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7 July 2009 : Column 219WH—continued
A parliamentary question last year revealed that an increasing number of training teachers are having to
re-sit basic maths tests. This reinforces some of the points that were made earlier. Since 2001, trainee teachers made 20,000 failed attempts at numeracy tests, and the average number of attempts needed to pass the literacy test has increased by 16 per cent. We all subscribe to raising standards, but, unless the Government play their full part in ensuring good quality entrants to the profession in the first place, some schools and pupils will be disadvantaged.
I wonder why the Government’s new £10,000 golden handcuff for teachers applies only to secondary schools. Do we not need to attract the best applicants into primary schools in challenging areas, given the importance of basic literacy at the very start?
Far more could be done with continuous professional development, and I hope that the new licence to teach will address that, albeit rather belatedly. Since the 2007 survey that I referred to, the problem has not gone away. As Professor John Howson of Education Data Surveys wrote only last week in his most recent assessment of the labour market for teachers, English and art remain two of the more perplexing subjects, with high vacancy numbers compared with the number of trainees. For English, the estimate is that fewer than 1,800 trainees may be competing for more than 2,400 vacancies. It is staggering that we have that shortage, given current market conditions.
On lack of training, the Government have followed rather than led. The inclusion agenda, which I am fundamentally in favour of, has been promoted ruthlessly since 1997, but the basic training for teachers has only now been introduced. Teachers coming through the teacher training programme before 2011 will not have received that extra training.
On standards in general, we need to untangle what real progress has been made from people’s lack of confidence that standards have remained constant. We really need Ofqual to be independent. We Liberal Democrats are seriously concerned about whether Ofqual will be genuinely independent and accountable to Parliament, rather than just to the Secretary of State. We have a number of proposals for an educational standards authority, which would guarantee that genuine independence.
In conclusion, although I take on board the point about teaching standards, we need to look at a range of barriers that stop children succeeding. Although a lot of progress has been made in respect of the failure to identify and resolve educational problems in early years, the standard of teaching at that stage still has to be developed much further. For example, one in five teachers in the early years foundation stage have only a level 2 qualification. In other words, we have got the most important part—the starting point—topsy-turvy and not everybody is able to access higher-level qualifications. On inadequate and inconsistent funding for schools and colleges with high levels of educational disadvantage, we advocate a pupil premium that would enable money to be found to pay staff higher salaries, if the head teacher and the governors chose to do so.
Infant class sizes are too large. The failure to plan properly this year has resulted in 10,000 pupils being in classes with more than 30 pupils. On class size, the
Government made a commitment to fund state schools at the same levels as independent schools. What happened to that?
In too many schools, leadership and governance is not effective enough. Government targets and micromanagement distort priorities. Teachers are undermined by this centralised approach. The Education and Skills Bill gave Ministers more than 150 new powers. I agree with the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness that all our schools and colleges must have the freedom to innovate.
The inappropriate offering of the curriculum, leading to pupils’ needs not being met, has made teaching difficult. Teacher training to the national curriculum means that teachers have lost the confidence to be innovative. So we are in a vicious circle at the moment that we need to break out of, because, as hon. Members have said, people remember an inspirational teacher throughout their lives, and we must ensure that we have many more inspirational teachers for children from all backgrounds.
12.2 pm
Mr. Nick Gibb (Bognor Regis and Littlehampton) (Con): I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr. Stuart) on securing this important debate and on his excellent, informative speech. I agree with most of the thoughtful speech made by my hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr. Field), who is clearly passionate about standards and schools in his constituency.
The standard of teaching that pupils receive is one of the most decisive and important factors in determining the success of their education. A good teacher can make an enormous difference. The Sanders and Rivers study, mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness, which took place in Tennessee and examined the effect a teacher could have on academic performance, found that if two average ability eight-year-olds were given different teachers, one a high performer and one a low performer, the children’s academic performance would diverge by more than 50 percentage points within just three years. Other studies from the UK and the USA have produced similar findings. The Institute for Public Policy Research concluded that a good teacher could improve a child’s academic performance by more than a grade level. Those studies show that attracting high-calibre people to the teaching profession is a prerequisite to raising standards, and that in turn means a career in teaching needs to be seen as an interesting and desirable option for top graduates and those who have made a successful career in other fields.
According to Lord Adonis, one key objective of the Teach First programme, which other hon. Members have mentioned, is to reconnect the teaching profession to the top universities. Partly, this undoubtedly comes down to pay. If excellent teachers, including those with prized qualifications such as maths or science degrees, are to be attracted and retained by the profession, they need to be paid in a way that is commensurate with their value to schools. That is why schools—particularly academies—should be given the freedom to pay good teachers more.
No one should be in any doubt that we have in our schools in this country some able, highly qualified, highly motivated and first-class teachers. On Mondays, when I visit schools around the country, I meet dedicated teachers with a genuine vocation who are transforming the lives of the children they are teaching. Britain would not be the fifth most successful economy in the world if this were not true. But as my hon. Friend rightly said, we have to be cautious about the future. We need to accept that we face huge challenges. One in five children leaving primary school after seven years are still struggling with reading and 40 per cent. are leaving school without having achieved five or more good GCSEs. Half of all children who qualify for free school meals fail to achieve a single GCSE above grade D.
There are many reasons for these challenges, including the curriculum and ideologically driven pedagogy emanating from the education establishment, but a factor must also be the barriers that mean not enough highly qualified young people are choosing teaching as a career. The first and perhaps most serious of these barriers is pupil behaviour. In March 2008, the Association of Teachers and Lecturers carried out a survey examining this issue. It found that 29 per cent. of all teachers have been punched, kicked or bitten by their pupils. Nearly one in 10 teachers said they had been injured by an aggressive or violent pupil. Crucially, nearly two thirds of teachers said they had considered leaving the profession because of aggressive pupils, verbal abuse and the threat of violence.
In 2008, the NASUWT compiled a dossier that detailed the violence that teachers had faced, some of which verged on the horrific, including attacks on teachers using knives and scissors and even attacks on pregnant teachers. In light of that, research by the think-tank, Policy Exchange, which found that the principal factor deterring undergraduates from a career in education was
“the fear of feeling unsafe in the classroom”,
seems perfectly understandable. Unless the standard of behaviour in our schools improves, the teaching profession will not become a truly welcoming environment for talent.
At the moment, teachers often find it difficult to enforce high standards of behaviour because they lack the powers that they need to keep discipline in the classroom. Teachers should be given far wider powers to search for and confiscate items that are banned by the rules of the school, and not just specified items on a narrow list. We Conservatives joined forces with the Liberals on that point during the Committee stage of the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill.
We would allow schools to require home-school contracts to be signed as a condition of admission to a school, which is something long opposed by Labour Ministers over the last 12 years until the 11th hour of this Administration in last week’s White Paper. We should abolish the exclusion appeal panels, to enhance the standing of head teachers by removing the ability to second-guess their decisions on discipline. These expensive, stressful and time-consuming appeals procedures are a deterrent for heads, who need to be able to expel persistently disruptive pupils. If a head teacher’s decision to exclude a pupil from his or her school were overturned subsequently on appeal, allowing the child to return, that would be in complete defiance of the head teacher’s wishes. This
system completely undermines the head teacher’s authority. I believe that these changes would enhance the ability of staff to keep order in their schools and would help to make teaching a more rewarding profession for prospective teachers.
Of course, the behaviour of pupils is not the only issue. As the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke) said, the curriculum is another important contributory factor, putting off the more academic teacher. The trends toward modularisation, thematic teaching, an outcomes or competence-based curriculum and so-called applied learning all reduce the time spent on engagement with formal, academic knowledge.
The overall standard of many qualifications has been reduced over time, making them less academically challenging and therefore less interesting for able teachers who have a passion for their subject. One subject that has suffered most from this problem is science, particularly at secondary level. Students studying for science GCSEs have in recent years been asked whether they sweat through the skin or the liver and whether they look at the stars through a synthesiser or a telescope. A report by Ofqual in March this year found that the standard of GCSE physics had fallen between 2002 and 2007. Fewer topics were covered and there was a reduction in the number of questions that required complex calculations or several steps to reach an answer. There was also a general reduction in the mathematical demands made of candidates. These findings reinforce the conclusions of a growing body of independent academics, such as Professor Peter Tymms of the university of Durham and the Royal Society of Chemistry, who have demonstrated that the academic standard of science qualifications has fallen over the years.
In addition to that problem, the new 21st-century curriculum replaces the study of scientific concepts with the study of the relationship between science and wider society. That leads to students debating stem cell research without the developed knowledge of biology that they need to appreciate the issues. The Ofqual report specifically picked out that issue when it said that
“candidates were required to discuss the advantages and drawbacks of CCTV, mobile phones and the internet. These may be interesting considerations, but they did not add to the candidates’ knowledge and understanding of physics.”
In reality, those are not even particularly interesting considerations. Goodness knows whether, in 20 years, we will even have mobile phones or CCTV. They replace the richness and complexity of scientific understanding with a pseudo, superficial learning. The drop in the standard of some science qualifications, with the movement away from teaching scientific concepts, creates a curriculum that is less likely to attract candidates with a genuine passion for their subject.
That problem is borne out by research into teacher specialisms. An investigation by the university of Buckingham in June 2008 found that 24 per cent. of state schools had no teachers with a specialism in physics. It also found that the number of applicants for physics postgraduate certificate in education courses had dropped by 27 per cent. in 2006. That problem is particularly acute in science, and affects subjects across the curriculum. In June 2008, a paper produced by the National Foundation for Educational Research found:
“Across all subjects, the proportion of lessons being taught by teachers with relevant post A-Level qualifications was slightly lower in 2007 (79 per cent.) than it had been in 2002 (83 per cent.).”
If we want to reverse that trend and encourage more graduates with relevant degrees into teaching, we must revive the academic value of the curriculum so that it is firmly focused on knowledge, concepts and ideas. At the same time, we must work to encourage individuals with a real affinity for their subject into the profession.
Mr. Graham Stuart: Will my hon. Friend address the training of teachers, and say whether he believes in a more formal route outside schools, or every school being a training school?
Mr. Gibb: I am attracted to the concept of training more teachers on the job through programmes such as the graduate teacher programme, which a number of teachers go through, but there is scope for expanding that programme. I take issue with the hon. Member for North-West Leicestershire (David Taylor) about some teachers in the independent sector not having formal qualifications. The problem is not the independent sector, which achieves 38 per cent. of all A grades in A-level physics. The graduate teaching programme attracts high-quality graduates who learn how to teach in the school from the head of department. We must be flexible about entry into the teaching profession and teacher training.
We have proposed changes to enable teachers to advance further with their academic subject as their career progresses and to make it easier for them to pursue higher qualifications, such as masters degrees and doctorates, with support for sabbaticals and bursaries. When teachers join a school, they should not lose contact with the academic community of their subject at university. They should continue to deepen their understanding and maintain their enthusiasm for their specialism so that they can communicate that passion to their students.
As well as making the profession more attractive by attacking the problems of pupil behaviour and the curriculum, we must introduce specific policies to ensure that teaching is a career for strong candidates. At the moment, around 1,200 postgraduate trainees begin training each year, having achieved a degree below 2:2, and 13 per cent. of applicants—about 5,000 students—have to re-sit the on-screen numeracy test to gain qualified teacher status three times or more before passing. We would address both those problems by permitting only one re-sit for the literacy and numeracy tests, which at the moment may be taken an infinite number of times. We would fund trainee teachers only if they achieved at least a 2:2 degree.
We would also raise the bar for new primary school teachers by requiring B grades in GCSE English and Maths. Those two subjects are integral to the job of primary school teachers. At the same time, we would ensure that every publicly funded teacher training institution provided primary teachers with specialist courses in maths and synthetic phonics instructions so that they were properly equipped with the necessary skills to carry out those core aspects of their work.
In addition, we believe that dramatically expanding the academies programme will enhance the standing of the teaching profession, making it a more prestigious
and attractive destination for top graduates. The greater autonomy and freedom enjoyed by teachers under that programme is part and parcel of enhancing their standing as professionals. We hope that freeing the profession from the frustrating bureaucracy of local and central Government will enhance its status, enabling it to attract more high-calibre teachers and raising standards as a result.
12.15 pm
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families (Ms Diana R. Johnson): I congratulate the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr. Stuart), who is my near neighbour in east Yorkshire, on securing this debate, and all hon. Members who have contributed today.
I am aware that the hon. Gentleman recently had the opportunity to discuss teaching standards with the Minister for Schools and Learners in the Select Committee on Children, Schools and Families, of which the hon. Gentleman is a member. I welcome today’s further opportunity to debate the topic and to hear other hon. Members’ comments.
The evidence shows clearly that parents are the most important influence on children’s life chances, but that nothing matters more to pupil achievement than the quality of teaching that they receive. A good teacher not only inspires—the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness made much of the inspiration needed to bring pupils on and make learning fun—but teaches in a way that suits pupils best, stretches them, and identifies where extra support is needed to tackle the barriers to learning to secure the progress of every child. The second part is important, because teachers’ professional skills lie in being able to draw the desired progress and achievements from pupils. In short, teachers change lives, and building a world-class school system in which every child and young person can fulfil their potential and receive the support that they need to succeed requires that we have a world-class schools work force.
I shall talk about a decade of progress. I do not recognise the picture that some hon. Members have painted of today’s teaching profession. Over the past 12 years, our schools work force has been transformed: we now have more than 40,000 more teachers than in 1997, backed up by more than 200,000 support staff, including teaching assistants, who have made a huge contribution in the classroom.
Mr. Graham Stuart: The Minister said that the teaching profession has been transformed over the past 10 or 12 years. Has the average position of graduates going into teaching in terms of the deciles of performance improved or declined over that period?
Ms Johnson: I will talk about the graduate entry to the teaching profession in a moment.
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