Education Bill

My Lords, a few of the amendments in this group are in my name and it may help the debate if I speak to them first. I apologise for interrupting. I shall speak to Amendments 64A, 64B, 73A, 73B, 73C and 73D. We have considerable sympathy with the intent of noble Lords who have supported Amendment 64. We believe that there is a need for government to send out a much stronger, more positive message to the teaching profession about their value and status. Therefore, we believe that a body carrying out the key functions of the GTCE should remain in the Bill. Like my noble friend Lord Puttnam, we fully acknowledge that the GTCE has struggled to fulfil parts of its mission. However, in abolishing it, we are in danger of losing other functions which it has delivered well and which would be lost to the profession as a whole. For example, in abolishing the GTCE we will deny the teaching profession a self-regulated professional body on a par with virtually every other professional body in this country. As the GTCE itself says: "““The Bill would remove the professional infrastructure that is standard for other professions such as medicine, law and nursing, and for other teachers””." Equally, teachers themselves are calling for the continuation of such a body. For example, the NASUWT says the abolition, "““will damage the status of the profession””." Meanwhile, as we have heard, the Government talk endlessly, and quite rightly, about raising the status of the profession. However, if they are serious, it would surely be a regressive step to take away the professional body. The Bill describes how certain functions will transfer to the Secretary of State and others will stop completely. I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hill, for his letter of 13 June setting out in more detail which of the GTCE functions will stop. In that letter he said: "““The GTCE functions which we do not propose to continue include: maintaining the register of teachers; investigating cases of professional incompetence; undertaking a range of surveys and research about the teaching profession; disseminating research and statistics; supporting teachers’ continuing professional development””." Taking some of those examples, we believe that it is vital to maintain a professional register of teachers, as other professions do and, indeed, as the comparator bodies in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland will continue to do. The register of those qualified and entitled to teach in our schools has been successful in enabling employers to make recruitment checks. Under the Government’s proposals, all that will be held is a database of those prohibited from teaching. Organisations such as the Association of School and College Leaders and the National Association of Head Teachers have made it clear how much they value a register of all qualified teachers that is accessible by schools. The NUT echoes that, saying that it would be a waste of resources if this work were abandoned now. The ASCL said that abolition of the GTCE and discontinuation of the registers removes the public’s guarantee that all registered teachers are, "““eligible, suitable, properly qualified and of good standing””." It is not just the public’s but parents’ rights to the same guarantees that matter. For example, as part of my other life, I carry out some paid work for the General Medical Council, and I listened with great interest to what my noble friend had to say about it. Not only have I seen how much doctors value the General Medical Council’s register but I have seen how important it is for patients to access details of their doctors’ registration in an open and transparent way. Surely parents deserve the same rights? In a recent survey, 93 per cent of parents want teachers to be regulated, to have an agreed level of training and to be registered with a regulatory body before taking up a teaching post. Incidentally, in the Bill’s General Committee in the Commons, the Minister, Nick Gibb, said: "““Although we are clear that we do not want to replicate the GTCE’s current register of teachers, we are exploring further what central records and data will still be needed in the future … I expect to confirm our plans to the House during the later stages of the Bill’s passage through Parliament””.—[Official Report, Commons, Education Bill Committee, 17/3/2011; col. 480.]" Perhaps the Minister can update us on those developments. Our amendment also places a duty on this new body to exchange relevant information from the register with the General Teaching Councils for Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, which, as I said earlier, will continue. It seems obvious that if those other bodies are to remain effective, as teachers move around the nations as they are bound to do, it is important that we exchange that information so that we can uphold standards across the UK as a whole. Otherwise, if we are not careful, teachers whose registration is perhaps under question will all move to England where they will be in the least scrutinised area. I am sure that that is not the intention behind the Bill. We have further issues of concern which these amendments address. Under the Bill only the most serious misconduct cases go to the Secretary of State, and he has only one decision: whether or not to prohibit them from teaching. Lower-level issues of teacher conduct would be dealt with at school level. This could potentially lead to inconsistent treatment from one school to another and, again, would be a process that lacks transparency. In addition, the burden of investigating and then deciding whether or not to ask the Secretary of State to consider prohibiting the person from teaching would pass back to the school. Teachers would not be confident that they were being judged independently. A number of noble Lords in the Second Reading debate raised concerns about the centralisation of power that the Secretary of State is taking to himself, and this is one of those areas. My guess is that taking direct control of teacher discipline might be one area that he will grow to regret, so it could be argued that we are doing him a favour by tabling these amendments. On a more serious note, there are also more practical concerns about whether the Secretary of State has sufficient resources and expertise to undertake these new functions, such as the function to prohibit people from teaching. For example—this is now historic, but it is still a rather alarming statistic—in 2006, a review found that 88 known sex offenders had not been banned from schools and there is a danger that, unless we put comprehensive processes in place, that situation will worsen. An independent body with gradations of sanction, as proposed in the amendment, would allay many of these problems. Amendment 64B is similar to Amendment 65 of the noble Lord, Lord Lexden; he may well want to speak on this. The Bill repeals the requirement for employers to tell the Secretary of State when a teacher is dismissed for serious professional misconduct reasons. Under the Bill, the revised wording only requires employers to, "““consider whether it would be appropriate to provide prescribed information about the teacher to the Secretary of State””." We are concerned about the variation in treatment from employer to employer that would result from this, and we are also concerned about how employers would know whether something was considered serious enough to report to the Secretary of State. Without a duty to refer to the Secretary of State there is a real risk of differential reference thresholds across the country. More importantly, it would make it difficult for employers to get consistent information about potential staff members who might previously have been dismissed, with the result that they will lose confidence in the whole referral system. It could also lead to poor decisions on recruitment leading to poor teaching, or worse. We therefore hope that the Minister will reconsider this issue. Amendments 73A, 73B, 73C and 73D sound more complicated than they are, but they all refer to the arrangements for winding up the GTCE’s affairs in respect of staff, property, rights and liabilities should our earlier amendments not be successful. The GTCE is a membership organisation most of the income of which comes from membership fees: £19.3 million out of a total income of £19.7 million. The GTCE had reserves of some £9 million on 31 March 2010. Does the Minister think that, on abolition, it would be fair for the reserves to go towards abolition and redundancy costs of staff? Or, given that the staff had paid the money in the first place, should not the reserves go to a charity or some other service that would benefit teachers? The amendments would allow the Secretary of State to transfer GTCE property to a charity and prevent the reserves disappearing into the wider departmental budget for uses that would not necessarily benefit the profession. I am sorry that I have taken a little time to talk through these amendments, but I hope that it has underlined the fact that it is easy to dismiss an organisation as an unnecessary quango and that dealing with the consequences for the profession requires considerably more care than the Bill so far provides. I hope that our amendments go some way to addressing that deficit.