Examination of Witnesses (Questions 440
- 459)
WEDNESDAY 9 JULY 2003
MR DAVID
MILIBAND MP
Q440 Paul Holmes: Or completed it
but never taught so you get a total of somewhere in the mid-50s
depending which study you look at.
Mr Miliband: So not 50% who start
teaching and then drop out?
Q441 Paul Holmes: No.
Mr Miliband: I am sorry, yes.
Q442 Paul Holmes: But that seems
to imply a crisis in recruitment and retention. The National Employers"
Organisation gave us evidence recently showing that turnover in
teaching had reached a high of 14% in about 1990 and then it fell
to about 8.5% in 1997, and in the last six years it has soared
back up, to 15%, in 2001, although they have not got any more
up-to-date figures. Professor Alan Smithers did a report for the
DfES published recently which said the numbers leaving teaching
have doubled since 1997 overall in six years and that in 2002-03
the numbers leaving are two thirds higher than in 1997. The National
College for School Leadership in their first annual report published
figures, for example, saying that 10% of primary and secondary
schools advertised head teacher posts last year which is higher
than for a decade, and 34% of the primary schools had to readvertise,
which is the highest level ever recorded, so there is a whole
set of figures there that we have received over the last few weeks
which indicate there is a crisis of recruitment and retention
from the level of recruiting and training teachers who then never
go into teaching or leave very quickly through to numbers, the
turnover, that has gone back to a high of 14% through to advertising
for heads which has reached a high and readvertising for primary
heads which has reached the highest level ever recorded, so there
does seem to be some sort of crisis.
Mr Miliband: I think it is completely
absurd to believe that, at a time when there are 25,000 more teachers
than there were six years ago—
Q443 Paul Holmes: We will come on
to that in a minute.
Mr Miliband: I am sure we will
but at a time when there are 25,000 more teachers than there were
six years ago, when there are 4,000 more teachers than there were
a year ago, when 70% of teachers stay in the profession for at
least 10 years, when the staying-on rate, so to speak, of secondary
school teachers I was astonished to find is higher than that of
chartered accountants—97% and 92%—it is completely
absurd to say that is a crisis. If we conduct our debate at the
level where if there is anything wrong it amounts to a crisis,
we debase and devalue the point of having a serious mature discussion.
If you say "Are there issues to address to make sure that
we make the best of the people that we have, to make sure that
people who have got something to offer in the education system
do the best that they can?", then I am up for that discussion
and I certainly do not pretend that I or we have a monopoly of
wisdom or anything of the sort, but one union I saw described
it as a crisis in front of you, the others snorted with derision
and said that this was complete nonsense, and frankly it is nonsense
to pretend we are in the middle of a crisis in teacher recruitment
and retention when there are more teachers than there have been
for a generation.
Q444 Paul Holmes: So the statistics
from the National College of School Leadership, from the DfES
report that you commissioned yourself, the figures on people entering
training and not finishing it, or not entering teaching or leaving
in three years, they all show record highs but you do not feel
that is a problem?
Mr Miliband: They can all be true
but they can also be selective and partial. The Smithers' report
shows there has been increased so-called wastage rates, which
is a very emotive way of putting it, but we also know that (a)
it has levelled off; (b) a lot of those people are going into
posts within education but not directly from the classroom so
are still making a contribution to the education system, and (c)
I am sure that we would all accept that one set of figures do
not on their own prove anything. Also, you did raise an important
point which I want to come on to which is at a time when you are
expanding the number of posts, which I think we would accept although
it sounds like we are going to have a sterile argument about whether
or not people who have qualifications from other countries really
count as teachers but we will come on to that in a second, at
a time when there are more posts there is obviously a turnover
in the system. Now, that is not to me evidence of a crisis. The
fact that there are attractive promotion opportunities in other
schools may raise issues, and it can raise issues about how schools
use recruitment and retention allowances to hold on to their teachers,
but it is not evidence of a crisis so we should not mistake turnover
for mass exodus from the teaching profession, which would be a
crisis.
Q445 Paul Holmes: So you reject all
the figures from the—
Mr Miliband: No, I do not reject
the figures—
Q446 Paul Holmes: You do not feel
they contribute to a serious and mature discussion?
Mr Miliband: No, I did not say
that. I said the opposite. I said that the allegation that those
figures constitute a crisis is not a serious and mature contribution.
These figures are correct, as far as I know—I have no evidence
to the contrary—but they do not constitute a crisis and
it is silly to pretend that we are in the middle of a crisis.
That genuinely is bad for recruitment and retention.
Q447 Paul Holmes: Well, we will move
on from that sterile debate. The Employers' Organisation who we
have taken evidence from were saying that they thought this was
not a crisis but they thought there were moments of crisis, and
they thought perhaps they were turning the corner and things were
in place like the workload deal that would help to solve the issues
that were causing a lot of these record levels of turnover and
non recruitment and so forth, but then the Heads Association on
the same day said that they were worried that they do not have
the money for September to implement the workload deal given the
funding crisis this year, for example. Now that is September.
As you say, school term ends next week and then it starts getting
into September, and the heads sat there and said "We are
not at all sure we have the money"—
Mr Miliband: The heads have made
a very valuable contribution to the workload agreement. They are
signatories to it, they have discussed it at the highest levels
of their councils and they remain signatories to it; they remain
committed to it and they believe it is deliverable; and they have
been sending out newsletters on their own and jointly with us
to their members for at least the last year saying "Get on
with it", because this is not just about using the marginal
extra pound to do marginal extra work; it is about remodelling
the school work force so we do things better, smarter. Step one
of the workload agreement in September, as you know, is to say
that 24 tasks should not routinely be done by teachers; they are
the highest priority for support staff to take on those tasks,
and if that means them not doing other things or other things
being done through better use of IT or other mechanisms then so
be it. What we are committed to doing with our partners, including
the Head Teacher Associations, is to make sure the resources in
the system are deployed so we use the personnel to better effect.
Part of that is to make sure that teachers are not spending their
time collecting dinner money and putting up displays but are teaching.
Q448 Paul Holmes: We received some
quite alarming evidence from the DfES official David Normington
where he said that, in terms of the funding deal this year and
the press reporting of that, whether it is true or not, which
creates the impression that perhaps teaching is not the best profession
to go into, they had only realised that there was going to be
a problem right at the end of March when Charles Clarke went to
speak at the Head Teachers' conference, and all day they were
being hammered by head teachers saying, "Look, there are
going to be budget problems", and that late on in the stage
they had only just realised there were going to be problems, but
then the head teachers were sitting there representing both primary
and secondary and saying, "We do not know if we have the
money in September to implement the workload deal".
Mr Miliband: With respect, what
I think they say is there is money across the system which more
than funds the deal. What they are concerned about is the distribution
across the system and whether individual schools are facing a
particular squeeze. What they have agreed and why I have argued
with them and they have argued inside the system is that the workload
deal (a) in year 1 builds up the cost, so the biggest costs are
in year 3 when we had the 10% of time guaranteed for preparation,
planning, assessment, which is why you will find they are as,
if not more, concerned about years 2 and 3 and the confidence
they have got there as they are about this September; (b) that
for many schools 24 tasks have already been devolved, especially
in the secondary sector less so in the primary sector, but (c)
that with the messages to go out—and partly this is a responsibility
of the national remodelling team—the work force agreement
is about doing things differently and not just doing more, so
it is not a matter of dumping more tasks; it is about changing
the way in which support staff work and the way in which teachers
work. I think you will see a really co-operative attitude from
the heads and from the teachers' unions who are signatories and
from the support staff unions to make it work, and it is our responsibility
to work with them to make it work.
Q449 Paul Holmes: The representative
of the primary heads in particular said that she was worried that
primary heads have less staff and less flexibility and less budget
anyway because of the size of the school and that they would face
the problem this autumn that their staff would be saying, "Look,
here are the 24 things we do not have to do—it says so in
the newspapers"; the primary heads would not have the money
or the non teaching staff to enable that, and basically the primary
school heads would end up picking up all that burden. It is in
the record if you want to see it.
Mr Miliband: I do not doubt what
you are saying and there is no question that it is more of a challenge
in the primary sector than the secondary sector which is a good
point. There is no question that we have to work closely with
primary and head teacher colleagues but, as I say, in the same
way that a pay deal has to be funded and paid, these are contractual
changes and they will be our highest priority for the support
of teachers and if that means support staff working in different
ways, not just simply having more load dumped on to them but working
in different ways, and if that means better use of IT—the
Chairman referred to use of capital and ICT investment earlier
to cut the amount of meetings and bureaucracy, to cut some of
the footling things that support staff have to do to liberate
time so they can do the 24 tasks, that is part of it and that
is why it is about remodelling. If you are saying to me you are
going to have to work very hard on the culture and on the structures
locally to get it done you are absolutely right, and that is what
we are committed to doing with the partners who signed the agreement,
and the significant thing about the agreement is it is not just
sign on the dotted line and walk away and hope for the best; it
is sign on the dotted line and work with the Government month
after month, week after week, to make it a reality in practice,
and all the signatories—all the representatives apart from
the NUT—have been sitting with us, framing the regulations,
working on the regulations, working on the drafts, putting real
input into the way those are developed, and they feel a sense
of commitment and ownership as a result of that process, and we
want to carry that on so that we are taking the glib phrase "social
partnership" and putting it into practice.
Q450 Paul Holmes: Finally on this,
one of the things that would make teaching an attractive profession
is that it would be viewed as a profession where you have the
independence of a professional to do the job, and I know, having
been a teacher over that period, that teachers certainly felt,
from roughly when the national curriculum came in from 1987-88
onwards, that a lot of that had been stripped away from them.
One of the employers' representatives quite upset me by saying
that he thought teachers were just about starting to be recognised
as a profession, like lawyers for example—I thought I had
joined quite a good profession back in 1979 but there you go!
He thought we were perhaps just getting there. One of the steps
to giving professional status to teachers was making teaching
an all-graduate recruitment in the late '70s. You have set up
the General Teaching Council to provide a professional body so
professional teachers are graduates with qualified teacher status,
they are members of the General Teaching Council. Would you agree
with that?
Mr Miliband: Yes. I can think
of many other words that people would use to describe lawyers
than a "profession"! But it clearly is a profession
and we have to make it a profession in the richest and deepest
sense of the word, and I agree with that. That is why I make speeches
all about it saying how a range of things from professional development,
CPD, etc, is about promoting what I would call a "modern
professionalism".
Q451 Paul Holmes: And you made a
speech to the General Teaching Council conference in which you
said there were 25,000 extra teachers since 1997. Of those 25,000
extra professional qualified teachers, 3700 are trainees. They
do not have qualified teacher status.
Mr Miliband: They are on the employment-based
route.
Q452 Paul Holmes: But they are trainees
without qualified teacher status.
Mr Miliband: Correct. The 25,000
figure includes people who are not unqualified but they have qualifications
from foreign countries, they—
Paul Holmes: If we could just stick to
that 3,700, to start with, of trainees.
Q453 Chairman: Let us give the Minister
a chance to answer in the way he wants.
Mr Miliband: The 25,000 figure
includes people with qualifications from other countries who are
equivalent to QTS (Qualified Teacher Status) and also the 3,700
on the employment based route. I think the figure is that 900
of them have already had QTS of the 3,700, but I will check that
and write to you.[1]
They are counted as full time equivalent teachers because they
are full time teachers, yes.
Q454 Paul Holmes: I asked this question
in the last session, I think it was, which was if you are including
people on the graduate training programme but they are not yet
qualified teachers why include them, and one answer was that they
spend a great deal more time in school because they are training
in school on the job, but so for example are people on the school
centres for initial teacher training. They are doing their GTP
course primarily in the school rather than in a university base
so why not include those as well and boost your—
Mr Miliband: I can imagine the
row there would be if we did not have consistent data series to
measure this. The GTP programme is unique in the way it works
and who it recruits and how it deploys them. It has been a significant
success for the Teacher Training Agency (TTA) who have done a
very good job on this. It represents about 10% of the total recruitment.
They are experienced professionals coming into the system—
Q455 Paul Holmes: But they are not
qualified teachers—
Mr Miliband: No. They are on the
employment based route to QTS, yes.
Q456 Paul Holmes: So I still do not
see why particularly you do not include the ones on the school
centres, the initial teacher training, as well as the graduate
trained.
Mr Miliband: Well, because the
school centres are not the same as the graduate teacher and if
you look at the time and the role that people are playing on the
employment-based route it is slightly different. I am happy to
start claiming there are 28,000 or 26,000 or 27,000 more teachers
than six years ago but I would not want to be accused of misleading
you about the comparability of the data.
Q457 Paul Holmes: Another category
of the 25,000, but we are not sure how many because the figures
do not disaggregate down enough, are instructors. Now, in a footnote
on page 10 of the DfES volume it says that instructors are teachers
not employed in the general capacity but who possess specialist
knowledge of a particular art or skill, such as music or sport—and
I emphasise—who are employed only when teachers with qualified
status in that subject are not available. Now, you are including
in your 25,000 increase instructors who, according to a footnote
in the DfES handbook, are not teachers with qualified status and
are only to be used when teachers with qualified status are not
available, so why are you now including instructors in your 25,000
teachers when your own handbook says they are not qualified teachers?
Mr Miliband: Because they are
full time teachers. Sorry, I must have missed something in what
you said.
Q458 Paul Holmes: But they do not
have QTS.
Mr Miliband: No, but neither do
people from Australia who have an Australian teaching qualification.
Q459 Paul Holmes: That is the point.
Does the Department know exactly how many overseas teachers there
are, how many of them are classed as occasional teachers, how
many of them are classed as instructors, how many of them are
with or without QTS status or the equivalent from their home country?
Mr Miliband: We know what we set
out in our memorandum but I really think it is important. Are
we really saying in the modern world, when people have qualifications
from respected foreign systems which are equivalent by all the
international "Institutes of Pedagogical This and That"
that say that their qualifications for Australians, New Zealanders,
South Africans or anywhere else are equivalent of QTS, are we
supposed to say, "Sorry, you are not a teacher?" That
would be a mad state of affairs. If schools choose to use those
people who are making a valuable contribution and that is the
only evidence that they are not of appropriate standard or anything
else, what are we supposed to say? That they are not a full-time
teacher? That would be a very silly state of affairs.
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