Examination of Witnesses (Questions 500
- 519)
WEDNESDAY 9 JULY 2003
MR DAVID
MILIBAND MP
Q500 Mr Chaytor: The British proposal
is more stringent than the French proposal, as I understand it,
that is why I am surprised that all we got was a press release
from Doug McAvoy.
Mr Miliband: I am sorry?
Mr Chaytor: All we got in protest was
a press release from Doug McAvoy. The issue really is that of
future teachers and how retirement is going to be managed. Can
you tell us about your thinking in terms of the flexibility of
the last decade of a teacher's life?
Q501 Chairman: It was the only point
on which all the unions totally agreed when they gave evidence.
Mr Miliband: I think the proposition
that they understood or the proposition that they chose to answer
was, "What do you reckon if we rob your members of the pensions
they have built up?" and they said they would not be very
pleased. I would not be very pleased either. So we are not planning
to do that and there is no question of robbing the teachers of
what they are entitled to or what they have built up. In terms
of our thinking—other than my repeated point that we are
going to have to work on this carefully—we are going to
phase it in, we are going to do justice to what people's expectations
and assumptions are. We just have to recognise that with people
living much longer the pressures on the scheme are much greater
and we also have to recognise the flexibility. Those are the two
founding principles of the thing. Fundamentally, it is not that
complicated; putting it into practice is very complicated. But
the principles underlying it are not that complicated and it has
to be a sustainable scheme. We have seen this year a big increase
in the costs of funding the teachers pension scheme, which has
not been very popular either, but in the end what you get out
is based on what you pay in and we have a responsibility to keep
it solvent and fair. We are going to have to work it through.
In terms of the flexibility, again a lot of it comes down to some
pretty technical things. We have to work on those carefully.
Q502 Mr Chaytor: What time scale
do you envisage the Department will need to come up with a fully
developed set of proposals?
Mr Miliband: I think that over
the next year we have to take it forward in a serious way. It
is obviously a long-term thing this.
Q503 Mr Chaytor: Do you have a mechanism
for doing that?
Mr Miliband: No, we are in a process
of discussions to get the right mechanism. We want to get the
right degree of engagement with the teaching unions and others
to make sure that it is done right, so we have not announced a
mechanism for it, we are working on it.
Q504 Chairman: We will be informed
as a Committee of your progress of your thinking.
Mr Miliband: I am sure you will
be.
Q505 Chairman: We will be wanting
to compare how teachers are going to be treated under this new
thrust in government policy compared to police officers and other
people in the public sector.
Mr Miliband: I am sure we will
have long and comprehensive discussions.
Chairman: Excellent. This rather joins
up nicely with career patterns in teaching. Valerie Davey wants
to lead on that.
Q506 Valerie Davey: Thank you. May
I follow on immediately in terms of people coming up to pensionable
age. Are you considering the flexibility of moving people from
full time to part time at that stage or allowing them to.
Mr Miliband: When you say am I
considering . . . Do I think that there will be increasing demand
for flexible patterns of work, whether when your kids are young
or whether when you are close to retirement? Yes. Is that something
which is a challenge to schools? Yes, as employers. Is it also
an opportunity for schools? Yes. Is it an opportunity for them
that is not yet fully taken? Yes. It can seem daunting but actually
I think it will be seen more and more as a resource. You know,
half a teacher who has young kids but wants to remain engaged
with the school will, I think, seem increasingly part of the package
of staffing resource that you have.
Q507 Valerie Davey: I think, like
other witnesses, you are moving from a realism point to making
an advantage of it. At the leadership college, the approach should
be: This is a real advantage for our schools, to have more people
doing flexible work, possibly at every age, coming in at part
time, dual roles, moving on.
Mr Miliband: Yes, I am not sure
about every age, because I think there are two obvious ages. One
is when people have young families and one is when they are close
to retirement. I believe in flexibility. Teachers who have 20
years' experience might want to have a year when they are teaching
part time or teaching for half the year because they want to go
and see the world or refresh themselves—and Paul raised
the question of sabbaticals in the last session or the session
before. That is all good. It means that someone has to pay for
it, and there is an issue there—because if you work half
the year you are going to be paid less than if you work the full
year.
Q508 Valerie Davey: You must be looking
at these in terms of cost-effectiveness. Since you have mentioned
travelling, I was at British Council meeting recently where it
was stated very clearly that the new funding which the Government
is providing for travel for international teaching experience
was possibly the most important thing for many, in giving teachers,
particularly head teachers, a new vision, a new recognition, dare
I say, of what is happening here and the values they have within
the British system as compared to others, and that for retention
it was money well spent.
Mr Miliband: I have not seen that
research but the important thing is that we have leading professionals
who are able to make decisions that are informed on good practice.
So heads and governors are the people I want to empower to make
these decisions. They are not my decisions; it is not me to say,
"You are all right for a part-time job" because I am
not in the school, I do not know the person. When I talk about
legal and financial flexibility and a sort of informed professional
leadership, it is about the decisions they make. That is a good
example of a high trust profession.
Q509 Valerie Davey: I accept that,
but the specific question was that the Department has just put
considerable further funding into allowing for overseas training
for teachers to be gaining experience abroad. Has that been done
on the basis of further retention or is this just another good
idea which is fairly idealistic but not grounded in the reality
of money well spent.
Mr Miliband: My understanding
is that it is a minute part of the leadership budget: 0.005% of
the leadership training is done in this area. My answer is that
it is only right for some people. Whether it is right for them
is not a decision that I can make, it is a decision that they
and their governing bodies have to make about how they professionally
develop themselves. The college can help them on that, but the
vast bulk of professional development will be done inside the
country and the vast bulk of flexibility will be done in the country
as well.
Q510 Valerie Davey: Could we go on
to this broader issue that we have, which we all in this room
recognise, a teaching profession. As with other professions, people
move in and out of it and they bring experience from other professions.
Is that part of your glass half-full or glass half-empty at this
stage?
Mr Miliband: I think teaching
is a much more open process. The Graduate Teacher Programme to
which we have referred, 10% of people are coming on to it. We
should not make a fetish of saying people from outside are always
best, but I think for any profession which has a mix of people,
those who are always in, who have come from the bottom and worked
their way up, and those who have come from outside—it applies
to the civil service, it may even apply to politics, you never
know!—it must be a good thing. It leavens the situation.
I remarked on a previous meeting of this Committee that no less
an authority than The Guardian said that teaching is now
the career change of choice. That is a good thing. Does that mean
some teachers might go out and come back? That would be a good
thing as well.
Q511 Valerie Davey: Are there figures
on time spent by mature entrants to the profession?—say
people coming into their thirties. Do we know whether we retain
them for longer than for first-time graduates?
Mr Miliband: Is that one of those
questions where you have the answer and you are going to then
sting me.
Q512 Valerie Davey: No, it is not.
We have touched on it before and there seems to be some indication
that . . . but we do not have the answer and we wondered whether
the Department had.
Mr Miliband: I do not have. I
will find out if the Department has the answer and if it has I
will write to you and tell you what the answer is.[3]
I have not seen any data on that. My own personal experience actually,
now that I think about it, of people who come in, is that they
stick with it and they absolutely love it. I am thinking of one
person in particular who came in from advertising in their late
thirties, who is now in their late fifties and has really stuck
with it. But that is anecdote, so I will find out.
Q513 Valerie Davey: Therefore, if
that is a correct assumption, are we making any efforts to incentivise
people to come into teaching at this later stage?
Mr Miliband: The GTP has advised
us, and that is 10% of recruits—which is not to be sneezed
at. Ninety per cent are not coming in in that way but 10% are,
so . . .
Valerie Davey: Thank you.
Q514 Chairman: I am a bit disturbed
about the answers you have given to Valerie Davey. It seems to
me that, at best, you could be described as inert in this area
and to somebody else less favourable you might be seen as deeply
conservative in this area. We have taken it that the whole nature
of teaching is changing. Career patterns out there in teaching
and elsewhere are undergoing a revolution. Not only do people
talk about the fact that you are not going to have a job for life,
as though this is something administered to them, that they will
have to change five times in a lifetime on average, but in fact
a lot of research is showing and practice is showing that people
choose to change their careers several times during their lifetime.
The evidence we are getting is that there is a tremendous desire
for people to have a different kind of lifestyle that revolves
around changing careers; that many people want to work part-time,
want to come in the profession and out of the profession; that
it is not just the two areas that you say it is, mainly two areas,
but that there is much more turbulence (to use one of the favourite
words of the Department) out there, which, if you are not aware
of, we would be very concerned as a committee.
Mr Miliband: I am sorry. Maybe
I should wear it as a badge of honour, of not having too many
initiatives. When I talk about legal or financial flexibility
at the frontline, when I talk about people coming into teaching
and gaining wide experience in and around the education system
and beyond, when I talk about people having part-time work, notably
when they are starting their families or when they have young
kids and when they are close to retirement, I think I am reflecting
accurately some sense of what is going on, the reality , so I
am sorry if you think that. Where maybe we part company is I do
not believe the implication of that is that I should have a national
programme for X, Y or Z. I believe I should give the people who
really know the individuals, who are the teachers and the governors,
and the people concerned, who are the teachers themselves, the
flexibility to make the most of it. I do not believe that is inertia.
That is a due deference to what my position is relative to those
who are employing the teachers. If there are areas where I am
clogging up the system, tell me, because I want to de-clog it.
I want to make sure that there is sufficient flexibility there.
Q515 Chairman: You said, when you
were talking about who spends the money, "I am responsible
for £4 billion. My job . . ." and you started with innovation
and the sort of vision element, and there you are comfortably
sitting in your office in "Sanctuary House". The fact
is that when you go to a school you know there is a very large
number of heads who really want to appoint a full-time teacher.
They are quite resistant to part-time teachers, flexibility: that
is too uncomfortable, it is too difficult for many of them. I
would have thought that your role as Minister would be to say
that there is a new world out there, that we have to have a whole
range of measures and initiatives to bring on the potential. Because
the evidence we are getting to this Committee is that there is
a great deal of potential out there, of teachers who should be
teaching in our schools, in our primary and secondary schools,
but they are not at the moment. For whatever reason, it is not
made easy for them to come back to teach part-time, to go off,
to join up their career and do all those things that obviously
are changing.
Mr Miliband: There are two responses
to the need to promote the measures. One is that I could have
a sort of part-time teachers' pot which was £x million, to
which people could apply and fill in forms if they wanted to do
it, and schools could bid to be pilots and pathfinders for this.
That is one approach. The other approach is to say that you want
to have structural and cultural change throughout the system in
the approach to people management, and that the battering ram
or the driver for this is the National College for School Leadership.
In our 1,400 toughest schools the Leadership Incentive Grant is
a real driver for this. The Performance Management System that
now exists in every school in the country should be asking of
every teacher, but also getting them to ask of every leader in
the school: What is my career path? How does it develop? I think
that latter approach, to suffuse different ways of working and
a different culture of people management in the system, is a better
approach than the pot of money that you bid for through a partnership
fund. I think that is defensible—I think it is more than
defensible: I think it is a better approach, if I may say so.
Q516 Chairman: We are not asking
you if you are doing a pot, or one way or tother; we are saying
that the vision thing is up to you to position the Department
for Education and Skills, to position yourself, to be aware of
changing trends and not to pass the buck to some unproven quango
that is given a leadership label. There are many people out there
who are more advanced in terms of recognising these trends and
reacting to them than government departments and government departments
have to catch up.
Mr Miliband: No, you said to me,
"You've got £4 billion, should you not spend some of
it on this?" I am saying to you—
Q517 Chairman: No.
Mr Miliband: Well, you did.
Q518 Chairman: No. To bring you back
to what you said, Minister, you said you saw your role as having
three major roles.
Mr Miliband: Yes.
Q519 Chairman: And innovation was
one of those. I am just pushing you, not in terms of the pot or
the money, nothing to do with resources, I am saying that if you
said one of the things you should do is to be the innovator, to
talk up innovation, then you have to have a profile in that.
Mr Miliband: I would say we are
more than fulfilling our role on promoting innovation by using
the National College and other mechanisms, including the Workforce
Reform, to push the idea that managing people is an absolutely
core part of getting the best out of the system; that you are
going to have to manage the whole team, not just manage the teaching
force; that you are going to have to do it in a flexible way;
and that we are going to have to give you financial and legal
flexibility to do so. If you are saying to me that you think it
has to become a stronger part of the departmental rhetoric—which
maybe is what you are pointing to—rather than departmental
policy, I would take that away and look seriously at that.
3 Ev Back
| 
