focus of what it is you are seeking to do, I shall pick and choose in what I say in my introductory comments. You will be aware, I am sure, that the Council's remit falls into two main parts - at least I like to think it does. The first is to maintain that register of teachers whose conduct and competence is regulated by the profession and its stakeholders and all this is done in the public interest. The second is to provide advice to government on a whole range of issues and topics concerning education. I shall say more about that in a moment. What I want to say now is that the Council's composition itself is unique in education circles, reflecting, as it does, the diversity within the educational landscape itself: we have practising teachers, we have school governors and parents, we have people from further and higher education, nominated representatives from teacher associations, local government, we have quality boards in business, all represented on the Council. When we speak on behalf of teachers, for example, I need to make it clear that we do so on the basis of having actually spoken directly to teachers in a number of ways, in a number of forums, taking advice and information from surveys and research, either commissioned by ourselves or by other bodies. Coming through all the advice and all that research consistently is one single message, that the single most important factor in education is the quality of teaching and that is teachers' professional concern and the Council, as the professional body for teaching, seeks to articulate and advocate the professional framework in which teachers are best able to maximise pupils' achievement and development. Within that framework lies the profession assuming for itself responsibility for the maintenance and improvement of standards. It seems to me that an immense amount has been achieved by teachers, by pupils, parents, local education authorities, government, in terms of raised educational standards over the last ten years. Within this picture of positive progress, substantial challenges still remain. One is the endemic under-achievement of some groups of pupils. Another one, certainly that we are aware of, though it may not be so publicly obvious, is what we call the accountability issue; other people might call it inspection. Teachers need to take informed decisions about their actions and their professional activity within the context of open self-evaluation and public accountability. That much is clear. We feel there needs to be a better balanced system of accountability, which brings external inspection, yes, performance management, self and peer evaluation, professional standards, performance measures, into a more coherent and useful relationship. Finally, but not least, there needs to be an improvement in the confidence, the professional motivation and the retention of teachers and those all hang together. What has changed since last year for the GTC? We have identified areas of advice and provided through discussion - I shall not bore you at the moment about how that advice comes into being, suffice it to say that the whole of the Council at some point is involved in agreeing whatever policy and advice we put forward. We have offered advice to the Secretary of State, for example, on the role of support staff, on continuing professional development and on the use of professional time. We have continued to work with a whole range of others to create and foster informed professional dialogue amongst teachers and between teachers and educational policy makers. To do this we have developed further the means by which we communicate, enter dialogue with and support the profession, including meetings, seminars, workshops, conferences, focus groups and an increasing range of research projects and we offer teachers an active role in all of those rather than just being objects of research. We have begun to focus too on our relationship with local education authorities and to enable teachers to influence development of local strategies. In particular I should like to talk about the LEA continuing professional development projects, where we are working with teachers and LEA advisers across the country to develop models of entitlement to professional development to support quality and retention in these areas. It will produce guaranteed professional development opportunities as an essential ingredient to these LEA recruitment and retention strategies. Indeed our own MORI survey of 17,000 teachers raised further awareness of the urgent need to invest in retention alongside recruitment. Further advice on retention and further development of the government's CPD strategy will be tested as part of a national conference on retention which we are holding with teachers and key partners. This will be the culmination of our work in this area. It is a first opportunity to identify solutions, moving beyond discussions of the challenging complex situation we are in. We have done quite a lot and achieved quite a lot in the past year, not least of which is our profile amongst the teaching professions. I do also want to mention at this point that during the past year, the Council has carried out its first full year of regulatory work, working closely with a range of partners to embed the procedures established and we carry all that work out in a transparent and open way in the public interest. I shall say no more about that at the moment. Yes, we have moved on, we are developing a range of partners, we are often called in by the government to working parties to offer advice on how various things might be done and my colleagues will no doubt touch on some of these as we go through. You will see that running through a lot of our work this year has been the issue with which you yourselves are concerned, that of the retention of able teachers in the teaching force. Thank you.

Q2  Chairman: Thank you very much. What about in terms of your personal style? Is this a full-time job for you at GTC?

Mr Beattie: It could easily become one; in theory, it is not. At the moment I am able to give the Council more time than I was last year, but I shall have to look very carefully over the next year at the balance between my other commitments and the Council. Nonetheless, I would not want to be not doing it.

Q3  Chairman: Is it a one-day or five-day job?

Mr Beattie: In theory it is two days. Because of the distance involved in travel between home, in Birmingham, and London, it is more often than not three days.

Q4  Chairman: In terms of the state of play of the corporate identity, the profile of GTC, is it on course for what you wanted it to be?

Mr Beattie: It is on course, it is developing. It is not developing as rapidly as some people would have wished, but having worked amongst teachers all my working life, I know the order of priorities which they devote to various activities. In the sense that the General Teaching Council will initially be seen in the same light as their professional associations, for example, or, dare I say it, the Department for Education, when there is a pile of work to be done it is somewhere fairly low in the pile. What I have found is that where we have been able to interact individually face to face with teachers, particularly young teachers, teachers in training, teachers in their first year of teaching, we are getting a very, very positive response.

Q5  Chairman: Do all teachers have to belong now to the GTC?

Mr Beattie: No; no, they do not.

Q6  Chairman: What percentage do?

Mr Beattie: Teachers who wish to teach in maintained schools and non-maintained special schools must be registered with the Council. Other teachers may, if they have QTS, register with the Council and others do.

Q7  Chairman: What percentage of the profession do you now have?

Mr Beattie: I should have to turn to my friend the Registrar on that.

Q8  Chairman: A ballpark figure.

Mr Meyrick: In terms of those teachers who are required to be registered, we have all of them now. When we set up the Council, we had a process called automatic registration, whereby we received information from employers. As a result of that we now have virtually everybody; I should be surprised if there were many teachers out there who were required to register and who had not. We have also been working very closely with other sectors to try to encourage them. We now have nearly 10,000 teachers from the independent sector who have chosen to register with us on a voluntary basis.

Q9  Chairman: What does it cost to be a member?

Mr Meyrick: It is £28 for registration.

Q10  Chairman: Who pays it? Individuals?

Mr Meyrick: Yes, the individual teacher pays the fee to the Council.

Q11  Chairman: Do they receive any help with that?

Mr Meyrick: Yes, they do receive help.

Q12  Chairman: All of them or some of them?

Mr Meyrick: All those teachers who are required to register with the Council receive £33 paid through their employer.

Q13  Chairman: Why £33?

Mr Meyrick: Why £33? Because the Council's fee at the moment still has a tail-off from the government's support which was initially provided. The intention was to provide an initial figure which would then be able to carry through and cover the small growth in the fee as the Department's money moved and as we became an independent body entirely funded by teachers' fees.

Q14  Chairman: At first there was a certain degree of great co-operation and then suspicion from the teaching union that you were going to muscle in and do their job and even make them redundant, or certainly subdue their voice in the corridors of power. How would you describe the present relationship with the teaching unions?

Mr Beattie: I would describe it as fruitful. We have moved beyond the situation which you describe which certainly did exist in the early days. Especially when I am speaking to meetings of teachers, I make it quite clear that we are not a trade union, have never had any intention of being a trade union and our remit is not that of the trade unions. They are concerned with pay and conditions: we are concerned with teachers' professionalism. A trade union will look after a teacher's interests: the General Teaching Council looks after the public interest. Once you can lay that clearly before such audiences, they appreciate the difference between the trade union and the General Teaching Council. That is also the answer to the question which was raised at the time and is still raised sometimes in meetings: why do we have so many people on the Council who are not teachers. We point out that it is a Teaching Council not a Teachers' Council and that there is a whole range of education stakeholders in the country and if we are to serve the public interest then those stakeholders must be represented on the Council. That too is being increasingly accepted.

Q15  Chairman: What sort of pot do you have to devote to things like your own research?

Mr Beattie: I do not have those figures at my fingertips and I am not sure we have them with us.

Q16  Chairman: Do you have a vast research department?

Mr Beattie: No, we do not.

Ms Stephens: We allocate a quite modest budget to research in its pure form, that is that conducted by educational researchers. I could certainly supply the Committee with figures. It is in the region of £200,000 per annum. We seek to maximise that amount of money by bringing our resources together with those of other parties who would benefit from the results of that research. Almost all of our research is undertaken in partnership with other organisations and indeed we have run a couple of rather small scale but nevertheless significant projects with some of the teaching associations, particularly one I could give you as an example on the effective types of professional development practices which make the most difference in terms of pupil learning. We do have another amount of money which is dedicated to directly gathering evidence in broader ways from the profession and from other stakeholders through focus group work, through survey work, through seminars, structured discussions and so forth.

Q17  Mr Chaytor: Your predecessor was best known as a film producer and you are a former teacher. Do you think there are disadvantages having the organisation led by a former teacher? What particular contribution do you think you can bring as Chair of the GTC?

Mr Beattie: It is an interesting cultural change for the Council and for the profession's view of the General Teaching Council. One of the things I can do which Lord Puttnam could not - and there are very few of those - is to look teachers in the eye and say "Look, for the past 37 years I have been doing what you have been doing and I know all about it. I think we need to move on from where we are. This self-regulating professional body is probably the best thing which has happened to the profession in a long, long time". The other thing I say to them is that I am quite happy to be on the Council because when I started teaching in Scotland in 1966, one of the first things I had to do was to register with the General Teaching Council for Scotland.

Q18  Mr Chaytor: Do you think there is a risk that the GTC is just seen as another area of the producer interest? How are you going to defend yourself against that accusation?

Mr Beattie: In the first instance I would point to the fact that we have representatives of parents, governors, a whole range of stakeholders I have already mentioned on the Council. I would have thought there was little opportunity for any policy development or piece of advice that appeared to be self-serving getting through that Council. I cannot in all honesty identify any stage or any support - that is not true, I can, I can identify one spot in the life of the Council - where we had to make that quite clear to ourselves as Council. People come through many routes to the Council. Having come through the route I came through, which was through one of the teachers' associations, indeed there was a learning experience for me to undergo as well. Certainly all members of the Council have trod that path by now.

Q19  Mr Chaytor: In your opening remarks, in characterising the range of problems we face, you referred to the endemic under-achievement of certain groups of pupils. Could you tell us either what you individually or the GTC as a body thinks are the main causes of that endemic under-achievement?

Mr Beattie: Yes; I will not reply to that one because I was at the same conference as Sarah recently which we hosted on exactly this issue and I will let her speak for the Council.

Ms Stephens: There is no simple answer, but there is, as we are all aware now, a correlation between socio-economic status and achievement. It is one we have yet to finally foreclose on in this country. It is certainly also the case that there are groups of black and minority ethnic pupils one can identify who also show historical and continuing under-achievement. The evidence and the data are there to show those links. It is also the case, however, that there are strong examples and a range of examples where teachers in schools are effectively breaking that link. There are elements of government policy one could point to which are supportive and targeted and making a difference. The Council has said that the targeting of resources, particularly in the area of multi-agency support, in the area of professional development for teachers to understand those particular circumstances in which those pupils are learning cultural diversity and so forth, still requires more attention.

Q20  Jonathan Shaw: The role of the GTC. You have power to discipline teachers. Last time Carol Adams came before our Committee she advised us that there had been five disciplinary hearings. Obviously you discipline after the process at the school or the LEA. She said that caseload was expected to increase. It is nearly a year now since we last saw you. What is the position in terms of disciplinary hearings?

Mr Meyrick: To date the Council has now heard 30 cases. In terms of the orders which are available to the Council to use, they have used the full range of orders which are available under the legislation to deal with those cases. Of those 30 cases, 27 have resulted in a finding of either unacceptable professional conduct or serious professional incompetence. What is particularly interesting is that the sanctions which have been used by the Committee have particularly focused on using the conditional registration order which is about trying to find ways of supporting those teachers back into effective practice. Often it is the result of one aberration rather than a continuing pattern.

Q21  Jonathan Shaw: We were surprised to learn that the disciplinary measures which are registered are removed after two years. We were advised last year that you were going to be reviewing that. Have you done that?

Mr Meyrick: It is not entirely true to say that. The reprimand sits on the register for a period of two years and at the end of that period comes off. Other orders can be indefinite. A conditional registration order, for example, can be indefinite.

Q22  Jonathan Shaw: Did you review that?

Mr Meyrick: We have not reviewed.

Q23  Jonathan Shaw: You have not reviewed it yet.

Mr Meyrick: Yes; but we will be reviewing that. It is in the plan to review that particular process because it would require a change in primary legislation. What we have changed is that if a teacher comes before the Council who has an existing reprimand, then the Council are able to take that reprimand into account at the point of deciding what order to give to that teacher. Post the finding of unacceptable professional conduct or serious professional incompetence, they would be able at that point to take into account the existing reprimand.

Q24  Jonathan Shaw: In terms of other parts of your role, you were saying you advise government. Do you meet with the Secretary of State regularly?

Mr Beattie: No, not regularly.

Q25  Jonathan Shaw: How often do you see him since you have been in post?

Mr Beattie: I have met Mr Clarke once. I also met Estelle Morris once.

Q26  Jonathan Shaw: So you have met the Secretary of State twice in different guises.

Mr Beattie: Yes.

Q27  Jonathan Shaw: When you met Estelle Morris and Charles Clarke were there any significant matters you pressed upon her or him?

Mr Beattie: When we spoke to Mr Clarke, it was shortly after we had published the result of the MORI survey on Teachers on Teaching and we were speaking to him about the results of that survey and how it had thrown up the issue which was not recruitment but retention and that we would be coming back to him in some months with advice on retention strategies.

Q28  Jonathan Shaw: Is there anything significant you can report to the Committee, which you can point a stick at and say that was the GTC, that was what we influenced? Can you tell the Committee about that? We are very keen to know what effect you are having? What is the point in you basically?

Ms Stephens: I can offer some examples of where we have had significant influence. In the process of the education policy, I am not sure we shall ever be able to claim total influence and I am not sure we would wish to do so either. We see that our work in influencing other partners, in alliance with partners, is also important.

Q29  Jonathan Shaw: Some are more direct than others, as I understand it.

Ms Stephens: Indeed. A couple of concrete examples. The early advice from the Council on the need for a national strategy for professional development, all the elements in that strategy, the focus on supporting the practice of teachers in their early years, second- and third-year teachers, post-induction, the extension of that into fourth and fifth, professional development, consolidation of that into a coherent strategy and making a point, not just on issues of quality, but on issues of retention and the cost benefit of follow-through of the investment in early training and preparation and induction with a modest follow-through in those early years is one which, certainly from the early evidence of the early professional development pilots, seems to be paying dividends in terms of retention. So that was certainly one area. Another has been the focus on the need for clear national standards and training for other adults in schools. As the Committee will be aware, the government are currently consulting on the standards for high level teaching assistants. When the whole area of refocusing some resource on support staff, other adults in schools, teaching systems, recognition of the contribution they can make as para-professionals to teachers as professionals and to pupil learning, when that whole debate came through, the Council was very clear from the beginning that it recognised the practice of these other individuals, their contribution, that standards and training had to be in place which were clearly defined. Two examples, but I could offer more if you want me to pursue that.

Jonathan Shaw: No, that is helpful.

Q30  Chairman: Is it a cosy relationship with government? Are you a soft touch or are a thorn in their flesh.

Mr Beattie: I would not have thought we were a soft touch by any manner of means. As you know, the Council is 64 strong and it is 64 strong individuals on the Council. They would not take kindly to being thought of as being a soft touch for the government, which was clearly one of the accusations which was sometimes levelled at us in the early days of the Council. We are polite - we are always polite, but we are nonetheless forceful and when we think a policy is the right one then we will argue it with all the vigour we can. Where we think sometimes government policy is counter-productive, one policy impacts adversely somewhere else in the system, we will also point that out. In my inaugural speech I did indeed say we would look at policy in terms of where it either impeded or enhanced the professionalism of teachers and where we thought it was advancing or inhibiting the progress of pupils. We are quite forceful in that respect.

Q31  Chairman: When MORI did the poll for you and when you got those results, what did you do with them vis-a-vis the government? Did you immediately make an appointment to see the Secretary of State.

Mr Beattie: Yes, we saw the Secretary of State shortly after they were published.

Q32  Chairman: What was your priority to drive home to him from the MORI results?

Mr Beattie: At that stage, because it was still fairly new material, we were doing broad brush stuff in terms of retention rather than recruitment being the main issue. We will certainly be coming back with more detailed work on retention policies and strategies which will be useful.

Ms Stephens: On a point of information, prior to the survey the Secretary of State at that time had requested that the Council host a national retention forum of all partners in the system, to bring forward evidence directly from teachers and employers, from other sources, and to examine that evidence and on the basis of that to keep the Secretary of State informed. The survey was part of that process but what the survey does do, is focus quite clearly on the issues of those factors which remain intractable. If we think back to the first significant survey on retention in 1991, which was by Smithers and Robinson, many of the factors which were revealed in the GTC survey are consonant with those in 1991. What that says to us is that there are what so far have proved intractable issues here. It is our focus on those issues and getting the profession to the point that when teachers leave they do so for reasons of positive career choice or personal circumstance, rather than having these factors propel them. If I might just take this opportunity, for the GTC it is about the numbers leaving, it is about the wastage, it is about the waste of the investment, both in financial and moral terms; financial terms in the system and moral terms in the commitment of the individual entering the profession. It is also about retention being a question of the indicators of a healthy profession. Those indicators must include a much lower level of wastage than we have seen hitherto.

Q33  Chairman: Why did you come to that conclusion? Nothing I saw in that or any other material I have looked at compares you with other professions, does it? I would get worried, if I did a survey of retention in my particular profession, only if I compared it with other professions and found that we were in a much more serious situation in terms of wastage. I do not see the evidence you have for that. Have you any?

Ms Stephens: The data which are comparable between the professions, as the Committee will be aware, are very difficult to identify and, as part of the process of the comprehensive spending review of 2002, there was certainly a recommendation that the data sets across the different sectors and professions be made to be comparable.

Q34  Chairman: So there is no way we can say that your situation is better or worse than nursing or any other profession. You say you just do not know, it is all unknowable.

Ms Stephens: What is significant in teaching is the number of teachers who have been exiting in their early years. If you look at the full process between entry to training and the first five years, the waste is quite dramatic. We do not have comparable data with other professions as of yet, but one of the things the GTC has suggested, through the auspices of the teacher data forum, is that nationally we do need to have a sample of young graduates whom we track over time in different professions to see quite where we are. If it be the case that this is no different from other professions, or indeed from others who are entering other graduate employment, then perhaps we need to revise our positions as a profession. It seems to us that the issue within the teaching profession is also of a degree of demoralisation.

Q35  Chairman: Before you go down that track and I think I know where you are going with that but just park that for a moment. You are saying that if I asked a Parliamentary Question or my colleagues here asked a Parliamentary Question about wastage in the Health Service or in other departments, we could not get an answer. Certainly if you look at the front page of the Financial Times this morning, there is this crisis the insurance industry faces of high level recruitment into the insurance industry and very high wastage. Sorry to bring in a private sector industry but that is the truth. I am just worried that you think it is unknowable, when most people would say that one is reasonably able to find out what the wastage is in a number of the professions.

Ms Stephens: In broad terms that is the picture. The definitions, and it is acknowledged in the CSR, of turnover and wastage are different from sector to sector; that is my point. One can make comparisons in the global picture.

Q36  Mr Turner: How many of those who could have registered with the GTC have done so? Apart from those who are required to, how many of those who are eligible to register with the GTC chose to do so?

Mr Meyrick: I am not sure I could immediately answer that, inasmuch as any person who has qualified teacher status is eligible to register with the Council, so that would include all those people who have retired from teaching and it would not necessarily be a reasonable position to expect that all those people who have retired from teaching but who have QTS necessarily should be counted in that figure as people who could join the profession. It will probably be a fairer picture to look for example at the independent sector and to say that of the 40,000 teachers there at the moment 25 per cent of those teachers have chosen so far, to date, to register with the General Teaching Council where they do not need to be registered. To take it beyond that into all of those people with QTS would be a bit unfair.

Q37  Mr Turner: That is fair. What do you think are the reasons the other 75 per cent have not done so?

Mr Meyrick: Partly the simple statutory reason that there was no requirement for them to join. I suspect that to some extent they and their employers have not yet necessarily understood the full benefits of becoming registered with the Council and the sort of place that potentially gives them in terms of the sort of issues Sarah and John have already alluded to about their ability to contribute to policy making for example. There is a message there that you need to work harder at persuading some of those teachers that being registered with the Council not only makes them part of that registered profession, but also that ability to be part of policy making can come through that. That is something we need to work harder at.

The Committee suspended from 4.48pm to 5.08pm for divisions in the House.

Q38  Mr Turner: Do you think you would have found out more quickly that you had not sold the message had those in the maintained sector not been required to register?

Mr Meyrick: On balance the requirement for teachers in the maintained sector to be registered from the very beginning has been helpful to us. It has enabled us to focus inevitably on getting that key message across to those teachers to start with and obviously alongside that working very closely with the independent sector as well. We have been able to focus our work on those teachers for whom registration is a statutory requirement. It has not impacted negatively on our ability to persuade those other teams and it has meant that we have been able to work on getting our message across to those teachers who are required to be registered very effectively as well.

Q39  Mr Turner: Mr Beattie said that he would certainly take action if government policies were impeding or inhibiting the achievement of the GTC's objectives. May I ask whether he has identified any?

Mr Beattie: I do not think I put it quite like that. We would seek to identify areas of policy which would impede or enhance professional practice. The action we would take would be, once we had identified those glitches, to go to the government with them and say they need consistency in their approach and it was having unintended consequences in this area. We would not just go along and say we did not think it was very good, we would suggest a solution. At the moment nothing leaps to mind, unless Sarah can come up with something from her perspective.

Ms Stephens: We have not done so in that sort of direct way. There are certainly issues which are of concern to the profession currently that we would want to investigate further.

Q40  Mr Turner: Such as?

Ms Stephens: Such as the national assessment regime, which is evident from all the dialogue, not least in the media recently. It has been a core and growing concern to teachers and more widely as well, to parents and others in the education system and centred around the balance of high state testing and issues around the need for that, when other countries, for example, use national sampling quite effectively to measure their progress towards targets, supported by robust teacher assessment. There are those issues around.

Mr Turner: That is one. Is there another example?

Q41  Chairman: Are we talking about an area where you might take a more active part or something you already have taken an active part in?

Ms Stephens: In that particular instance the Council has determined that it will seek to review the evidence in this area and look more widely at international comparisons, investigate for example, those countries which come out more positively in the Pisa studies, how they operate in their national assessment systems at different ages. Yes, it is an undertaking on the part of the Council to do further work on that and we have communicated that to the department.

Q42  Chairman: Mr Turner was asking for another example.

Ms Stephens: Yes, indeed. The chairman referred to this in his introductory remarks which you invited him to make. There is a concern also in the profession which is expressed in a variety of ways, sometimes concerns about inspection, others expressed more broadly as the total accountability framework which teachers currently operate. There is a sense of systemic unease amongst teachers about the different elements of that accountability framework and how they fit together and the extent to which school self-evaluation and the amount of time which is invested in that towards school improvement is actually supported by the accountability framework, the extent to which local stakeholders of a school have a role in that self-evaluation process, a critical but supportive role, and the extent to which there is a reliance on the Ofsted processes. These are concerns. There is an unease in the system and that is something the Council is actively addressing. We are in this next period, following an initial seminar, with key researchers and other stakeholders in this area, taking forward a forum, a programme of seminars and workshops, to examine the issue of the accountability framework and in particular the role of self-evaluation within that.

Q43  Mr Turner: Given the examples you have chosen and the role of the GTC as a defender of the public interest rather than merely the teachers' interest, would you understand why some members of the public might be concerned that you have chosen things which the teachers' unions tend to rattle on about, rather than concerns, for example, of under-achievement, as the two examples you have given?

Mr Beattie: We have already mentioned under-achievement as one of our concerns and it is one we are already working on. We had a conference just a few weeks ago about the under-achievement of certain ethnic minority school children which would be the start of that process. Yes; the answer to your question is yes, I can understand why some people might think that it was self-serving to identify the ones we have identified. In a sense you have to take this on trust. I have been doing what I have been doing for 30-odd years not for my benefit, but because I genuinely care about the youngsters which I teach. If it seems to me that the inspection regime - and I do not use that unkindly; it is the system we use - and the assessment regime with which I am currently involved are not enabling me to enable them to do their best, then as a professional I would feel constrained to try to persuade other educational partners that it was time to look at this again. It is a question of establishing our credentials and trust as professionals with those representing the public; in this case it would be the inspection regime and we would argue that there are other ways of doing it which would not inhibit progress in the way we suspect the current one does. Let me put it this way. I could not argue against an inspection regime which I personally found uncomfortable just because I did not like it. I would have to be convinced that the inspection regime, however unpleasant it might be for me, was not working in the interests of the students. At the moment I do not feel that. I feel that the assessment regime we have is not forward enough looking. I have just been reading a very interesting book on assessment for learning and assessment in the future and where our assessment system is going. I found it quite stimulating and I am somewhat regretful that I am coming towards the end of my career because it looks as though we may be beginning to make progress in that field, where we have been looking for some time for a change.

Q44  Mr Pollard: You were asked a question about the Council and its effectiveness and the answer from Mr Beattie was that you have 64 strong individuals on the Council. I shuddered at that because I wondered, with 64 individuals all having their own opinion and putting it forward forcefully, how you would cope with that and whether it would be as effective as you maintain. If you had said a strong, determined and focused body, I should have felt much reassured. I was wondering if you could tease that out a little bit. Is my definition of what we should be looking at better than your one of 64 individuals?

Mr Beattie: Yes.

Q45  Mr Pollard: Thank you; that will do.

Mr Beattie: That was merely a polite yes. Your way of describing it is more accurate and better. The reason they are where they are is because of the sorts of people they are. As a Council they work well together because the Council comes together at the end of the process and not at the beginning of the process; the detail has been worked through in various councils before it gets there.

Q46  Mr Pollard: I have controlled meetings of three and that was enough.

Ms Stephens: On the issue of individual predilection which might have been implied there, this Council is seeking to operate on the basis of evidence and the proper analysis of that evidence.

Q47  Ms Munn: I want to come on to talk in a bit more detail about the survey and how it highlights some of the retention issues. I notice that in terms of de-motivating factors pay got a much lower score than a number of other issues. Are we paying teachers enough now then?

Mr Hill: If I understood the question correctly, the first important point to make is that the GTC does not have the same relationship with things to do with pay and conditions as the teachers' unions. In terms of what the research suggests, pay consistently comes out as a factor, but not the most important factor, in many situations as far as teachers are concerned in relation either to their reasons for leaving the profession or reasons given why they might have considered leaving the profession. In one example of this which I can give you, as to what might make a difference to teachers who have left the profession - and that has come from the London Metropolitan University and the work of Professor Ross and colleagues - pay features higher as a possible incentive to come back. As to whether we are paying them enough or not, because of our remit I am not sure I should comment on that.

Q48  Ms Munn: The reason I asked the question was that, in terms of general management theory about the kind of issues which motivate and de-motivate people, pay is a classic one which is not a motivator but a de-motivator, yet in terms of the survey you have done it actually comes below a number of other issues. So you may not want to say, exactly as I have put it, whether we are paying enough, but in terms of whether it is a main issue at the moment, it seems that teachers are generally more content with the level of pay. Nobody is going to say they are getting enough, are they?

Ms Stephens: It shows the relative significance of some of the other issues.

Mr Beattie: That is the point I was going to make. We need to look at it round the other way: if pay is coming down there and the other things are up here, those other things really are significant and we need to tackle them.

Q49  Ms Munn: That is an interpretation. Coming on to talk about the issues which have been identified in terms of motivating and de-motivating, there is a clear group of reasons why people come into the profession, why they feel motivated and then there is clearly a load of issues which come up subsequently which make them feel de-motivated. One of the things I have found very interesting in terms of the paper which reflects upon the findings is that it notes across the board that those teachers who are exposed to any opportunities are at least 15 per cent more likely to be a teacher in five years' time compared with those who have not had any of the opportunities listed. What I am wondering, in terms of the structure of the whole profession, is how good it is at looking at the issues which motivate teachers, the reasons why they come into teaching, looking at the reasons which de-motivate teachers and to be honest de-motivate lots of other professionals, high workloads, high amounts of bureaucracy, the face-to-face work with the kids. How good is the profession at seeking to provide more of the motivators and minimise the de-motivators, particularly over a longer period of time as the evidence shows that the longer people are in teaching the more they become ground down by the kind of things people get ground down by in all professions.

Mr Hill: One thing to say in relation to some of the testimony from individual schools where the teacher retention form, particularly earlier on in its life, in the autumn, was received, was that there were several issues to do with ways individual schools have tackled recruitment and retention problems which they have encountered which home in on exactly the point you are making: various elements of human resource management, but in particular looking at what it is that makes teachers want to be teachers in the first place. What is it that makes teachers happy to be in the particular schools they are working in? What is it that makes them continue to want to teach there? In particular we have very strong evidence of the fact that the extent to which teachers are able to take part in the schools involved in initial teacher training can make a big difference to the opportunities offered within that school for teachers to gain new experiences, to celebrate their own good practices with other teachers within the school and with trainee teachers beyond and so on. There are those sorts of bits of evidence of schools doing something about it. You asked the question about the profession as a whole and I guess the message there is that there are some things schools can do to make a difference and it is a question of how you communicate that and support schools, in particular school leaders, in doing something about that.

Q50  Ms Munn: The point I am making is that is probably easier in some schools than others. If you take a large comprehensive, that is fine. I was a school governor of a primary school which had six teachers. Even for them to do the basic of having the opportunity to observe their colleagues, which was something Ofsted had recommended out in the inspection, over a period of time was a major financial and logistical nightmare. What I am really asking is whether it is something about the fact we have schools set up as individual schools on their own, which in itself is creating a number of difficulties, or not allowing them to be the resolution to some of these which you described and which some schools are able to do.

Mr Hill: There is obviously greater potential there to do something about that where groups of schools work together, in whatever situations they work together, whether it be education zones, network learning communities or federations, as they become a reality. In terms not so much of the work of the retention forum but the LEA CPD projects, I am aware of situations, for example, in rural Lincolnshire where there are some smaller schools and opportunities that schools look for to work across schools and provide teachers within those schools for different opportunities to the ones they might gain from within their own schools. Conversations with teachers and head teachers for that matter of small schools at some of our teacher meetings held in different venues nationally have raised similar recipes for doing something about the problem. It cuts both ways. There is also an example of teachers who have a particular kind of experience at a larger school looking for something in a bit more depth that they might be able to get by working in a smaller school. I hope that is helpful.

Q51  Ms Munn: I suppose the other sort of issue I am looking at is that you have individual teachers and the pattern you get - and I am going to characterise this in a way which is perhaps extreme, but - of somebody who has been doing the job for a period of time, over 20 to 25 years, and they have basically become a burned-out teacher because, for whatever reason, they have become stuck in a particular school, doing the same job, not getting the creativity stimulation which they wanted, which they went into the job for. Whose job is it to look at individual teachers, rather than relying on individual teachers sticking up their hand and saying they want to go to do this, and say they are getting burned out - perhaps not a terribly helpful phrase - or they need something else? Is it the schools, the head teacher. Would the local education authority have a role in this, given that what you are looking at and what we are concerned about is that overall the teaching resource within our country is being depleted. If we leave it up to the individual school, is it going to get done?

Ms Stephens: The dimensions of that, LEAs, schools, individual teacher, all play in, as does the national framework which enables teachers to undertake roles which may be beyond just the classroom practice they have committed themselves to and may indeed involve supporting new entrants into the profession, supporting those in their early professional development, spreading that expertise. We have a profession now with 50 per cent who are over 45 years old who in 15 years will be gone. That is a massive reservoir of expertise. How do we get that back into what will become, in that sense, an increasingly inexperienced profession? These are critical issues and in the early professional development pilots, there has been quite an amount of focus on the role of those older teachers in mentoring and the LEA co-ordination of that. There are instances of work going on under our own auspices and guidance and that of others, where LEAs are looking very much more carefully, in a more nuanced way, at succession planning, for example, at matching particular expertise or particular teachers to needs and aspirations of newer teachers, older teachers and newer teachers perhaps across schools working in consortium models within LEAs to support that, so there is a whole range of practical realisations, but it does need input at each school level. Certainly the work the National College for School Leadership is doing around focusing school leaders on human resource management in a way that perhaps hitherto they have not been focused will contribute significantly at the school level. There is a sense in which there is not a single solution and it is rather dependent upon the size of the schools, the nature of the schools, the nature of the region, whether it is a rural region. A whole load of propositions are being looked at around on-line exchange and connection enabling teachers to do that kind of thing as well. It is evident from the large number of discussions we have had with teachers on this, that those teachers whom you described as perhaps burned out are actually looking for something to recharge them and how can we offer that to them? What are the options on flexible working practices towards the end of a career, for example, or the options of continuing a commitment to pupil teaching, to class contact, but also supporting those coming into the profession? We really need to mine that nationally.

Q52  Valerie Davey: Young people at school are constantly being told these days that there is no such thing as a job for life; they have to be multi-skilled, they have to be prepared to change. Should we be telling them "with the exception of teaching"?

Mr Beattie: Recently, whenever I go to speak to groups of teachers one of the things I do is ask how many of them are closely related to a teacher, because when I was doing my MA many years ago most people coming into teaching had close relatives who had been teachers and that was what drew them in. The second question I now ask is how many of them are coming into teaching from a second career. Those numbers are now as large and even larger. It is already acknowledged within the profession that the new approach of people coming into the profession is very often not one of saying they are going to become a teacher, they will be here in 40 years' time and will draw their pension. The youngsters I speak to now are quite clear that they have career plans, they expect these career plans to be supported once they are in the profession, it may involve them in working in schools for up to five or ten years then they go off and do something else. They may well come back; they might not. The other side of that coin is that we are increasingly seeing people who have done something for ten years deciding to come into the profession. I suppose the direct answer to your question is no, we would say the same to youngsters: it is not a job for life. It can be, but it is increasingly not being so.

Q53  Valerie Davey: What are you as the Council using as your criteria for retention? What is an investment? You said that it was not a good investment for people to be leaving. I understand that. There is a wastage. What do you mean by wastage? What are your expectations in terms of retention then? What are you actually saying to yourself when you are looking at the issue of retention? What criteria are you using? Twenty years, 30 years?

Ms Stephens: You are looking at the quantification of that.

Q54  Valerie Davey: I am looking for some guideline as to what you are thinking.

Ms Stephens: We are not positioned to answer that. We have not gone down that track. The issue we focus upon is the one I referred to earlier. Of those who go, let us say the majority go for positive reasons.

Q55  Valerie Davey: You might be wanting to push some out. If you had a clear vision of the teaching profession these days and what it needed, is it physically possible or intellectually or emotionally possible to teach for 40 years these days?

Ms Stephens: There are some really interesting issues in there. One of the characteristics of teaching has been the extent to which the individual has been isolated in the classroom and certainly that desire to work with other adults and make a contribution to other parts of the education system. What we are looking at through a project the Council is doing is how to further diversify the possibilities within the education system such that teachers can retain a commitment to teaching as well as offering to other parts of the system. The Council is also interested in issues, for example, such as whether it is possible to find combinations where those who have the most attractive options elsewhere, for example, in science and technology sectors can also make a contribution as fully qualified teachers at the same time as, as well as, this notion of portfolio careers in and out. Is it possible to find ways where those individuals can keep their professional knowledge up to date in the sectors in which they work and offer some contribution to teaching? I do not think there is a sense now in which we can have any single model. I suspect a model of a full-time qualified teacher will always be the backbone of the system, but there is a range of other options which needs to be investigated in order to modernise this profession, to give it an attractiveness which is beyond just that which is about the commitment to their pupils which of course is at the core.

Mr Beattie: May I answer the question directly about whether it is possible to have a lifetime career in teaching, which is what I had? It still is; although there is this pattern of people dropping in and out of teaching, it still is. It would not be possible in the way that it was in the past in the terms people have described in that you have gone in and you have got your chair in the corner of the staffroom and that is where you are going to be for the next 20 or 30 years. There is now an expectation for variety within that career. Within that variety would be things like sabbaticals, for example. Those can recharge batteries enormously well and enormously quickly by taking people out of the firing line, as they might see it. Usually, very often in cases I was familiar with, they went off to do some educational research and came back. Often they came back to the same place and applied and made a change. Sometimes they used that as a stepping stone to go on somewhere else, to another aspect of education. It is possible, but we would have to build in those sorts of opportunities that Sarah was talking about of mixing and matching with things you did. You might go off, as people did, and be literacy consultants. That is the current example. A number of people have been literacy and numeracy consultants, will do that for three years and then come back into school. We are thinking much more richly about the nature of a career of 30 or more years in education. That was the point Sarah was making about the other things they can do.

Valerie Davey: I am thinking rather differently, as a former teacher. The criterion is that it is for the benefit of young people. Perhaps they need in front of them people who have been something different, who have been engineers, who have been doctors or whatever it might be and who bring therefore a real richness back into the classroom, the people you are saying - and I keep meeting them too - they have decided, having had a lifetime in retail or a lifetime in something else, as it felt to them, 20 years, that actually they want to give something back and the way they want to give it back is by going into the classroom, by being a teacher. It seems to me we ought to be asking what retention is. Are we retaining them simply because it looks good on paper and we have an investment in them, or are we actually saying we ought to say this investment is 20 years, then we are going to re-invest or have new people. I just do not think that teaching ought any more to be a lifetime commitment, quite honestly, for the majority of people. There should be this in and out and we should be looking to bring people in and send people out. What the nation is doing is investing in people, not just for teaching, by giving them their degree, but actually saying their degree is for ... and not being, as previously, worried about having to retain people. There is something unhealthy about it.

Chairman: I am must a little worried because we have a lot of material to cover. I want shorter questions and shorter answers. Do you want to pull the question out of that now?

Valerie Davey: Should we not be saying more cheerfully ""Go" and "Come"?

Chairman: I see that GNER are just refurbishing their fleet which is through its half-life. I wonder whether half-life refurbishment for individuals is perhaps what we should be into, especially in teaching. I offer you that as a passing thought.

Q56  Valerie Davey: In your document you have the fact that you have in round terms 535,000 registered people. You also have 950,000 who are not fully registered. You have this huge bank of people to draw on. What is the problem?

Mr Meyrick: The 950,000 does cover a huge range of people from those people who have QTS and have had a full career in teaching and are now retired, to those who might be accessible in terms of being able to be brought back into the profession. It is about finding strategies to deal with those different groups of people, some of whom it would be very appropriate to attract back in the sort of way we are talking about. A lot of people out there do not have QTS and they need to be attracted into the profession as well and those people need to be encouraged to find ways into QTS so they can come into the profession as well. It is finding the right approach for the right groups.

Q57  Chairman: Earlier Sarah said that the sort of thing you are getting into is the stuff where you can find evidence, you want to base our views on evidence, which this Committee would applaud and this is what we consistently ask the government to do, to base their policy on evidence. Surely there is evidence here - you do not have to invent this - a whole range of sectors and professions which has these problems. They are not unique to teaching. They go across a large number of callings and professions and jobs people do. Surely part of your job could be to try to get the best practice or good practice in these other disciplines, other sectors and help apply them. I do not see how you can do it with the measly amount of money you are spending on research at the moment. Is this the sort of research and comparison you would like to bring together? What I am getting at is that you said you want to base policies on research, on evidence. In this very area of teacher retention, it seems to me you are not looking outward, you are looking inward. You are not looking at what is happening in other sectors because retention of staff is not individual or unique to your profession.

Ms Stephens: I would accept that as yet we have not undertaken any specific study across professional comparisons. That is the case. In the first instance, we have sought to understand those factors which are propelling people from the profession and those which are specific to teaching, those which are in the nature, as the individuals who are leaving or intend to leave see it, of teaching itself. That has been our first point.

Q58  Chairman: What are the government and the department saying to you? They have a big research budget, they have a lot of people commissioning and carrying out research. What are they saying? What is the dialogue between you? They do have knowledge of much of this material.

Ms Stephens: Surely. Certainly in our first advice to the government on retention, we suggested to them that they fund a study to look at those factors now, currently, which are influencing retention and they did indeed do that and that study is about to report. It is a study which was commissioned from the University of Liverpool, Professor Smithers.

Mr Hill: To give some examples which would demonstrate how the relatively small amount of money spent on research by the General Teaching Council nonetheless enables us to gather evidence, the forthcoming report from the University of Liverpool is an example of where our advice has at least contributed to a substantial piece of research, which will be very important to the work of the Select Committee for sure. One of our other recommendations in the initial advice on recruitment and retention was to do with a longitudinal study of the different routes into teaching and recommending that a study be made of that to look at how cost effective it proved, but also to look at the extent to which teachers entering the profession by the different routes felt prepared and then coped with their early professional development and so on. That relates back to questions about where we find ourselves in terms of how long we want teachers to be retained for. If you are looking at teachers' training, before they become teachers and their early professional development, clearly what we are looking for is teachers who, even after three or four years, go off to do something else, by the time they get to that point feel they are members of the profession, feel they are equipped to do the job and come back. In relation to that we and the Teachers' Training Agency have put in a certain amount of money for a five- or six-year project with the department putting in a more substantial amount of money and that is about to happen.

Q59  Chairman: Are you telling me that GTC or the government have never looked at those schools or those regions or sub-regions where you do not have a problem with retention, where people actually stay in the school, there is stability in the school and much better practice and perhaps the lessons could be learned quite quickly in terms of evaluation? Is it better in places like Northern Ireland, which we recently visited, where you have very highly qualified entrants into the teaching profession? Is that within your knowledge?

Mr Hill: That is certainly not within our knowledge at the moment in terms of research. The other examples I would have given include the one in the memorandum to you with the Open University looking at mature entrants to the profession. Interestingly they are already finding that they are less likely than might have first been thought to go off and do something else. You have a memo about that. Also, not in relation to Northern Ireland, although I know of an example in Northern Ireland that these researchers are aware of, our commissioning with SAGA of a piece of research specifically into what happens with those experienced teachers towards the end of their careers, moving some research which was previously done based only on the accounts given by teachers themselves to identify and look in depth at some examples of good process within schools in relation to older teachers. That work will be carried out partially with SAGA and researchers.

Chairman: John, you were looking a bit puzzled about the line of questioning. What I was trying to get at was the difference between the unions and you. You are different from the unions. You opened this session by saying you were different from the teachers' trade unions. You said when you get into the policy areas you are different because you base your campaigns or your dialogues with government on evidence. What I am trying to draw out is that if you are doing that we have to know where that evidence is. Part of our inquiry at the moment is to find whether you know about evidence, in the department, in your own knowledge, it may be international studies, which can help this Committee. That is what I was trying to draw out.

Q60  Mr Pollard: I am not very good at sums but on a quick calculation a 14 per cent response rate is a very small response to the general survey which you did on teachers' views on teaching. In line with what the Chairman said about having a small pot for research and that you wanted it evidence-based, I wonder what value that actually has and whether you would have been better concentrating on the retention bit of it and asking those who were leaving why they were leaving, if it is a problem. May I give an example, as somebody sitting around this table who started off as a chemical engineer, then worked for a charity for the homeless as a director of housing and then an MP, looking forward to joining the Chairman in the Lords in due course, last Tuesday I was made an honorary of the Royal College of Midwives and I am looking forward to delivering my first baby. What I am saying is that you can go through your career and have real distinct changes and that is a good thing, not a bad thing. That follows on from what Valerie was saying earlier. We should encourage this. This enriches rather than being a worry. It might be a worry if a lot were coming in and then going straight out again so you were left with none. That is where you should really be focusing. There is a question there somewhere.

Ms Stephens: To pick up on one point along the way there, we have, as you said, put some proposals forward to the government to do just the kind of research work you suggested and they have picked up on that. The study is due to be completed shortly and will indeed address that. Just to reflect for a moment on the point about whether the Council is suggesting that it is a reasonable proposition to attempt to chain an individual into one career strand, no, we are not. What we are saying is that when they go - at the risk of repeating myself - let us hope that they feel they can advocate on behalf of teaching, because at the moment that is not the picture.

Mr Beattie: I was not looking puzzled at your question, Chairman, I was making a note about Northern Ireland. I was talking to my opposite number on the Northern Ireland TC not too long ago and this was one issue we did not discuss. We will the next time. We have learned something.

Q61  Paul Holmes: Can we explore some of the figures on recruitment into teacher training and retention within the first year or two of new teachers? The Teacher Training Agency says that about 25 per cent of trainee teachers do not complete their course at all. The GTC says that another 25 per cent of the remainder have not completed their course, they do not turn qualified teacher status into fully qualified teacher status. That would work out at around 40 per cent of all people who started teacher training courses not becoming fully qualified teachers one way or another.

Mr Hill: It would do, although you also have to allow for the fact that the 25 per cent figure we give in relation to completion of induction years does not mean there are not teachers who will not go on to complete their induction years beyond that. Those two figures you have just used in a way continue to set the context which was set a couple of years ago through the work of Professor Smithers and through the work of Martin Johnson at the IPPR, where they both did slightly similar but different calculations and came up with a figure in Professor Smithers' case and it is there in The Reality of School Staffing, a more recent report produced in the autumn for the National Union of Teachers, that from the point where anyone enters teacher training to a point three years into their career anything up to 50 per cent of those who were there at the beginning have gone. You can check the precise figures in the report.

Q62  Paul Holmes: If around 40 per cent either do not complete teacher training or turn QTS into fully qualified teacher status, you then have up to another 20 per cent who, within two or three years, have left teaching very, very early on. You have somewhere between 50 and 60 per cent of the people, who started teacher training courses, who within two, three, four years are out of teaching or never entered it at all. Is that sort of wastage rate, 50, 60 per cent, good or bad? We have already said it is difficult to compare with other professions, but surely a 50 or 60 per cent wastage rate is pretty alarming.

Mr Hill: The point to make about that is that in comparison, for example, to another profession, if you are talking about the expenditure of public money on the training of people who will eventually be teachers, who you hope, even if they follow a modern career path and teach for a while and then go off, will come back, you are still talking about a big loss. Whether it is nonetheless acceptable, because that is what you have to do in order to get the right number of people coming out of the system at the other end of it, may be argued differently by others, but certainly it was the original cause of concern in the General Teaching Council among others, going back to 2001 when the initial advice was given.

Q63  Paul Holmes: Are you aware of any studies in the past, in the 1980s or 1970s, on the same sort of topic, which would say that things are exactly the same as they were then, or they are getting worse, or they are getting better?

Mr Hill: I am not aware of anything comparable with those figures. The figures in 2001 were based on teachers who had been in their induction year in 1998 and the most recent complete set of figures I could come across, which might enable a similar calculation to be done, would be 1999, which is why I think the two percentages you have offered, based on things more recently, are quite helpful and suggest that the scale of the problem is probably still there.

Q64  Paul Holmes: So you are not aware of any studies from the previous 20 or 30 years which you can compare back to. What about other professions, nurses, doctors, lawyers, whatever? Are there any side comparisons to make? Would they accept that a 50 or 60 per cent wastage rate was good or bad?

Mr Hill: I do not know whether we could provide the evidence here, but I am sure we could find it. In relation to the medical profession, doctors, quite clearly you would not get that kind of wastage rate from a point at the beginning to a point in their service.

Q65  Chairman: A very high percentage of women who study medicine, after seven years of training, never ever actually practise. It is a very high percentage. Have you checked the percentages?

Ms Stephens: Although I understand that there was an STLB commissioned report in 1999 which at that time showed, to the extent it is possible to show the data and comparability, that the health sector was in a better state in this respect. You may want to refer yourselves to that.

Q66  Paul Holmes: Is that sort of comparison or study or digging back over research from 20 years ago on teacher training retention not something which should be done as a matter of priority by either you or government or both? Are you not flailing in the dark a little bit if you do not even know whether 50 or 60 per cent wastage rate is good, bad, improving, getting worse? Is that not a priority you should be looking at?

Ms Stephens: Yes, I believe it is a national priority.

Mr Beattie: It may be though that it was bad news even then. If they turned out to be comparable figures, there is not much comfort in that particularly. Yes, it is something we can do, certainly.

Q67  Paul Holmes: So it is something the GTC intend to undertake.

Ms Stephens: Whether we have the resource to take that kind of survey is in question.

Q68  Mr Pollard: Or whether you should be doing it in the first place.

Ms Stephens: Or whether indeed it should be done at all.

Q69  Paul Holmes: In the sense of flailing in the dark, the government has then come up with some solutions to all these problems such as golden hellos, paying for training bursaries for certain categories of subject and not other. Is it too early to say or are there any figures, any estimates of how successful things like that are? Do the students who get their training bursaries paid for stay in teaching any longer as a result? Do the ones who get the golden hellos stay any longer than the ones who do not?

Ms Stephens: It really is too early to say. Certainly the cohort study we have advised the government to fund, but which we are also supporting with modest amounts of money, will actually get to those very issues, the diversification of entry routes, what benefits they have in terms of retention, in terms of career progression, in terms of quality of teaching. That study will also look at the extent to which that incentivisation of particular routes or particular subjects actually has a payback in terms of retention.

Q70  Paul Holmes: There is a golden handcuff effect as well. If you get your training bursary, if you get the golden hello, you have to stay in teaching for a certain minimum period of time, but what is the limit, how long do you have to stay?

Ms Stephens: I am afraid I do not have that detail.

Mr Hill: No, I do not have that.

Q71  Paul Holmes: I was a teacher up until two years ago and anecdotally I have had it suggested to me that there is certainly a noticeable trend now in people who have come in under this system who are staying for the minimum period and then they are out. They have borrowed under some of the student loans and all the rest of it and once they have done the minimum they are off. Presumably the government has analysed that to see whether it is a good investment of money and training or not.

Mr Hill: The cohort study to which I referred earlier will also explore another concern that we have about some of these incentives and which was flagged up in the initial advice in 2001 along the lines of being aware that some recruitment policies could have an adverse effect on retention at the other end. We have anecdotal and slightly more than anecdotal evidence from teachers at teacher meetings that some of the young teachers who worked in the early projects are recipients, for example, of golden hellos or recently, for example, opportunities to have their student loans repaid and so on. There are others who have not benefited from it and two things seem to be going on there. One is, quite understandably, that some people feel put out that they have not benefited. More worryingly, I would suggest, there is also the financial aspect of it as well. Some of those missing these opportunities are slightly older teachers and they may have been the very things which would have enabled them to pay off some of their debts and they are still fighting with those debts. It would then mean that in terms of teacher retention, not on a national scale but in terms of the areas where they work, they simply will not be able to afford to continue to teach in that particular area because of the cost of living in that area and they may go somewhere else. There are other things to explore in relation to the effects of some of those incentives which no doubt have made a difference to some teachers.

Q72  Paul Holmes: There was a suggestion that the Open University study looking at training teachers who go in through work based training rather than BEds or PGCEs and a suggestion that they might actually be staying in teaching more than was expected.

Mr Hill: The cohort study will examine all the different routes to teaching. I am also aware from the NASBTT conference, the National Association for School Based Teacher Training, that a claim was made there that the retention rates for teachers entering through training school routes is in excess of 90 per cent. That was probably mentioned in the memo. It would be very interesting to see the extent to which that was true and sustained over time. In terms of the joint conference we held at the Institute of Education in the autumn, the conference looking at issues around initial teacher training, the interpretation of why that might be had a lot to do with the notion that teachers trained through those routes are better prepared for hitting the ground running and understanding the realities of the job they are going to take on when they move over to their induction year. I am also aware of counter evidence in relation to the quality of some of the teaching and have reservations about some of those routes. It is not the whole solution to the problem but it is an area which needs further investigation, which the cohort study would certainly do.

Q73  Jonathan Shaw: Would the cohort of students through the initial teacher training programme tend to be older students? You advised us that a greater number of teachers tend to stay on after their training, who are perhaps coming into it as their second career.

Mr Hill: The average age of people entering teaching is higher than it was and marginally even higher for black and ethnic minority groups. The mature entrants study, which is a different thing, undertaken by the Open University, specifically looked at those entering through some of those various routes on the basis of them being older entrants and having come from other backgrounds, though interestingly about 10 per cent of them, on the initial evidence - and it is very initial evidence - had recently had some experience of working in schools, which is what motivated them then to think they would become teachers.

Q74  Jonathan Shaw: You briefly referred to ethnic minority and black teachers. The survey which you and MORI undertook looked at gender, age, sector, employment status but not ethnic origin.

Mr Hill: It did actually collect ethnicity, but it does not feature in any of the evidence provided to you.

Q75  Jonathan Shaw: It does not feature. Can you illuminate the Committee? What are your findings?

Mr Hill: The best thing we can offer to do is send you some information about the survey. We commissioned London Metropolitan University to look further at the survey from the point of view of ethnicity. One of the problems is the numbers of teachers involved and whether there are enough of them to make it useful.

Ms Stephens: Just to make that group data robust; whether there are indeed sufficient numbers who responded. We are clear on the survey that it is broadly representative in terms of gender, in terms of sex, in terms of region. I just want to be clear about this. We are not as confident on the issues of ethnicity, service and position, in terms of the research methodology and the response from it.

Q76  Jonathan Shaw: Certainly it was a concern of the Committee. When we visited Birmingham this was spelled out very clearly, particularly in terms of role models for young black men and under-achievement in that particular cohort. So obviously we should be interested in understanding any information you might have, particularly if it could pinpoint areas which seemed to be doing well in terms of retention of ethnic minority teachers. We should be particularly interested in that.

Mr Hill: For your information, the Teacher Training Agency have a report, referred to as the Carrington Report, which did some useful work on issues to do with recruitment. It is a recruitment issue as much as retention issue of the black minority ethnic teachers. The national college's study focused more on those who have made it to leadership in order to examine possibly the major retention issue in relation to those teachers: the fact that they are ambitious but appear to hit a glass ceiling when it comes to promotion. Also for your information, but I cannot comment on this as it is not yet a public report, the other major report which has almost reached the point at which it will be a final report, commissioned by the department, is one from the University of Glasgow and looks at aspects of teachers' careers in relation to gender, disability, ethnicity and sexual orientation and that has further information about issues to do with recruitment and retention of black and minority ethnic teachers.

Q77  Jonathan Shaw: We see in the papers today that a particular school says that they are not going to have traditional sports days; they do not want competition amongst their kids, they want inclusive problem solving. They will all come first. Mr Beattie, you said you were concerned about teaching. Sports teaching is an important part of the curriculum. We hear it time and again. You can say that is a peripheral media story, but presumably the media would make an enquiry of the General Teaching Council as to what your view is. Would the GTC have views on that?

Mr Beattie: I have not heard about that and I certainly have not heard from the press.

Q78  Jonathan Shaw: It is in The Times today.

Mr Beattie: Is it? I have a copy of The Times; I must get round to reading it. Without knowing the details I could not possibly comment on the case, except to say that I share your view that healthy activities, sporting or otherwise, should be part of the curriculum for all children.

Q79  Jonathan Shaw: In a competitive way?

Mr Beattie: I have no objection to competition and most of the children I know who have undertaken sport and other activities like that appear not to have either. I would not necessarily make it compulsory. On the other hand I would also encourage problem solving activities, enquiry based learning and all those other things. I do not think it is a choice: there is a place for both of them.

Q80  Chairman: What I am trying to tease out of you in a sense is what we started off with, the firmness of your role. The parallel with the GTC was always drawn with the General Medical Council, the GMC. What I am trying to get out of the discussion is whether you are a General Medical Council model or whether you are a BMA model. At one moment you sound more like the BMA than like the GMC. It came out strongly when Keith was answering a question. He started by saying it was all anecdotal but he was going to tell us about it. Then Sarah referred to the MORI poll, which is interesting but not exactly frontline academic research. You have a piece of research which we have in common with you, although we have not been allowed to see it, in the sense that we share a special adviser who wrote part of that report and we will, I hope, be able to see it at a certain stage. You are telling us you are the GTC, you have been going for two and a half years. We are a Select Committee just starting an inquiry into why or whether we have problems with teacher recruitment and retention and I am not getting a clear focus from the four of you, or any firm idea about whether there is a problem and if so where its roots are. I am sorry, I am not being rude but I am giving you a second chance.

Mr Beattie: The distinction between the General Medical Council and the British Medical Association is one which is unknown to me so I cannot respond to that. Certainly in terms of the retention issue - and it is an issue rather than a problem - we are at the stage, on the basis of the MORI survey which you described. My colleagues' research and discussion and policy work in other areas, identifying what at the moment are the strands and trends and information there, are about retention or lack of retention in the teaching profession. I am quite clear that our intention in all this is to identify the sort of good practice which will enable the profession to enable good practitioners who wanted to remain in the profession to do so constructively and fruitfully over a number of years. Does that help?

Q81  Chairman: It does. What was the most worrying thing for you out of the MORI poll when you read it through?

Mr Beattie: For myself - and it was a very small sample - it was the feeling amongst teachers from ethnic minorities that the respect they received was less than their white counterparts and in some cases they felt that perhaps even their professions did not accord them the same sort of respect as they did to their white colleagues.

Chairman: I partly share that, but what seemed to mark the profession off was that a lot of the responses in a sense were what we might have considered them to be. When we get to the lower respect teachers get from the public, from parents, from politicians, personally I thought that was absolutely mind bogglingly more extreme than I would have guessed.

Q82  Ms Munn: I want to raise an issue which is related to that, about the bunker mentality "I am okay with my kids in my school and my parents know me and I get a reasonable level of respect, but generally I do not". Then when you come onto the issue of the image of the teaching profession, it seemed to be that 56 per cent thought the government must become a better advocate of teachers and the career of teaching, but only 10 per cent of teachers thought they themselves could do more to promote their achievements. There almost seems to be this feeling not just of nobody liking them, but that it is not their job to do something about it, which I think is enormously worrying.

Mr Beattie: Yes, it is a worrying factor. Even if this is a reasonably small sample, the fact that that number of people feel that way is something we ought to be concerned about. We are certainly concerned about it. What we can do about it is another matter. One of the things we set out to do is make the profession feel better about itself and slowly we are beginning to do that. It is a significant message to us as a nation that this number of teachers feel that way about how they are perceived.

Q83  Ms Munn: What is the message you are going to be giving to teachers about this being a two-way thing, that it is not just up to everybody else to do something about saying how wonderful teachers are, which a lot of us do quite a bit of the time in our constituency life.? Should they not be doing something about it themselves? In a sense we as MPs suffer from the same thing. A lot of people will say they have no time for MPs, but if you ask about their own MP, they say they are doing a good job, or they are taking up an issue on their behalf. It is in our interests because we have to get elected, but we take on the importance of portraying ourselves and doing what we can to make sure that we come across well to the public. Should something not be done about the fact that teachers do not see that they themselves have to get out there?

Ms Stephens: And advocate on behalf of teachers. We return to the issue, do we not, which we touched upon earlier? We do seem to have a position at the moment where few teachers feel that they wish to have that advocacy role on behalf of teachers, because their professional experience has been such that they do not wish to recommend it. Of course that is not all, but it is a significant factor within the profession. Part of dislodging that has to be our role in supporting that professional experience, getting it right, getting it right so that teachers, when they come into the profession, have a good range of challenges and a framework of professional support, which is commensurate with other graduate employment opportunities. Part of our role is also about revealing those teachers who do feel able to say that thus far their professional experience is this and working with the media on that. We have begun that process of identifying those teachers.

Q84  Ms Munn: The issue for me though is that it is not just about somebody going out and saying come on in this is a great job to do. It is also about teachers themselves talking about what they are achieving. You might not want to be somebody who suggests to somebody else that they do this job, but that does not mean you should not have pride in what you do. We have some of the best results we have had in literacy and numeracy. That is down to teachers; it is down to additional resources, but it is down to teachers. I would want to see them prepared to go out and argue that. Changing people's views and the public's views about how teachers think cannot be done by Charles Clarke standing up and saying teachers do a good job. That is the important thing.

Ms Stephens: I am sure that is right and part of our role is on that level, to enable the profession to articulate what it is that it does do. Even now we have a popular conception that teachers stand and deliver, that it is quite a simple transmission model which goes on in the classroom. Actually what teachers do is pretty complex stuff. For teachers to be able to make that clear and the results of their achievement is vitally important and we are certainly attempting to work with teachers to enable them at local, regional, national level to reveal that, for example through the media, giving them opportunities to do that.

Q85  Chairman: What are the subject areas which most concern you at the moment in terms of shortage of teachers?

Mr Hill: In relation to the way the curriculum will be changing, the demand for teachers will be changing according to the way individual schools interpret curriculum 14 to 19 with time in relation to some of those vocational subjects. I would look to the core subjects in particular, but on the basis of the TTA targets and applications, and that is obviously not the be-all and end-all of how many teachers you are getting, they point to the situation in science subjects and maths as a concern, for the simple reason that those subjects are going to continue to be important in every school, whatever way individual schools interpret the increased responsibilities there within curriculum 14 to 19.

Q86  Paul Holmes: I was tempted to pick up several things, but I will not, or we will be sidetracked into party-political slanging. So may I ask you a different question, but carrying on from something you said earlier? In terms of the role of the General Teaching Council, and you were talking about the Teacher Training Agency, what is the point of having two different bodies like that? Why does the Teacher Training Agency not just get taken over by the GTC, for example? Why have two separate bodies?

Mr Beattie: The immediate objection to that would be that at the moment we are not in a position to do so. We have quite a lot on our plate as it is. What might happen in the future is another matter. At the moment, we work quite closely with the TTA on a number of issues. We are certainly not big enough to do all that would need to be done in that respect at the moment. They have practice and expertise in the field which at the moment we are happy to share with them.

Ms Stephens: The TTA administers large-scale processes. The General Teaching Council is not an administrative body. It is a body which enables self-regulation and advice to government on behalf of the education community, including teachers. Anything of a different nature would require a change in remit. It is not one we seek. We see these two roles as key roles in influencing the contribution teachers make to pupil learning in the public interest and we do not see ourselves as an administrative body of the recruitment and supply of the profession. Indeed neither does the GMC. There are no easy comparators to reach there.

Q87  Paul Holmes: If the General Teaching Council is to have a real role for teachers - and I was a school teacher when the GTC was set up and refused to join it at the time - if teachers are really going to think yes, this organisation is standing up for us and representing us and so forth, should you not get more teeth in some way? It is hard to imagine the BMA saying they want to have a say in how doctors are trained. Why should you not, if you are an organisation which is really going to stand up for teachers or regulate teachers, have more resources? You were saying earlier that you do not have the resources to commission research and comparisons. Should you not have more resources and more involvement in what is going on, if you are going to do a real job on behalf of teachers whom you are there to represent and regulate.

Ms Stephens: In terms of the definition of qualified teacher status standards, they are the responsibility of the Secretary of State. The primary point of advice thus far is the TTA. We made a significant contribution to the last revisions to the QTS standards, which after all define the training upon which professional entry is based. The General Teaching Council's code of values is now part of the qualified teacher status standards. That has been an important move for the profession in that they are values which have been signed up to through consultation with the profession. The Council believes that there is an issue in how the enactment of professional standards occurs. Are professional standards best carried into the classroom through the profession having a significant contribution to their definition? That is a role we can helpfully fulfil: ensuring that is the case. On the issue of professional development, we are making a major contribution. We have just set out a professional learning framework which maps the kinds of professional development which teachers and research show are effective in supporting pupil learning.

Mr Beattie: We do have a very real role and that role is the regulatory role. This is the first time this profession has been regulated in this way. It is a major undertaking and our core activity at the moment is to get that registration perfect and to carry on with the regulatory, disciplinary work and build up that clear code of standards and conduct that we want for the profession.

Chairman: Thank you for that. I want to look at reasons for leaving the profession now in more depth.

Q88  Mr Chaytor: Of those who leave the profession at whatever stage of their career, is there a significant difference between primary and secondary teachers?

Mr Hill: In terms of numbers or the reasons?

Q89  Mr Chaytor: Yes, is there statistically a significant difference indicating that either secondary are more disaffected or primary are more disaffected or is it across the board?

Mr Hill: No. There are some differences in the reasons those who leave give for leaving in the same way that in our survey there were differences in the reasons teachers gave for being demotivated and having thought about leaving. The biggest ones emerging in secondary are clearly the increased emphasis on behaviour management, behaviour issues with students being a factor.

Q90  Mr Chaytor: Is there a difference between those who were recruited at the beginning of their career and those who were recruited as mature students, that is to say are those who came in without having experienced anything else more likely to want to leave early?

Mr Hill: It would be interesting to see what comes through in this mature entrants study in relation to the question about people who have come in with experience of other things. I could not comment on what that shows at this particular time. What is very clear, not just through our survey evidence or the University of Liverpool evidence, that you will have access to through the department, is that the feedback on the induction year, going through the annual mid-year survey done by the TTA on the evaluation of teacher training has identified behaviour management and ICT as key areas for development. The suspicion has to be, although I do not have it broken down into primary and secondary, that behaviour management will matter even more to secondary for the simple reason that it seems to matter more to secondary teachers than primary teachers in general.

Q91  Mr Chaytor: One of the issues you raise in your submission to the Committee is the question of flexible working patterns for those reaching the end of their career. What are the real specific obstructions to getting a more flexible system as people approach retirement? Is it simply the pension being based on the last three years' salary or however it works? How could the system be made more flexible and what representations have you made to the government to suggest it should be made more flexible?

Mr Hill: The detail of what goes on in pensions is much more in the area of pay and conditions, so it would be for the teachers' unions to make specific recommendations.

Q92  Mr Chaytor: You made the point in your submission, so presumably the GTC has a view as to how it should change. What is the essence of the problem?

Mr Hill: The essence of the problem at the moment is that teachers who might seek to work less and stage an exit to their careers are largely bound by their own personal financial circumstances which would include the implications for their pension if they reduced the numbers of days a week worked.

Q93  Mr Chaytor: Is that not always going to be the case? You seem to be arguing that the traditional model of working until you are 60 and suddenly retiring needs to be changed, needs to be made more flexible, but the problem of making it more flexible is always going to be a financial one, is it not? What I am trying to get at is whether there is something within the teachers' pension scheme which prevents it being more flexible for those who have the financial stability or the financial security to work less.

Mr Hill: Clearly there is. Our reference to flexible employment, both in the case of teachers reaching the end of their careers and in more general terms, has more to do in the middle of their careers with reduced hours worked, part-time work, job sharing and so on. With teachers at the end of their careers it also has to do with what they do with their time and whether there are ways in which those teachers would be able to continue to work full time for longer.

Q94  Chairman: David Chaytor is asking you a specific question. Those of us who have talked to senior police officers about how to keep good experienced police officers who would like to stay on, have asked them what inducements there should be in pension and other arrangements, in order to attract senior officers, officers of any rank, particularly senior and middle ranking officers, to stay on for five or ten years. They have a specific number of very detailed suggestions as to how you could change pension arrangements and so on in order to do that. Have the General Teaching Council got specific proposals to make it more attractive for your people to stay on?

Ms Stephens: No, we do not. We believe that is the proper work of the teachers' unions in negotiating different terms and conditions which apply to the profession and that is without our remit.

Q95  Mr Chaytor: Your brief is to advise government on all aspects of the profession, so how can that be outside your remit? This is a key issue to maximise the potential of long-serving career teachers.

Ms Stephens: Absolutely. We would advise them to work with the teachers' unions on such a matter; that would be our advice.

Q96  Mr Chaytor: It is not very helpful advice.

Mr Beattie: I must come to my colleague's support here. We have to be very, very careful the minute we enter this arena of pay and conditions; there are great sensitivities around that. To answer one of the questions which was asked earlier, there is already a stepping down arrangement in the teachers' pension scheme. If you no longer want to carry particular responsibility, then you can negotiate that.

Q97  Mr Chaytor: You cannot negotiate stepping down to 50 per cent or 75 per cent.

Mr Beattie: I do not know the details of it. I have known colleagues who were interested and I have told them that there is such an arrangement and they should phone the union and they will be told about it. That is the extent of my knowledge. That is something we really cannot get involved in. On the other hand, I can foresee ways in which you could take early retirement. I have a number of colleagues at the moment taking early retirement - two to be precise - who are going to find life quite difficult as a result, but they are determined to go. I could foresee a situation in schools where we began to recognise this as a professional issue and not an individual issue, just solitary individuals who are finding life hard and want to get out, where we say there is a great reservoir of experience in those people, they carry the history of the profession to some extent and it is going to be lost when they go. So let us look at some of the things we can do. What is it that makes their lives so difficult at the moment? It is probably teaching full time in the way they always have done. On the other hand - we talked earlier about entrants coming into the profession - let us move them into mentoring positions, let us give them the opportunity to be responsible for performance management, so they can use their expertise as teachers to watch young teachers teaching and suggest how they might do things differently in the light of their greater experience. Let us see whether we can send them out to do some work with our primary colleagues. The ones I am talking about at the moment do have areas of expertise which would be quite useful in primary schools. If I look at the situation with which I am familiar, which is a very large secondary school, the only one in town with a whole series of satellite primary schools feeding into it, because we have the sort of committee where all the heads of primary schools come together with our own head and consult on issues for the whole town, we could start in that sort of situation to develop a scheme whereby some of the teachers like that might move out to do some things in primary schools and they could swop. It would be quite useful to have the primary maths teacher who is currently teaching key stage 2 maths to come and work in key stage 3, for instance. That sort of thing. It would have to be local solutions and that is one of the things.

Q98  Mr Chaytor: Have you advised the government about these options or are you going to?

Mr Beattie: We have not done yet. We need to work those through in our own committees first before we can go to the government with them.

Q99  Mr Chaytor: Can I shift the topic a little? In terms of the reasons for people leaving, the workload, the initiative overload and so on, do you think the government has responded to the messages from that survey in recent times? How do you think the proposals on reforming the workforce will help or hinder that?

Mr Beattie: Speaking in purely personal terms, the government clearly has responded in terms of the work on the remodelling of the school workforce. How the individual proposals will work out in practice we will have to wait and see. I hope that they will be really successful, but I am going to call my colleagues from the research and policy departments to carry on this discussion.

Ms Stephens: Certainly we made the case to the government, one that had long been evident, that, particularly in primary schools, teachers had not had any guaranteed time for preparation and planning for assessment. It seemed to us that this was a key factor, not only in retention but also in quality of teaching in the classroom. The national agreement, as you will be aware, is designed to deliver changes on that basis. The extent to which those are realised is really in the air at the moment, particularly in the current thinking environment, but one does not need to go much further on that.

Q100  Mr Chaytor: What about the initiative overload then, or slowing down of the pace of new initiatives? Do you detect any positive response by the government there or do you think the pace of change has carried on?

Mr Beattie: Mr Miliband got a round of applause, the first round of applause we have ever had at the General Teaching Council, when he announced that he had yet to launch any initiatives. There does seem to be some movement in that direction. I would sense at the moment that there is a wave of initiatives around, but on the other hand I have just seen a consultation document on the achievement of ethnic minority students and just last week there was something about styles of teaching and learning which the government wants to bring into schools. So there are initiatives out there. I suppose what we must hope is that the sorts of initiatives which now come over the horizon are recognised by the profession as being helpful to them but primarily to their students first of all and then to themselves rather than initiatives which they see as an additional burden on already overworked teachers.

Q101  Mr Chaytor: In terms of the bureaucracy which is often related to initiatives, do you have any sense that the level of bureaucratic demands in terms of record keeping or completion of returns is improving?

Mr Beattie: I have only anecdotal evidence on that and at the moment the sense is that it is not noticeable. My colleagues may have more specialist information.

Ms Stephens: Just in terms of the extent to which government is acting. A new unit has been set up of teachers and head teachers, the implementation review unit, which is going to act as a monitor on that very point of the extent of reduction of bureaucracy, of unnecessary paperwork.

Mr Hill: In relation to the original question, I might want to say more about some of the other things the government has been doing which address key factors that teachers have cited for either low morale or actually leaving the profession. We have one but we also have the improving behaviour and attendance programme as another. We have been advocates of a CPD strategy and although GTC will be giving further advice on its reservations about where that is heading, that has been a major factor which has addressed the sorts of issues. We have already highlighted our main concern that the missing bit has something to do with what we have described as accountability in the realms of things to do with inspection and assessment procedures as they exist at the moment.

Ms Stephens: One of the things we would say to government in all of this is that as you monitor the effects of reduction of workload, as you monitor for the effects of the increase in professional time, also monitor for the effects on morale, also monitor for the effects on retention.

Q102  Mr Chaytor: Are the two separate? Is one not a proxy for the other?

Mr Hill: Something we have not said clearly enough from the beginning, and I would certainly have said it in response to the question about the major thing I would take from the survey, is that the headline grabbing from the survey was all to do with the extent to which there might be so many teachers leaving within a certain period of time and it was unpicked and it was clearly misleading and unhelpful. You can ask probing questions about the extent to which there is or is not a retention problem, but what the survey does highlight very clearly is that there is an issue of teacher morale and it is an issue which leads to quite surprising findings, like the one you mentioned in relation to the 10 per cent who saw it as their responsibility to do anything about the public perception of teachers, but that is not my experience of what teachers do on a day to day basis in their contact with parents. We cannot emphasise enough the extent to which that survey and the other evidence to do with the reasons teachers give that they might leave are also to do with teacher morale and an indication of where that is in the profession at the moment. The other big thing to say about retention is that whatever the global picture, and you know this only too well in relation to the secondary subject specialists, and certainly the London situation, the way in which teacher supply and teacher retention issues can impact on individual schools can be quite substantial and there are differential effects to be considered.

Q103  Valerie Davey: The government has responded to the workload concern by emphasising the need for more teaching assistants. That is an area which has been either acceptable or contentious, depending on the different trade unions. How do you feel about that and how do these new assistants coming in, these higher level assistants, come into your responsibility or do they not? Are they part of your brief? Could they be registered with you or not?

Ms Stephens: On the first part of your question, our view would be that teachers are those primarily responsible for the teaching of pupils. Extended support through the contribution of properly trained other adults has been seen to be beneficial. There is some limited research evidence, there is a wealth of intuitive evidence, testimony from the profession and there is some correlation on school improvement as well. To that extent, and to the extent that other adults in other capacities can relieve some of the administrative burden of teachers for which their training presumably was not destined, the Council supports the contribution other adults make, underpinned by clear national standards and clear training. Currently the high level training assistants do not fall within the provision of the legislation for the General Teaching Council, which was set out to register those who have qualified teacher status. There is nationally an issue on para-professionals and the extent to which they are within the regulatory frameworks that more highly qualified and trained individuals are. It is not just in the teaching profession, it is wider than that, although my understanding is - I would not say this with absolute conviction - that the new Social Care Council does embrace para-professionals as well as those trained as social workers. I am pretty sure that is the case.

Mr Meyrick: That is my understanding.

Ms Stephens: There may be something of an irony in that those with the greatest levels of scrutiny and public accountability are those with the greater levels of training.

Mr Meyrick: The General Social Care Council will embrace all types of social worker. It is not a requirement at the moment for any of those people to be registered with the General Social Care Council. I understand that the intention is that gradually certain types of jobs will come under the requirement through employment requirements but at the moment the General Social Care Council is entirely voluntary based.

Q104  Valerie Davey: Do you anticipate that this will or should be an extension of your work, given that this is certainly within the education ambit and will be increasingly in the future, together with the important role of managing that group which is the teachers' responsibility.

Ms Stephens: There would be merit in having a sensible discussion with government about that. That would be the position of the Council generally; that is not a personal view. There would be merit in having a discussion about whether that might be a problem.

Q105  Chairman: That does bring us back to the definition of your role, whether you are a regulator and whether, if you are a regulator, everything else you might be tempted to do - because it is so tempting to do other things once you are set up - could make it very difficult for you to run that regulatory role in quite the independent way that people would want you to?

Mr Meyrick: It is important to go back to the legislative framework which establishes us and also to look in some senses at the differences already highlighted between ourselves and an organisation like the General Medical Council. We have been given a dual responsibility to regulate the profession but also to provide statutory advice to the Secretary of State and others on a whole range of other issues. We have not been given, as the General Medical Council has, the responsibility of inspecting the provision of teacher training, where the General Medical Council has a responsibility to inspect the provision of medical education. We have not been given the responsibility to set the standards for qualified teacher status. The General Medical Council does have the responsibility to set the standards for primary medical qualification, but the General Medical Council does not have, in the way we have, that statutory duty to provide advice on that range of issues such as the retention or recruitment of the profession we have been talking about today. Similarly, we have a statutory duty to regulate those with qualified teacher status. That is very similar to the General Medical Council which also has a duty to regulate only those people with primary medical qualifications. The General Medical Council would not expect to extend its remit beyond those people and the Nursing and Midwifery Council has a particular remit to regulate registered nurses but does not at the moment have any power to regulate nursery nurses, for example. If those nursery nurses happened to have qualified teacher status, then they could fall under the regulation of the Council, albeit that they are not required to be registered under the current statutory framework. In terms of the future of regulation of people who are in the classroom, there is a debate to be had with government about how that is best delivered, whether the General Teaching Council is best placed for that role or whether some other way of regulating those people might be found for the future and we should be delighted to contribute to that debate. At the moment we have a very clear regulatory responsibility for those with qualified teacher status.

Q106  Chairman: You put very clearly the regulatory case and the comparison with other bodies very well and succinctly, but in terms of the other role you alluded to, giving advice to the government, you are a regulatory body with a degree of independence, or you should have, so when you give advice to the government is it published, is it in the public domain?

Mr Meyrick: Absolutely.

Q107  Chairman: All of it?

Mr Meyrick: Yes.

Ms Stephens: Yes.

Mr Meyrick: Absolutely. Without being pedantic about it, you kept emphasising that we are a regulatory body, but the legislation is very clear: we are a regulatory and advisory body. We have two very clear prongs of our responsibility and our role. Yes, we are a regulator, but yes, we are also required to provide advice on a statutory basis.

Q108  Chairman: What I was trying to tease out with some of my questions was the way in which that regulatory role and the advisory role affected one another. One of the strands which interests us very much is, if you have an advisory role, what the quality of your advice is, in other words what is it based on? If it is based upon something like evidence, where do you get it from, otherwise are you not just like the trade unions and campaigners rather than advisers based on evidence?

Mr Meyrick: May I give you a particular illustration of that which is one of the specific areas of regulatory responsibility we have, which is that we now are the appeal body for those teachers who are unsuccessful and do not pass their induction year. In that role members of the Council sit as committees to hear cases of individual teachers who have failed their induction year. There has been a direct read-across into the advice we have been able to provide to government and to providers of the training around the induction year into saying look, there are some specific lessons we are learning as a result of hearing these cases on inductions, which can read directly into the sort of structures, the sort of support which are required in order to deliver very good induction. There is an absolute direct correlation there between our regulatory work on the one hand and our advisory work on the other hand. As we grow as a council, that sort of read-across is going to grow and grow: the use, for example, of the register, which has the potential, we would all acknowledge, to be an absolute key tool for supporting policy development. When we are able to have a register on which we are able to track individuals through their careers as they move in and out of those careers according to the entry point, the type of entry they came in through, with information about their ethnicity etcetera captured on that register for those 500,000 registered teachers, that is going to become a hugely powerful tool for supporting policy advice. Of course it is early days at the moment, but we have the potential to build on that.

Q109  Chairman: That is most useful and exactly what we want to see as you develop and having a regular relationship with this Committee as well. As you mentioned the policy advice you give to government is on the record in the public domain, can we have some examples of the sort of stuff you have been saying to government on teacher improvement and retention? Would you send that to the Committee?

Ms Stephens: I am so sorry, I had presumed that we had already done that. Certainly, yes. We will certainly make available the advice that we have submitted thus far.

Chairman: Thank you. That is the note on which to end our deliberations. It has been a long session for you and I really am grateful. It was long and must have felt even longer because we lost three quarters of an hour with voting. From the bottom of my heart, I know how long it is sitting there, thank you.