Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20
- 39)
MONDAY 19 MAY 2003
MR JOHN
BEATTIE, MS
SARAH STEPHENS,
MR ALAN
MEYRICK AND
MR KEITH
HILL
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 you 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% 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% 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 teachers 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.
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