Education Bill

I rise partly to apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, for calling him Lord Lucas earlier. I am sorry for that. I blame my Front Bench for giving me the wrong information. I do not want like the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, to go back to the Middle Ages and end up at 1858 with the General Medical Council or indeed to revisit Nicholas Nickleby and the Dickens novels. I would like to start in 1963 when I became a teacher. It was the proudest day of my life when I got my first teaching post and went into a secondary modern school, Middleton County Secondary Modern boys school in Leeds. I spent 34 years in the teaching profession and I regarded it not only as a profession but as the most noble and decent thing that I have done in my life. If I had my life to run over again, I would do exactly the same thing. One thing was always missing, however. Those of my friends who, unlike me, did not leave school early to try to play football and fail before going into teaching but who became doctors, lawyers or dentists all had a professional body which not only were they proud of but which decided the standards by which they ran their profession and which they met. It was interesting that last Thursday we had two of your Lordships, the noble Lords, Lord Ramsbotham and Lord Hill, proudly talk about having to visit the dentist. I do not know whether it was an enjoyable experience for the Minister but it certainly was for the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, who was speaking perfectly well today. I suspect that when they went to the dentist they wanted to know that the dentist was registered as a dentist with the General Dental Council, which was set up by the Dentists Act 1956. If they had any doubt, they could have gone on the internet, looked at the register and confirmed that the dentist was qualified, registered and hopefully competent. They would not have liked to go on to the web and seen a phrase saying, ““It might be a dentist. The only information we have is that he has not been barred for misconduct and that at some time in the past he did some training””. That is what we are talking about. Let us remember that this Bill comes from the White Paper, The Importance of Teaching. If the importance of teaching is to say that we are not even prepared to let you as a profession have your own register to decide the standards by which you operate, the standards by which parents have confidence in you and the standards by which society has confidence in you, then God help us. I can say to the Minister that the dentist that he visited last week was taught by teachers. They got the training necessary to go off to university and to train as a dentist from the teaching profession as it stood. I say to my noble friend that the GTC was set up by the Teaching and Higher Education Act 1998 and that I sat on that Bill. To be fair to the Minister, the Labour Party at the time was not desperately keen on it either. I can remember proposing an amendment to that Bill which set up the register, because the original proposal—the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, will agree—was to have a GTC but with the Secretary of State having the register. It was through good argument during the passage of that Bill that we persuaded the then Government that essential to a GTC must be a register of teachers who were not only trained and competent. That was the very basis of it. I support much of what the Minister wants to do in saying to schools that they are going to have greater autonomy, that head teachers will have greater autonomy and that the Government are going to set up all sorts of different organisations, although we may or may not agree with some of them. But to say that the one group of people who cannot have autonomy are the teachers themselves as part of the teaching profession is sad indeed. As the noble Lord, Lord Knight, mentioned, for the Secretary of State to say in his White Paper that there is, "““no calling more noble, no profession more vital and no service more important””," than teaching and then, at one stroke of the pen, say, ““Ah, but you are not even worthy of having your own teaching council””—my goodness, Minister, you really do need to think again.