Apprenticeships and Teacher Training

Flick Drummond Excerpts

Wednesday 19th October 2022 Westminster Hall

[Mrs Flick Drummond (Meon Valley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir George. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for North West Durham (Mr Holden) on securing the debate.

We all know good and bad teachers: they shape our lives, and therefore can be considered the most important influence after parents and carers. Our economy depends on skills and apprenticeships, and I welcome ways into career paths that open them to people from a range of backgrounds. However, I have huge concerns about the number of ways of getting into teaching, and whether they all guarantee the preparedness of teachers. Depending on what equivalence we attach to similarly operating pathways, there are around 10 ways of getting qualified teacher status. It is now proposed to introduce a level 5 associate teacher apprenticeship aimed at teaching assistants, both as a route into teaching and a continuing professional development activity. We should remember that most TA roles are based on a level 3 qualification, or level 4 in some cases.

If, as I have said, teaching is the most important influence, we should be making sure that teachers are well trained and motivated. Teaching is a vocation, but that does not mean that everyone is good at it. There needs to be rigorous training over years to enable good teaching, which includes child pedagogy. It requires a mixture of sciences, such as child development, as well as subject teaching. Finland, which comes top of most education surveys, has primary school teacher training for four years and secondary school teaching programmes for five years. Candidates then have to do a year of pedagogical training; alongside that, they do a research thesis on a topic of their choice and spend a full year teaching in a university-affiliated school before graduation.

This gives status to teachers, and confidence that teachers are well prepared. Compare that with the lack of that foundation in some routes in England, which particularly concerns me, because we cannot rely on stretched schools and their teachers to provide additional support to newly qualified teachers who are expected to learn from others on the job. Additionally, we cannot put children and young people in a position where they may have an unqualified or struggling teacher for a whole year. The new apprenticeships specification builds in so much overlap with the qualified teacher status that it is inevitable that the distinction will be lost or overlooked.

We lose far too many of these valuable recruits early in their careers because they feel unprepared in the classroom. The average rate for teachers leaving the profession is around 10% per year. However, among early career teachers the rates are a lot worse; some 12.5% have already left within a year of qualifying. Some 17%—

[Ben Bradley]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Mrs Drummond]

I will not, because we do not get extra time.

[Ben Bradley]

We get a minute back at the end.

[Mrs Drummond]

No, we do not get a minute back in here, I am afraid.

Some 17% will have left within two years. After five years a third have left, and 40% of teachers who qualified 10 years ago have left teaching. Besides being a failure of current policy, this also undermines our ability to develop a cadre of experienced teachers who can help the next generation.

I am a huge fan of apprenticeships, vocational education and learning while working, but the stakes are so high in education that we must be cautious. Classroom-based professional development can help qualified teachers learn themselves and stay in teaching, but it is not a substitute for giving teachers a solid foundation at the start. We certainly should not be circumventing routes to it, which I am concerned the kinds of apprenticeships now being proposed will do.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jonathan Gullis]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving me the opportunity to clarify. From my understanding, it was headteachers who reported that there was not a massive desire—and nor did they believe that there would be—within the sector. The cost was definitely the main problem. A regular apprentice gets 20% of time off to undertake further learning, but that figure is 40% when applied to the school year, because there are 13 weeks when teachers are not physically in the classroom with their pupils. The cost to a school was felt to be too great to have someone off timetable for 40% of the time. However, allowing a teaching assistant to take a teaching qualification through a level 5 apprenticeship, which we are exploring, could be a way to deliver teachers through an apprenticeship scheme. We would be using people who are already in the school system—those 200,000-plus teaching assistants who do a fantastic job up and down our country.

Where there is employer demand for new apprenticeships in education, including a route to teaching for those without a degree, we will work with employers and the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education to consider how those proposals could be delivered. We are currently engaging in detailed work with a new trailblazer group to explore the viability of the new apprenticeship standard at level 5. That apprenticeship would enhance training opportunities for existing teaching assistants. It would also offer a route for high-potential individuals without an undergraduate degree, providing them with a career pathway to gain a qualification to train to teach.

I look forward to continuing discussions with school leaders, the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education and my hon. Friend the Member for North West Durham on how best to support talented non-graduates to gain the necessary qualifications to train to teach.

I want to ensure that I address the points raised by hon. Members, because that is important. I thank my good friend, the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), for his kind words and his continued passion for state education, a sector that I am proud to have worked in for eight and a half years. To declare an interest, my partner is a member of that sector as well. It is a fantastic career. I hope that anyone watching today who is not yet a teacher will be able to understand what a great profession it is. Not only is the new starting salary for this academic year over £28,000, but I have supported the pledge in the 2019 Conservative manifesto to ensure that a £30,000 a year starting salary is enacted for the next academic year.

On top of that, there are bursaries. The levelling-up premium is available in education investment areas. That can give someone up to £3,000 tax free, on top of their salary, depending on the subject they teach. We should really promote that. I believe that take-up is really good so far, but we are checking those numbers. I want every Member in those education investment areas to drive those reforms by getting people to sign up as quickly as they can.

My hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield (Ben Bradley) is a fine champion for his local area, and I am glad to have been able to spend time with him to learn about the work he has been doing for education. We have no plans in place yet to look at what we are doing specifically for men. However, my team in the Department are looking at diversity, which is not just about ethnicity; it is about gender as well. It is about men getting into the profession, particularly in primary schools, as well as women getting into leadership roles in the sector. It is also about socioeconomic backgrounds and those white, working class, disadvantaged boys who we want to see representing the profession in schools, as well as people from other ethnic minority groups who, tragically, are falling out of the profession at a quicker rate than their white counterparts. We are going to do a big piece of work in that area. I look forward to visiting Lambeth Academy tomorrow to meet Leon, one of those inspirational headteachers, and understand what he has done throughout his career journey.

I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Meon Valley (Mrs Drummond) was a teacher—

[Mrs Drummond]

Ofsted inspector.

[Jonathan Gullis]

They were the ones I dreaded when I was in the classroom. It is absolutely brilliant that she has that insight into the profession. I understand the importance of maintaining that high-quality education and ensuring that that the skill and knowledge base is there, particularly with the important reforms that we have made to GCSEs and A-levels. That is why I am certainly intrigued to explore further what my hon. Friend the Member for North West Durham said about primary education as potentially a pilot route.