Children: Speech and Language
Lord Storey Excerpts(13 years ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Nash
We regard the solution to this issue as a local one. That is why we will be setting up the local offer involving children and young people with SEN and their parents and we will publish details of where parents can find all this available in one place. As young people will have an education, health and social care plan which will be reviewed every year, this will monitor the issues to which the noble Baroness refers.
Lord Storey
My Lords, the Better Communication Research Programme report looked at speech and language therapy support in schools, and according to the report only 10% of mainstream secondary schools have such support. My noble friend the Minister will be aware that the provision of speech and language therapy throughout the country is very patchy. How can the Government ensure that anybody who needs this service can access it as quickly and efficiently as possible?
Lord Nash
My Lords, I know that the noble Lord has vast experience in education and I am grateful for his question. We are sharing widely the good practice in the better communications research where speech and language therapists work with teachers and teaching assistants to provide support. He is absolutely right about a divergence in provision around the country and the shortage of funds, but it must be for local authorities and their partners to assess local needs and to make better use of resources so that they are directed where they are needed. Our proposal for a local offer will do this and will put parents and young people at the heart of decisions.
Schools: Pupil Premium
Lord Storey Excerpts(13 years, 3 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Hill of Oareford
The principle that we are adopting generally in introducing the pupil premium is to leave discretion on how it is spent as much as possible to individual heads because they will know the circumstances of the children for whom they are responsible. However, the noble Baroness is right that those approaches that are working well—which we will discover through the publication online of details of how schools have done, through inspections by Ofsted and through spreading good practice through the education endowment fund—should be spread as widely as possible, with lessons being learnt from them.
Lord Storey
My Lords, the Minister will be aware that, according to an Ofsted survey of, I think, 300 schools, 50% were using the money effectively and were seeing real changes. How can we ensure that the other 50% are using the money, which we have heard is going up next year, in such an effective way?
Lord Hill of Oareford
My answer makes a similar point. It is important that we learn lessons from the ones that are spending it effectively. We will do that through the work of the Education Endowment Foundation, which was set up specifically to spread good practice and help other schools learn the most effective ways of tackling disadvantage. It is early days, but as more information is published, the fact that from this September schools are having to account for how they have spent their money and what they have spent it on, and demonstrate a linkage between that money and results, will help us achieve the goal of my noble friend Lord Storey.
Education and Training: People with Hidden Disabilities
Lord Storey Excerpts(13 years, 7 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Addington
My Lords, first, I thank everyone who has taken the trouble to put their names down for this debate. I must also declare a series of interests. I am not only dyslexic but vice-president of the British Dyslexia Association and patron of the Adult Dyslexia Organisation, and I work for Microlink, a company that provides support for those with disabilities and of which I am chairman.
When I linked autism and dyslexia and included them in hidden disabilities, the main point that I was trying to make was that anything that is not easily spotted at the start of the educational process, whenever someone chooses to take that, leads to problems if it impedes one’s learning or classroom situation. How early one gets in and identifies the problem is crucial.
I will say only a few words on autism, starting with Asperger’s, for the simple reason that there are many people in the Chamber who know far more about the subject and can talk from greater depth of knowledge than I will ever be able to. Those with Asperger’s, who are on the edge of a spectrum, are often identified later as a result of interaction with other people outside the home when it becomes less difficult to spot. This would be made much easier if someone was trained in the initial stages of education and in the classroom, and indeed if that training was not a limited introduction, to be able to spot it later on as problems start to manifest themselves, often simply because they were not dealt with earlier.
The problems of social interaction—taking things too literally; not being able to communicate properly; non-verbal communication, which is so important even when talking in this Chamber—create other problems if they are not picked up. We must have someone who can recognise these problems and get in earlier. I am really calling for people to be trained throughout the education process to pick these up. Also, education and training are supposed to be lifelong. All conditions for which there is not this embedded knowledge, and even sometimes when there is, are going to be spotted later on in life. Therefore, we must not limit ourselves to training just in the education sector.
I appreciate that the noble Lord, Lord Hill, may find himself having questions directed at him that might go to BIS, to the Department for Work and Pensions, or to the Department of Health—certainly in the case of autism. We had a little exchange earlier in the week when he asked what the best lead department would be to drive something. I suggest that when it comes to some of these conditions, the Department for Education could be of the most benefit, certainly for dyslexics. The basic few examples that I have given for autism and dyslexia are very clearly there.
A good point is dyslexia, because the problem occurs when one starts to use written language. Dyslexia, which I believe means “difficulty with words” in Greek, becomes apparent of course when one starts to learn to read and write. To access all forms of education and training in our society as we are going through, one has to have those two basic skills. If you do not deal with those, you are at an eternal disadvantage.
This situation is getting more prominent—I was about to say worse—for the simple reason that as we formalise our skill base more, measure it and try to support people, there are more and more occasions when you have to write something down or react to written information. Whether it is on paper or on the screen, that requirement is always there. There is a greater emphasis on the written paper in the modern driving test, as opposed to the one that I took. I do not have to go on much further because we can all think of examples. That is what we have if we do not deal with the situation for certain people.
It is reckoned that 10% of the population are on the dyslexia spectrum. I think it is 1% for autism. We could have mentioned many other hidden spectrums, such as ADHD, dyspraxia and dyscalculia. We are probably getting up to about 15% without trying. I do not know what that percentage is in every classroom, but it is a very high one, so we must have a degree of knowledge based in that classroom for early intervention.
Why have I brought this matter forward at this present time? It is because we are having a look at the whole special educational needs sector—we are coming down the track. The Government have made proposals. However, I do not know whether this was intentional—I hope that it was not—but the people concerned with these non-obvious disabilities have heard warning bells rung by some of the language that was used. This may be a chance for the Minister to muffle those bells a little in the process of his speech. I refer to things like, “We will concentrate on things and get a whole cross-departmental approach towards making sure that people go through. We will cut down the number of people on the special educational needs register. We will concentrate better”.
Unless we have people with expertise based in the front, identifying the problem, we cannot do these things. Even if we redefine someone with dyslexia as not having a special educational need, because the system can use it, they are still dyslexic, and dyslexic throughout their lives. It is not something that you get rid of; it is a disability and it is to do with the organisation of your brain. It is there for ever, as I know to my cost.
Aside from this, going into my personal history, I wonder how many other people in this Chamber have been congratulated on their improving handwriting on Christmas cards in their forties.
Lord Addington
My noble friend says “the opposite”. I look forward to hearing from him later on.
It is something that stays with you, and you have a different developmental pattern. Sir Jim Rose said in his report:
“Dyslexia is a learning difficulty that primarily affects the skills involved in accurate and fluent word reading and spelling … Characteristic features of dyslexia are difficulties in phonological awareness”—
I shall not try to say that twice—
“verbal memory and verbal processing speed … Dyslexia occurs across the range of intellectual abilities”.
There is a great deal more in that vein to be found in the document from Dyslexia Action. It is always there, and you will always have a different learning process, which means that every time you go into a new phase of your educational and training process you will always have the problem. The way in which it is dealt with will change over time, as will the way in which you deal with it and your interactions with other people. That will change under the pressures on you, but it is always there. If we get teachers trained initially and then make sure that others throughout the system have the support and knowledge of what was happening, we will take a huge step forward. We must make sure that the interaction and the different learning process never become a barrier. We must allow people to explain it.
If someone has the condition explained to them, they start to be able to take the appropriate steps to mitigate the condition. If a teacher goes up to a child and says, “You’re not stupid, you’re dyslexic”, that teacher and all other teachers have an infinitely better chance of a positive relationship than they would if they did not identify the problem. You can then go and tell the parents. The dyslexia world is full of the recurring story of parents saying, “My child is dyslexic and I have discovered that I am”. How do people get through life? They will say, “I never take notes—I always ask someone to do it for me”—as a result of having never kept a pen on their person for more than about three seconds at a time. They are dependent on partners, and so on. Those are the success stories.
In our prison population, about 70% or 80% are reckoned to have problems with literacy. Every single assessment of the prison population that has looked at it has come up with the figure of about 50% being in the dyslexia spectrum. If you take on board the idea that if you cannot access education you cannot access training because you cannot go through the process with a technical ability to read and write—and thus you cannot get employment—you have a far greater likelihood of becoming an offender. Asperger’s, I am afraid, is also highly represented. Possibly not communicating as other people do might lead to conflict. It is a very complicated and worrying situation. If you do not get in there early and coherently, it will cause problems.
What do I want done? Sir Jim Rose presented, under the previous Government, a model for the better training of dyslexics within the teacher training programme. You have to make sure that that is used not only in the initial training but throughout the system. Throughout the process of training, it is equally appropriate. The noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, might well be able to regale my noble friend on the Front Bench with the long series of meetings that we have had over apprenticeships. The previous Government decided that they would reassure employers about standards in training and said that everyone must pass an English key skills—now functional skills—test. When challenged on this, they said that they would make a change, but I think that it fell through the cracks in the changeover of Governments. All I know is that I have spent the better part of two years chasing around to get those people the same support and help to get an apprenticeship that you currently have to get a degree—or at least for there to be no greater barriers.
At the last meeting I had, it was agreed that assisted technology could probably be used to get through this test. Someone said, “Well, no one has complained about it—we haven’t had one letter or e-mail”. You get that degree of resistance further up. I have had meetings with the Department for Work and Pensions, usually under the last Government. There is nothing new here. They said, “Well, yes, we’ve got people with needs who are long-term unemployed. We should help them”. “How?” “Oh, it’s complicated—we’d have to get more training packages”. “Yes, please do”. The Department for Education is uniquely placed to set a precedent for good training and awareness. That department can drive this. If it cannot, it can at least build the engine and hope that someone else will put their foot on the accelerator.
We must do something here to address the problem. Some 10% of the population with dyslexia are underachieving in many cases, sometimes becoming a drag on our society. The figures for autism might be smaller, but the problem is as profound, man for man, if not more so. We have to try to address the problem, but we will not do so unless we get a greater degree of awareness throughout the system. We have to get agreement. Every time a dyslexic has to deal with a form, they are at a disadvantage. Every time you ask someone to fill in a process that has anything to do with reading and writing, a dyslexic is potentially disadvantaged. We have to make sure that at all these points there is someone there who understands and, when you say, “I am dyslexic”, will understand that slight adaptions should be made. Assistive voice to text and text to voice technology is very old beer now. I have been using it personally for over 12 years. It is now comparatively easy to use. We have a way forward. This is something that could be integrated into the classroom more easily. It need not be that big a problem—all you need is slightly different patterns of dealing with this.
I look forward to hearing from my noble friend when he replies that the Government are taking this on board and that his department is driving this through the whole machinery of government. If it does not do so and merely concentrates on the schools aspect, it will leave people with a wonderful set of skills for one part of their lives and leave them to fall off a cliff the next.
Lord Storey
My Lords, I, too, thank my noble friend Lord Addington not just for securing this debate but for his passion in making sure at every opportunity that these matters are at the forefront of our consideration. I am sure that his determination will succeed.
I declare an interest as a practising head teacher. I was very mindful of what my noble friend Lady Browning said about young people being labelled in the past. Because of their learning difficulties, they were often regarded by their peers, and sometimes by their professional teachers, as “thick”. From my first teaching job, I remember a teacher who was very keen on literacy and would test every child on their reading age every month. She had a chart on the classroom door with the names of all the children—there were 40 of them then—and their monthly reading age. Because some of the children had learning difficulties—sometimes specific learning difficulties, sometimes global learning difficulties and sometimes dyslexia, although we did not know that at the time—their reading age never moved. Therefore, the teacher would say, in an almost patronising way, “Poor little Michael”, or, “Poor little Dominic”, or whatever their name was. That was not the fault of the teacher but it created huge problems. These were not just learning problems; as was rightly said, it often led to bullying.
This did not just happen in schools. When I was doing my education degree, I vividly remember a very highly regarded lecturer in education almost dismissing dyslexia, saying, “There’s no such thing. It’s just made up. They don’t have dyslexia in China, do they?”. That was often the view at the time. Thank goodness we have moved on.
We then moved on to a period in which we began to understand dyslexia and other learning difficulties but did not know what to do about them. Resources were very limited. It would often be a parent who came into the school and said, “I think my child is dyslexic”. The teacher would say, “Oh yes?”, and would eventually get around to thinking about what might be done about it, but the resources were not there. We have come light years in what we are now able to do. Both the previous Government and this Government have taken enormous steps regarding special educational needs and are to be congratulated on what they have done. That is not to say that there are no further things that we should do.
I give one example of the progress that we have made, which touches my heart. A very close friend of mine has a daughter who has mild cerebral palsy. Although she required a bit of pushing from her parents—she was in the independent sector—she has been supported all the way through her education. She is now at Leeds University, which has been fantastic in supporting her. She obviously has a scribe whenever she is doing exams and so on. When she could not get the work in on time, they said, “Come on, we’ll help you and make sure that’s right”. She repeated one year. This year, she will get her degree and the following year she will do a two-year masters degree. That is something of which, as a nation, we can be duly proud.
The only reason I got involved in this debate is my own personal experience. The previous Government rightly used the phrase, “every child matters”. If we are going to make sure that every child matters, that has to be in everything. I look at my own school and at what we now do. First, we have an ethos that recognises particular special needs issues. On dyslexia, we have a qualified SpLD teacher who is, thanks to government funding, undergoing her masters. She is qualified to diagnose specific learning difficulties. The staff are also trained to identify characteristics of learning difficulties. They then use a checklist and go to the head of special educational needs. If that resource did not exist in schools, we would have to try and buy in a specialist teacher, or we would have to go and get the school psychologist, which would often mean a waiting list of six to 12 months. Having the resource in the school itself, having the staff qualified and trained, makes a huge difference.
What happens when a child is identified as dyslexic? Obviously, we involve the parents. We put together strategies in the classroom. We look at intervention strategies. We look at one-to-one teaching. We look at a multi-sensory programme of teaching. Most of us learn in an auditory or visual way. If a young person is dyslexic, we need to do lots of oral work and what we call “over-learning”—learning strategies to cope.
What do we need to do as a country? Again, I agree with my noble friend Lord Addington and other noble Lords have made the same point. We need to ensure that the training is there. In each school, there ought to be somebody who is fully qualified. That needs to be a crucial, integral part of our initial teacher-training course.
A lot of colleagues will have had information from Dyslexia Action, and the Dyslexia Foundation from my home town. The work that they have done to case study and highlight has been tremendous.
I am grateful to the Minister for always being prepared to listen and give information. I think that he is probably fed up of my Questions, but I have asked him a number of them on dyslexia. They not only show that we understand what needs to be done, but they indentify next steps. The money that has been made available by the Government is to be commended. However, looking at the uptake of funding and the number of people who have taken training places, region by region—I will not embarrass various regions—there are huge regional variations and that gives me cause for concern.
In a recent Question I asked whether the Government would consider asking teaching training providers how many compulsory courses there were and how many optional courses there were. Sadly, we do not hold that information centrally. We need to hold that information. We need to know how many teacher training establishments make this provision, so that we can plug the gaps. We need to get that information.
I agree with my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones that we have made huge progress. I am heartened at what we have heard but I am absolutely sure that progress will continue to be made. With the noble Lord, Lord Hill, a Minister who listens and I am sure is prepared to act and, in the other place, a Minister, Sarah Teather, who believes strongly in special educational needs and early intervention, I am hugely optimistic.
Schools: Dyslexia
Lord Storey Excerpts(13 years, 11 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Storey
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to ensure that there is adequate diagnostic testing for children with dyslexia in primary schools.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Hill of Oareford)
My Lords, early identification of literacy difficulties, including dyslexia, relies on the regular monitoring of children’s progress. We are investing in specialist dyslexia support for teachers, including initial teacher training, to help identify dyslexic pupils earlier. The new year one phonics screening check to be introduced this June will identify children who have not acquired phonic skills to the expected standard and help flag up those who may have additional needs, including dyslexia, and who would benefit from further support.
Lord Storey
I am grateful to my noble friend for that Answer. As he rightly says, early identification of children with dyslexia is hugely important. However, he will be equally aware that very few primary teachers are qualified to carry out diagnostic testing, so that when referrals take place, they take a long time to sort out. Will he consider including as part of initial primary training a unit of training that is linked to the diagnostic assessment of dyslexia?
Lord Hill of Oareford
I agree with my noble friend about the importance of teacher training in order to address these issues and he is quite right to say that we need to make sure that there are teachers with those skills in primary schools. The new standards we are setting for QTS include an emphasis on the ability to teach a range of special needs not specifically around dyslexia. I understand the particular point he makes, but so far we have opted to take a broader approach and then support teachers with improved materials and networks of either teaching schools or charities. However, I take his point about the importance of making sure that primary schools have the skills that they need.
Education Bill
Lord Storey Excerpts(14 years, 3 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Sutherland of Houndwood
My Lords, this is an amendment about professionalism, and I think everyone who has spoken supports the importance of professionalism. I commend the Government for what they have done in this area already, as well as the previous Government, as important things were done then.
However, I have reservations about a universal requirement for a particular kind of qualification. If we take the example of health, I would not mind being nursed by a nurse who was not a graduate, although actually these days, that does not seem to be on. I do not want to push that analogy at all, but to point up the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Perry: there may be exceptions. There may be individual cases that, if we were too rigorous, would be excluded. However, the question—which I believe has just been raised —is of proportionality, and whether it can become disproportionate in, for example, free schools.
There is a real danger there, and I have already expressed worries about inspection and exemption from inspection in these areas, which is why I think the questions raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, are fundamental. I approve of the use of the word “normally” here, and I wish it was in more legislation, but “normally” must then be monitored. I hope there are clear answers to the questions that she has asked.
Lord Storey
My Lords, I have said before in this House that the most important thing for a student is the quality of the teacher—not the qualifications, necessarily, but the quality. There can be the best buildings, the best resources, but unless there is quality teaching, then that child will not be able to make the progress that they deserve. If you have poor teaching and a poor teacher, that child loses the year, and the year can never be repeated. It is lost for good.
Since I have come to this House, the one thing that has struck me in education debates is that in every speech and contribution I have heard, the child is at the centre. I have felt quite emotional, to be honest, about the care that has come to me from the comments that people have made. We had a debate on special educational needs, and I was absolutely stunned by the remarkable contributions from everybody in this House.
However, one thing said constantly in that debate was that it needs to be about training, and about understanding the child. You cannot just put anybody in and expect them to be able to teach, understand, and relate to the child. It has to be a whole package. That is not to say that everybody must be a qualified teacher. There are examples of people who have a natural gift for teaching but are not qualified. How do we make that system work? Well, we have a system presently that allows that to happen.
I speak from practical experience. At the tail end of the summer term, I had a situation in my school where a teacher left. Working in that classroom was a teaching assistant; an advanced, higher-level teaching assistant, who was—to use an expression—“stunning”. The pupils thought the world of him. Being a conscientious, thoughtful person, I checked with my local authority, which said, “Yes, as long as he has a higher-level qualification and you’re happy with him, he can take the class”, which he did for three weeks. He was fantastic. The children progressed. I have to say, I would rather have had him than—no, perhaps I should not say that. He progressed and did incredibly well. He was also supported by the school and other teachers, who were able to compensate for any areas in which he needed to develop. As a result of that, he has decided that he will not just be a higher-level teaching assistant; he will go on to be a teacher.
There are occasions when you can put people who do not have the formal qualifications in the classroom, and they can do a remarkable job. My noble friend Lady Benjamin constantly reminds me that pupils from the Caribbean often need a very different type of teacher, and that maybe the qualities that we currently have in our teaching profession are not always able to deal with those situations. That is dealt with, again, by encouraging teaching assistants who are working with teachers in the school environment.
When the Minister replies I hope he will deal with the questions that have been asked by my noble friend Lady Walmsley. I also hope he will reflect on how we might combine both desires.
I do not have a problem with free schools. I remember the first free school, which was Scotland Road Free School in Liverpool in the 1960s. What I have a problem with is saying that you can have non-qualified teachers in an educational establishment. If free schools are to be successful, they cannot be seen to be on the margins. Parents will soon think, “Oh, these are inferior places. They haven’t got any qualified support in those schools”. They will not send their children to them once the initial idea has started.
I will make one further point. There are whole areas of teaching that, in a complex society and a modern world, people who work with children need to know about—safeguarding, for example. Are we saying that these adults who will teach in free schools will not have any training in safeguarding, or in the problems of special educational needs? The list goes on. We need to be absolutely sure that we get this right.
Baroness Morris of Yardley
My Lords, I also support this amendment, on which there is a fair degree of unanimity across the Chamber. My position is approximately the same as that of the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland. We do not want schools where everybody has the same qualification. Over the past 10 to 15 years, we have very much moved to having different qualifications in schools. Clearly, what we want is for someone to be qualified to do the job that we are asking them to do, and for people to know what they are qualified to do and what their training is. We have never had that in the past. We have been a one-qualification profession. We ought to be more like medicine and move away from that, to having a number of different qualifications.
We have a record of getting this right. The movement of bursars into the maintained sector has been hugely successful, as have the teaching assistants and higher-level teaching assistants to which the noble Lord, Lord Storey, just referred. Therefore, we are on a journey of trying to get this right. The issue that faces us now is: where do we go next? I should have thought that where we go next is to look at the evidence of what has worked so far, the skills that are needed in the school and what training is needed. I absolutely accept that there will be some individuals who have experiences and a skill set that teachers and head teachers will want to use in schools. Some of them, as the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, said, will be absolutely excellent in their field. They may have a skill set that teaching would go alongside.
There is a fair degree of unanimity across the Chamber over our vision of what we want schools to be like. Therefore, the question is whether the legislation that the Government are putting forward will arrive at that end. I do not think that it will. I cannot see why this big debate about how we get a qualified workforce—whatever the qualification may be—is being squashed into free schools. I would have thought the debate was bigger than yet another freedom that we can give to free schools. The debate is about the qualifications we need for all our schools, whether they be maintained schools, community academies or free schools. The Minister must address in his reply what this has to do with free schools. It has to do with all schools. I am not sure why he has cornered and corralled this debate into free schools. It is bigger than that.
Education Bill
Lord Storey Excerpts(14 years, 3 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Storey
My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, used the right words—“common sense”. I cannot understand this. As a parent and as a teacher, I have no objection to same-day detentions. As has been said, if there is to be a sanction or punishment often it is best that it is done straight away. However, the notion that young people, children and students are kept behind at school without their parents or their carers knowing does not seem right and proper.
If a school organises an after-school activity, whether it be football, netball, swimming or whatever, parents give their permission for their children to take part in those activities, understanding that their children will have to make other arrangements to come home. Why cannot that be done for same-day detentions? All we are suggesting, which is eminently sensible and supported by all the unions bar one—of the unions supporting it, even the National Association of Head Teachers thinks that it is right and proper that parents are notified—is that when a same-day detention is held the parent is contacted, not through a message left on a voicemail, an e-mail or a text but actually contacted. If they cannot be contacted, the same-day detention would have to be held the next day. That is the right and proper common-sense approach.
I have had various e-mails today saying that it would be a breach of the law if the child was not safeguarded and so on, but in all this guidance, about which no doubt we will hear in a moment, I cannot find an understanding that the parent comes first—that the parent matters. I hope that in the guidance it is made absolutely clear how we will protect the well-being and safeguarding of children.
We have spoken about rural areas and the school bus, but in urban areas—in my own city—children often have to travel two miles across the city to go to school. On dark nights they are placed in a very vulnerable situation. If the parents know their child is being kept behind, they can make arrangements.
I hope the Minister will understand the real sense of concern about this issue and give an assurance that the guidelines will clearly spell out what we are asking.
Baroness Howarth of Breckland
My Lords, I recognised that there would be a number of reasoned arguments and I stand with my colleagues who made them. I took a rather different way on this. During the summer I consulted a number of friends and my family—it was a random experiment—and it became absolutely clear that they did not believe that I was telling the truth when I said that it was the Government’s plan that when their child was going to be detained they would not be told. They said, “You are making it up”. That was the first response.
The second response from rural parents—I work and have friends in London but I live in a rural area—was, “But there is only one bus. They cannot be detained without notice because if they do not get on the bus they do not get home at all”. We have to remember that not every poor parent in a rural area has a car; they depend on that transport. There are no other bus services or taxis; you catch the school bus or you do not get home. The third response was the sheer indignation that this was “my” child, not owned by anyone else.
The common thread through all that was that the parents were quite keen for the child to be disciplined at school. There was no disagreement that the child should not receive their discipline, that detention might be the right answer, or that the closer it was to the incident the better little Jonny would learn from it. The disagreement was that parents had to know that their child was going to be detained so that they could ensure the protection of their child and were not worried out of their minds. I hope noble Lords will forgive my anecdotal bit of research but it was pretty consistent with the reasoned arguments that we have heard this evening.
Lord Storey
My Lords, this matter is very important and I very much look forward to what the Minister has to say on this. We are rightly concerned about safeguarding. All staff in schools rightly have CRB checks and the CRB register is regularly maintained. It is equally important that when a member of staff commits an act of gross misconduct which goes to the disciplinary processes and is dismissed, we have a mechanism whereby that teacher cannot move to another authority, job or school. As we have heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, we would put at risk the whole basis of the safeguarding of schools. In the Minister’s reply, I hope that he will give us comfort in that we can be assured that this situation cannot arise.
Let us take an example. A teacher comes into school under the influence of drugs or alcohol. He or she is sent home and the matter is investigated. Gross misconduct is alleged and the matter goes to a disciplinary hearing of governors. The governors decide to uphold the gross misconduct allegation, after which the teacher appeals. The appeal panel of governors upholds the action and the teacher is removed from his or her job. In that situation, we would want to be assured that that information is retained so that the member of staff cannot move to another authority or school. This is hugely important for the safeguarding and well-being of our children, as well as being important to the parents.
Education Bill
Lord Storey Excerpts(14 years, 3 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Elton
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for her reference to early assessment, but I fear that early assessment is actually too late. My criticism of these amendments, though not of their purpose, is that they come too late. We are suffering from having failed as yet fully to adapt to the change that has come over the mores of our nation and many others, most of it during my lifetime. We have gone from a time when unwanted children were such a threat to respectability, earning, and so on, when having a child was regarded as a danger and a risk to those who were not married, to a time when sexual activity is regarded by many, almost wholly, as a recreation with no consequences. It seems to me that that must be addressed long before they become parents. The answer therefore lies in later amendments which deal with how children are taught in school.
I sympathise with the wish of the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, for a campaign to change our attitude to these matters. It is a biological as well as a political thing which will need a great deal of effort for a very long time by a lot of committed people. I hope that a number of them are in this Chamber.
Lord Storey
My Lords, I remember that when I was training to be a teacher one of my education lecturers, Mrs Mesurier, always used to say, “It is all down to good toilet training”. She was absolutely right. We should never underestimate the importance of parents to the life chances of children. That is why as a society we have done so much over the years to realise that the processes, schemes and opportunities for parents to be taught how to support and help their children at a very early stage are so important. I would also add that we must never underestimate the fact that many parents live in the most difficult of situations but bring up their children in a fantastic way.
There are all sorts of schemes in schools. We need only look at Sure Start, which we will be talking about later. It was a scheme to ensure that parents were closely involved in their children’s education, while at the same time they could be taught parenting skills and given support. I am all for action and feel that maybe we should take stock of the tremendous work that we have already done. I am not opposed to collecting more information; I just think that we should recognise the commitment and the work that we have done and evaluate more closely some of those schemes. I wholeheartedly agree with my noble friend that assessment of a child at an early stage is hugely important because we can then tailor educational needs and support to that child and family.
Baroness Howe of Idlicote
My Lords, this has been an extremely interesting debate about a very serious subject, which has encouraged a lot of your Lordships to look back at better times when it would seem that it was somewhat easier to make the right decision. We have to face the fact that things have moved on. I particularly support the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, because it seems that what was being said about the guidance, and indeed what the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, said, is probably fairly accurate in that it needs tidying up. My reading of the guidance was that teachers had the right to refuse to take part in searches, so there is at least that aspect in which a teacher can exercise their own feelings and responsibility about these things.
The points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, were worrying. It may well be that the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, is right, that if every school could agree a principle—and maybe that should be written into the Bill—that no telephones are to be brought in, or that they must be left at the gate and picked up on the way out, that might be an answer. I suspect that it would not be as simple as it might sound. Alas, we have got to look practically at what we do now. I do not envy the Minister and his team, because to get it right for this current moment is a very important but difficult job.
Lord Storey
My Lords, I was not going to speak in this debate, but so many important comments have been made that I feel that I want to add my few words.
I very much agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, that this is about safeguarding both the child and the teaching staff. I also agree with the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, that we need to engender trust in a school. The noble Lord, Lord Elton, reminded me about his report on discipline, which I remember quite well. I remember having to write an essay on it—so he is to blame.
The problems of discipline in schools are not just to do with pupils. They are to do with that group of people we were talking about in a very positive way: parents, and—dare I say it?—the legal profession. You can just imagine a situation that happens daily: that of a teacher, say in primary school, who in innocence says “Come on, hand over that game you’ve got in your pocket”, stupidly goes to reach for it, and the next thing is that there is a legal action. So all that trust has evaporated.
The guidance has to be very clearly laid down. Pupils should not have mobile phones in classrooms—and this is hugely important. It is very dangerous, for all the reasons that we have heard. Of everything that has been said, that is probably the most important, because it is not just about grooming children, but about other pupils bullying each other through mobile phones.
So why on earth schools are allowing children to have mobile phones in schools, I do not understand. In small schools, they can be handed into the school office or, as has been suggested, go in a locker. I hope the guidance is very clear. It is about ensuring the protection and the safeguarding of the pupil, as much as the safeguarding of the teacher.
Baroness Howarth of Breckland
My Lords, I had not intended to speak, but it was in hearing the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, talk about clarity, that reminded me that I had had a letter from someone in a school. Your Lordships will understand why I quote it:
“Please could you register my welcome overall of the trust put in teachers and school leaders to manage behaviour more effectively in schools and colleges. However, I am concerned that the measures taken to improve the authority of teachers are being seen as threats to the child and to the member of staff concerned. Searches should be allowed by staff and good practice ensures that a teacher will ask for a witness for the search”.
It shows that the common sense that the ministry is trying to encourage exists in schools, but that there is a lack of clarity. The real need is for clear guidance, and indeed the amendment put down by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, would help people to understand. I think it was the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, who said that there are so many things that are believed in schools that are not actually the law or statute.
This has been a wonderful Second Reading debate, I have to say. I have thoroughly enjoyed some of the speeches, and not having had an opportunity to get to the actual Second Reading, I am now taking my opportunity, too. We have to remind ourselves that not everything was wonderful in the past, and that there are some things that are significantly better. One thing that is significantly better is child safeguarding. We abandon anything that continues to safeguard children, as the noble Baroness was saying with regard to Barnardo’s, at our risk.
I am not an educationalist but I suspect that my pedigree in safeguarding is probably as good as anyone in this House. I encourage the Minister to think carefully before abandoning those controls where it is quite clear that teachers have the common sense to think that they need a witness. But it is not always the teachers who end up doing these things. I have known of caretakers being asked to “take that mobile phone off young Jones”. It is about people who would have other motives for touching a child.
I also believe that no male adult should handle a young woman aged 12 or 13, and certainly not without a witness. If you talk to young girls, they say that they feel that that is an assault on their dignity and it is something that goes with them. I encourage the Minister to think carefully about ensuring that we have either the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley—to confirm to the Front Bench, I am suggesting one of the amendments—or extremely clear guidance for teachers so that they know that they do not search in unsafe situations.
Education Bill
Lord Storey Excerpts(14 years, 5 months ago)
Grand CommitteeRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch
My Lords, this amendment would require teachers in all state schools to be qualified. Specifically, it will remove the ability for teachers in free schools not to be qualified. This country has great teachers. Under the previous Government, Ofsted said that we had the “best generation ever”—a proud achievement meaning the best quality teaching for our children. This Government talk about standards and the importance of teaching. The Secretary of State says that the importance of teaching cannot be overstated, while in the foreword to the schools White Paper, the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister say that,
“no education system can be better than the quality of its teachers”.
I agree with that but it is difficult to see how the Government’s actions, which would allow teachers in free schools to be unqualified—unlike the teachers in any other state school—support these statements. I believe that a core purpose of education reform should be to drive improvements in standards and raise professionalism, but it is difficult to see how this move does either. Can the Minister explain why the Government think that by lessening teacher professionalism in certain schools, standards will increase? What evidence does he have to support this?
We have already discussed in the Grand Committee the abolition of the General Teaching Council for England, a body that was set up to improve standards of teaching and the quality of learning. We have also raised concerns that the Government have done so without putting in place satisfactory arrangements on teacher registration or on maintaining standards of teacher professionalism. We have raised similar concerns about the abolition of the Training and Development Agency for Schools, which among other things had responsibility for the development and maintenance of the professional standards framework for teachers. This is beginning to create a disturbing picture, so does the noble Lord think that these moves, and the move to allow publicly funded teachers to be unqualified, will lead to an increase or a decrease in educational standards?
The model funding agreement for free schools simply indicates that teachers should be “suitably qualified”, and while the model funding agreement for existing academies includes provision that teachers are qualified in line with the expectations of maintained schools, that is not established in statute. Our Amendment 124B will ensure that all schools, including academies and free schools, would be subject to the same legislation as other schools when it comes to qualified teachers. The Secretary of State has said about free schools:
“We want the dynamism that characterises the best independent schools to help drive up standards in the state sector … In that spirit, we will not be setting requirements in relation to qualifications”.—[Official Report, Commons, 15/11/10; col. 623.]
However, where independent schools are high performing what evidence does the Minister have that it is the lack of qualifications that drives up standards rather than the lower teacher-to-pupil ratio, the size of the school or other factors?
In every profession, it is a given that standards are increased by professional qualifications so why are the Government so keen to make an exception of education, and what sort of message does this send to the existing teaching profession about how its skills are valued by this Government? What next—unqualified doctors? If the Government release doctors from the bureaucracy of getting qualified, do we think that would drive up standards in the NHS? If accountants are given the dynamism that the Secretary of State thinks comes from a lack of qualifications, would standards rise in their sector? Would lawyers freed from the shackles of professional qualifications do a better job?
International evidence shows that the status, expertise and professionalism of teachers have an important impact on standards. The OECD report Viewing the United Kingdom School System through the Prism of Pisa states:
“Importantly, many of the high performing countries share a commitment to professionalised teaching, in ways that imply that teachers are on a par with other professions in terms of diagnosis, the application of evidence-based practices, and professional pride”.
On a more populist level, those of us who watched “Jamie’s Dream School” earlier this year will have seen the shocked realisation of some the participants—all of whom were experts in their own field—when they realised that teaching is a highly skilled profession.
It is a mystery where the demand for this policy has come from. It is certainly not from parents. A ComRes poll in April this year found that an overwhelming 89 per cent of adults surveyed preferred their child to be taught by a university graduate who is a qualified teacher, 86 per cent believed that any school receiving public funding should employ only qualified teachers to teach pupils and 82 per cent disagreed with the coalition Government and said that they would not want their child to attend a free school that did not require its teachers to be fully qualified. Parents should be able to choose the type of school that is best for their child, and they should rightly demand high standards of teaching in every state school. They should be secure in the knowledge that all publicly funded schools will employ teachers with relevant training and qualifications.
Finally, I note that there is nothing in the coalition agreement on allowing unqualified teachers in our state-funded schools. It only states:
“We will support Teach First, create Teach Now to build on the Graduate Teacher Programme, and seek other ways to improve the quality of the teaching profession”.
This amendment would ensure that free schools and academies are covered in legislation by the same requirements regarding teacher qualifications as other schools. It is simple and a clear guarantee for parents that whatever school they choose for their child, they will know that qualified teachers will be employed. I hope that noble Lords will feel able to support this position.
Lord Storey
My Lords, I have a great deal of sympathy with this amendment. My experience as a head teacher for 26 years is that one of the reasons that standards in schools have risen is because of the quality of teachers, the quality of entrants going to university or college and the quality of the qualifications they received. We have to think very carefully about where we are going on this. Are we going to have unqualified people who, for example, have no child protection training, no safeguarding training and no special education training? If we do, we do a disservice to our education sector as a whole.
That is not to say that there are not people in schools who are not fully qualified as teachers. For example, currently teaching assistants with NVQ level 3 can teach, provided that the work is prepared by a teacher. Teaching assistants with a higher level qualification can teach and prepare the work, but there is a teacher at hand. The notion that in free schools you have people with no qualifications teaching children is a retrograde step. It is almost Dickensian. It goes back to the pupil teacher. I hope that the Government will look at this very carefully. I am not opposed to the notion of free schools. In fact, the first free school can be traced back to the 1960s in my home town of Liverpool, but it was opened with qualified teachers.
The other day, I was listening to a programme on Radio 5 about a school where all the people providing the teaching—I cannot use the term “teachers” because they are not qualified—are going to have a military background. I have nothing against that, provided they have qualifications to go with that role. I hope that we will look at this closely and return with some proposals that we can all accept.
Lord Peston
My Lords, I regard teaching is a skilled profession and one that demands all sorts of skills, but I am aware that, among the general public, many people believe that anyone can teach and that there is nothing to it at all. They are just plain wrong. Teaching is not only a skilled profession, but it is an incredibly difficult one. I shall enlarge on that in a moment.
Perhaps I may go into my own anecdotage, as I always do when addressing your Lordships. Many years ago, when I was a lecturer at the LSE, the professors decided that they ought to get some advice from the Institute of Education about teaching. I was told by a most senior professor, the great Lord Robbins, that I had been selected—it turned out that I was almost the only one who had agreed—as one of those to be examined by two people from the Institute of Education. None of the professors volunteered to be examined by them. They heard me lecture a couple of times and then they came to see me. They said, “Do you think you are a good teacher?”. I said, “I am a very good teacher, I can assure you of that”. Then they said, “Do you think it would be advantageous if the students could actually hear what you said?”. I said, “What?”. They said, “Well, you constantly march round, turn your back to them and for most of the time they cannot hear what you say, but they are too well mannered to tell you”. Then they said, “Do you think it would be useful if you wrote legibly on the blackboard so that they can see what you write?”. Again, I was taken aback.
They went through it all and I realised that I had been totally deluded in my view. In those days, you just got a first-class honours degree at the LSE and you were appointed as a junior lecturer, end of story, and you were told to go and teach. In principle, I was addressing willing learners. One thing we have to bear in mind is that the lives of many teachers are difficult because quite a large number of the people whom they are teaching do not want to learn and one of their skills has to be to persuade people that it is worth learning and that education is a useful thing. We have discussed before in Grand Committee how you persuade students when their own parents, particularly parents with girls, tell them that education is a complete waste of time.
Therefore, it seems to me that we must not go down the line of pretending that anyone can teach. I do not say that everyone who has a teaching certificate will turn out to be a good teacher, but that seems to be at least a sine qua non to start with. My noble friend mentioned whether we are to go down the next stage which is having unqualified doctors. I remember, some time ago, talking to a computer expert, saying, “Do we really need expensive doctors because as far as I can see you could write a program which would involve structured questions and answers and you could give it to me and I would follow the structured questions and answers and I would diagnose a condition and the program would also tell me what to prescribe?”. I spoke to one or two medics and they said, “Don’t you know that doctors do other things besides simply looking at a few symptoms and then prescribe?”. They were entirely right; their contribution is a human contribution and that applies to social workers and all sorts of areas where people need to be skilled and qualified. We do not need Philistines outside telling us that anyone can do this sort of thing.
In following what has been said already, it overwhelmingly seems to me that we must not go down the path of diluting the educational training of those are to be our education trainers. None the less, having said that, we must place all this—the point has already been made—within the context in which people teach. As I have already said, there is no big deal when teaching willing learners. Equally, teaching becomes a good deal easier when classes are small. I do not see this Government, with their ridiculous economic policies, suddenly increasing the amount of expenditure on education so that all schools could have the same class sizes as private, independent schools. Our teachers have to cope in difficult circumstances. Above all, the job of your Lordships is to be supportive and not to undermine them in any way whatever.
Lord Monks
My Lords, speaking as an apprentice Member of the House, I also support these amendments to help the Government to meet the objectives that they have set themselves. My noble friend Lord Young complimented the Government on those. There are tough, ambitious targets and there is money being provided. The resources are there but we are short of the means to carry through the action necessary to meet the targets. These amendments are part of the story that can at least fill the gap.
Apprenticeship, as my noble friend Lord Young said, has been in intensive care for a long time. When he was going down to British Telecom, 40 per cent-plus of boys leaving school at the minimum age were apprentices. Unfortunately, it was only 5 per cent of girls. That was 40 years or so ago but then the system collapsed. Traditional industries shrank, the new industries did not want the practice at all and employers poached rather than trained. With a little more money, they took staff from the employers who did train. The original attempt to stop that was the Conservative Government’s Industrial Training Act and a levy grant mechanism, but the system did not stand up against that pressure. With the higher education expansion a little later and perhaps some faults in apprenticeship itself—being time-serving rather than competence-based—the whole thing shook and not much was left.
The result is pretty disastrous for Britain in terms of low productivity and a poor record in this area compared with some similar countries. It is much worse than anything in the higher education field. I was in Sweden recently looking at apprenticeships. Apprentices there are required to be able to speak a foreign language by the time they have completed their apprenticeships. Certainly, they are required to be competent in English and are now encouraged to become competent in German or French as well. Some of them are becoming competent in Chinese. This is a moving target and we are well behind. Reference has been made to the educational problems of some of the young people who we are trying to squeeze into the opportunities available.
I welcome the priority that the Government are giving to this matter but we need more ways of ensuring that progress will be made. I have been a big supporter of Investors in People from its inception. It is odd that its website does not refer to apprenticeships and that they are not a central feature of that website. We should be spreading this concept into newer occupations. As the noble Baroness has just said, this is a very good method of learning for people who do not feel comfortable with the traditional academic route. I hope that the Minister will give a sympathetic response to this group of amendments.
Lord Storey
My Lords, I, too, support the spirit of these amendments. It is good to create more apprenticeships but this matter also concerns the ethos behind those apprenticeships. There is a view in this country that unless people get academic results and go to sixth form and university, they have failed in some way. However, that is not the view in other countries. I take the point that the noble Lord, Lord Monks, made—that we need to look at the models followed in other European countries. Switzerland, for example, has an apprenticeship scheme. I know this from personal experience because I have a Swiss cousin. Her two sons were not academically able but she did not regard the fact that they did not go on to higher education as a failure. She was delighted that they undertook an apprenticeship scheme that was linked to higher education. Germany also has a very advanced system. This is about not just creating more apprenticeships but making sure that other thoughts are borne in mind, such as learning a language or going back to basic learning needs.
On Monday I was lucky enough to visit BBC North in Salford, which has established an apprenticeship scheme. No qualifications are required to enter that apprenticeship scheme. The scheme is linked to what is called an ambassador scheme. They take young people post-16 from the most disadvantaged backgrounds. Those young people have all sorts of problems. Once they have got over their fear of apprenticeships—some young people fear apprenticeships—a large number of them take them up. The BBC guides those young people as they go along.
For example, a young Asian lad spoke to all those on the visit. He was very articulate, had great presentational skills but came from a very disadvantaged background. I asked him what his apprenticeship covered and he answered, “Catering”. He served us our lunch. I said to the director of human resources, “Given that lad’s presentational skills, perhaps catering is not for him”. The director of human resources replied, “Actually, you are right. He discovered that he has presentational skills and gets on well with people. He also has a great interest in football, so I am planning for him to be an assistant floor manager on ‘Match of the Day”’. We should consider that ability to guide people as they go along and develop their skills. This is about not just creating apprenticeships but the whole wraparound that goes with it.
Education Bill
Lord Storey Excerpts(14 years, 7 months ago)
Grand CommitteeRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Moynihan
My Lords, my friend in sport, my noble friend Lady Massey, will not be surprised to see me rise to address the subject of sport in the context of Amendment 74, particularly in respect of a brief but important issue.
In subsection (2) of the proposed new clause to be inserted by Amendment 74, my noble friend uses the phrase “for teaching physical skills”. As he knows, and as I am sure the Committee knows, physical skills cover cardiovascular and respiratory endurance, stamina, strength, flexibility, power, co-ordination, agility, speed, balance and—from memory—accuracy. However, I think that my noble friend is focusing on sport and recreation in schools. Sport requires participants to compete in physical activities and we should also cover recreation.
Standardising the language in legislation is extremely important. I hope that if my noble friend withdraws his amendment and brings it back later, he will focus on ensuring that, in this and in all contexts, we are talking about sport and recreation in schools. It is very important that recreation should be included to encourage dance, for example, among young people in schools, and not just competitive sport and the traditional sports. In that context, I simply offer that brief observation to my noble friend, who I hope will consider it when he is considering his reaction to the Government’s reply.
Lord Storey
My Lords, I echo what the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, has said. My concern is that physical contact happens in schools, whether it is in music, sport or a whole range of things. If you try to codify it and say, “These are the areas in which you can have physical contact”, what about the other areas—for example, when a four or five year-old wants reassurance and wants to hold the teacher’s hand in the playground? If that is not in the guidance, does that mean that that should not happen? We need to be very thoughtful about this.
The Earl of Listowel
I support what has been said. It is a theme across children’s services that many practitioners feel inhibited—particularly with children who have had an upbringing where there has not been much demonstration of love—about giving a child a hug or comforting them. The theme there is that an environment of overall excellence is the best safeguard for children, as Sir William Utting said. The better the staff and the better they are supported, the more confident they will be to do the right thing for the child at the right time.
I was very grateful for the comments made by the noble Baroness, Lady Perry of Southwark, about reading the committee report and, if I understand her correctly, the impression that it might give teachers about our sense of how good a job they are doing and how professional they are. It is a helpful way to rebalance our discussion. Certainly, from my experience principally in the past year when I met head teachers of primary schools, I was very impressed by their experience, judgment and understanding of children. I am particularly concerned about children from environments where they have experienced a lack of love, parents who are alcoholic or misusing drugs, or parents who are just not available to their children, which might be one of the reasons for my perception. When these children go into school they bring with them their home environments and earlier experiences and difficulties can arise if teachers are not well supported in responding to them. The Government’s adviser, Charlie Taylor, highlighted that point last week at a meeting and said that in his special school for children with EBD he was careful to help teachers to reflect on what had happened with the children and help them to see that, however aggressive a child might seem to be, that behaviour did not constitute a personal attack on the teacher but probably had something to do with the child’s home experience. By perhaps emphasising that area too much, I may have inadvertently omitted to emphasise the fantastic job that many teachers do with children. This is not an issue for many children but concerns only a small minority. I hope that my comments are helpful and I look forward to the Minister’s response.
Lord Lucas
My Lords, again the Government have pre-empted me by sending me this morning a very helpful e-mail describing their proposals for what are still called disciplinary proceedings, but I do not think that is the right phrase to use for these things. They are much more to do with performance, and we should try to get the word discipline out of this because it implies that the teacher has done something wrong rather than that the teacher is just in the wrong place. If it is a matter of a teacher having done something wrong, of course it is discipline, but this is about a performance review, and the consequences of a performance review.
It is crucial for children that they have good teachers. There are always inevitably going to be teachers in the system who are not up to scratch. The first response of the system ought to be to try to support them, to try to find ways of improving their performance, for their colleagues to help them, for them to go on courses if necessary and whatever needs to be done to encourage them back to a position where they are doing as well as their pupils deserve them to be doing. However, at present, certainly to judge from conversations with head teachers, they find the whole process of dealing with teachers who are not up to scratch so difficult and slow that many of them just give up and put up with substandard teaching. I do not think that that is a satisfactory position.
I do not know whether the e-mail sent to me was more widely circulated around the Committee. I think it perhaps should have been. I think that applies generally to messages going round in response to amendments. As I am sure my noble friend has seen, the interest in each question is pretty general around here, even if it has been proposed by just one or two of us. However, it seems to me that the Government are having a go at tackling this and are proposing quite interestingly simplified guidance that ought to enable this process to improve from both a teacher’s point of view and from the point of view of pupils and schools.
May I ask a few detailed questions? Is it possible under the new scheme for pupils to be involved in these proceedings? Pupils’ views on how good teachers are are often quite accurate. Is it envisaged that there will be some way of feeding that back into the system? I see that support is given to teachers throughout the process, which I thoroughly approve of. Is it proposed that once the point has been reached where it has been decided that a teacher should leave a school, there should be support for the teacher in making their next move, in whatever direction that is? It does not seem to me unreasonable that a teacher, having been supported all the way through the process, should not just be pushed off the edge at the end of it.
I note that a teacher who appeals successfully can be reinstated. That seems to me a good principle to apply to pupils too. I very much hope that, having set this new system in place, the Government will take an interest in how it is going and in a year or two will look to see how it needs adjusting and improving. I beg to move.
Lord Storey
My Lords, I have not seen the guidance, letter or e-mail, but I am grateful that this measure has been tabled because it concentrates our minds on a number of issues. A pupil, child or student cannot repeat a year, so if they have a teacher who is not up to the mark they have lost that year and that opportunity. Over several days of our discussion a constant theme has emerged that the most important thing in education is not the amount of equipment available or the quality of the buildings but rather the quality of the teachers and support staff. If you have quality teachers, you will have education at its best.
I do not have the relevant figures readily available but only a handful of teachers have been asked to leave over the past few years because of their inadequacies as teachers. I ask myself why that is the case. Then I reflect on how difficult it is to ask a teacher who is not performing well and is not good enough to leave the school. We have had debates about the quality of training and of the first year’s experience in school being the best that we can possibly provide. We have talked about the quality of support in school and in-service or CPD provision in schools. We have a performance management system in schools whereby every teacher is set performance targets every year. Those targets are monitored and evaluated and lessons are watched. If a teacher fails their performance management, it is a bureaucratic nightmare to try to do something about it. Frankly, does even the most experienced head teacher really want to go through that bureaucratic process which may involve teacher associations and will certainly involve a plethora of appeals and systems? They do not. The teacher concerned knows that he or she is not up to the job. Perhaps there could be a simplified system which would give them the support they need. I have seen teachers who, perhaps because of personal circumstances, have been struggling, have been given support and have come back up for the job again. I look forward to seeing a simplified way of dealing with this important issue.
Education Bill
Lord Storey Excerpts(14 years, 7 months ago)
Grand CommitteeRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Earl of Listowel
My Lords, in moving Amendment 66, I will also speak to my Amendment 67. These are probing amendments, the purpose of which is to gain reassurance from the Minister about the entitlement of teachers to continuing professional development. Given that this is a changing environment, I would be grateful for reassurance about that entitlement.
In particular, if schools are taking more responsibility for the CPD of teachers, there must be clear funding for that in the future, given the need for consistency of CPD across education. As I hope noble Lords will agree, if we are to do well for our children, it is absolutely vital that our teachers are well supported in schools. If teachers do not get the support that they need through professional development, they are much more likely to burn out early. In addition, matters such as the inclusion of difficult pupils will be more difficult if teachers are not given the support that they need to give those pupils the necessary understanding and support.
When Professor Sir Michael Rutter, the renowned clinical psychologist, spoke some time ago at the British Psychological Society, he highlighted his concern that initial teacher training includes very little input about child development. In the past, there was some reference to child development, but it consisted of a rather dry few pages on Freud, Piaget and other theoreticians. The teachers to whom I speak say that they would prefer to learn about child development and about managing children’s behaviour a little while after they have started in practice with pupils, because they realise then the importance of understanding these things. It is very important to have a reflective workforce if we are to get the excellent outcomes for our children that we all want.
The bulk of teachers are already in the profession. Although we are looking at ensuring quality in teacher training and induction, most of our teachers are already in schools and many of our teachers are over 50 years old, so it is very important that we also attend to their continuing professional development. I look forward to my meeting tomorrow with Charles Taylor, the Government’s adviser on behaviour, who I think would probably agree with me—I hope that I am not being presumptuous—that it is very important for teachers to be able to depersonalise their interactions with their more challenging students so as not to take personally what may seem to the teacher to be a personal attack but which will very often be something to do with what is going on in the home environment.
It is also important that teachers are aware of developmental milestones, for reasons that many colleagues have given in the past. I hope we might also consider developing some of the best practice from the continent, whereby trainee teachers get to observe a child over a long period, take careful notes and share those observations with other teachers, and thereby learn about child development.
Another very helpful approach is that adopted by the child psychotherapist Emil Jackson and others who are working in 10 secondary schools in Brent, north London. They are working with groups of both school staff and head teachers, sitting with them and helping them to reflect on their relationships and the way that it is working in their classes. Another way of getting that understanding of child development into the teaching workforce is in allowing them a space in which they can sit with professionals such as child psychotherapists, clinical psychologists and child psychiatrists, particularly to discuss their more problematic pupils with them. That is very effective and has many benefits. I apologise for already speaking for rather too long to the Committee and beg to move my amendment.
Lord Storey
My Lords, briefly, I agree very much that in-service training—CPD, as we call it—is hugely important for the teachers in our schools. However, I would say that we currently do that. Every school has to have five days of training. In some schools we still call them Baker days, from somebody we know. My concern is that that training has to be of the highest calibre. As often as not, it is merely a day when people can sort other issues and training does take place.
Also, Ofsted inspections have to look at the quality of training in schools. In terms of observing teachers, every teacher—unless they are newly qualified—has to have set performance and management targets and, as part of that, classroom observations have to take place so that every teacher has to be observed, for a maximum of two lessons per week. To answer the noble Earl directly, training takes place in schools for five days a week, but I am always concerned about quality and teachers are observed at least twice a year.
My third and final observation is that the training days can, however, be quite disruptive to pupils because schools take them at different times. Would it not be great if all schools in an area took their training days at exactly the same time, so that parents could prepare for that and it would not be to the detriment of our pupils?
Lord Sutherland of Houndwood
My Lords, I am happy to give strong support to Amendment 66, in the light of the remarks that the noble Lord has just made. However, I have my reservations about the practicability of Amendment 67.
Baroness Perry of Southwark
My Lords, this amendment continues with the theme of induction and deals with the rather important issue of who assesses whether the teacher has or has not successfully completed the induction year. The Bill is rather misty on who will do this assessment. New Section 135A(2)(h) simply requires the head teacher ,
“to make a recommendation to the appropriate body”.
My amendment would allow a person who is independent of the school and the local authority to make the judgment. They will be well qualified to make it because they have successful teaching experience and will not pop in just once to make the assessment but will observe the teacher during the induction period on more than one occasion. We all know that you can have one bad lesson and then one sparkling one that goes terribly well, so it is important to see the teacher on more than one occasion.
This is very important, not only because, as we all agreed in the previous debate, induction is a vital part of the training of the teacher, but because it is sometimes very difficult to make an assessment. As I know from long observation and experience, the college or university where the students do their initial training tends to judge them much more on their academic achievement than on their practical performance. Also, it will be very reluctant for all sorts of reasons that I do not need to enumerate to fail many of its students. Now we move on to the school. If it is left to the school and the head, there is also a very real difficulty. The young teacher will have been a colleague for a year, and the school will be very reluctant to make a harsh judgment, even when it has grave reservations about her or his ability to perform well. Therefore, we are left with the crucial option of bringing in a well qualified person who will observe on several occasions.
I did not speak in the previous debate but I hope that even those who have not done too well in their first year might nevertheless have their induction period extended, as is suggested by new Clause 135A(2)(g). Like my noble friend Lord Elton, I have seen many teachers flounder in one school and do very well in the next. Crucially, we have heard that only 15 or 16 fail every year. That is simply not enough. We are still letting through a tiny minority of people who are not born to be teachers and who are not very happy in the teaching profession. For their sake, as well as for the sake of the thousands of children whom they may influence in their career, it is important that they are given at the very beginning the chance to say, “Teaching is not for me, so I will go into another profession”—rather than, out of the kindness of our hearts, just swinging them through. It is pretty miserable to spend the rest of your career doing a job that you are not good at, that you do not particularly enjoy and in which you struggle every day. The red light should come on at a very early stage and I hope the amendment will go some way to making that possible. I beg to move.
Lord Storey
My Lords, I will speak briefly. In days gone by, the inspector called. They would sit and watch newly qualified or probationary teachers, as they were called in those days, and make a decision. We have moved on considerably.
My current experience—I have a newly qualified teacher—is that it is a very detailed process. It is not just about one classroom observation. The newly qualified teacher will have a mentor in school who will guide them through any issues or concerns that they have. Each term, they will be observed on average two or three times. At the end of each term, a detailed form will be completed, which will have to be signed by the mentor and head teacher, both of whom will also provide comments. The newly qualified teacher can give an input into how they feel the first term has gone. That would be in partnership with the local authority and the local authority would then receive that form, which would be completed each term, three times a year. The newly qualified teacher would have to be successful in each of those terms, so it is not just a question of the head teacher observing the newly qualified teacher; other people would be involved in that as well. It would not just be about literacy and numeracy, but it might be that the person responsible for science in the school would observe a class that the newly qualified teacher was taking.
Currently, it is a very rigorous and robust process. I have no objection to an outside inspector or independent person coming in, but I want to assure my noble friend that this current process is very worthwhile.