Education Bill

My Lords, as always, I listened to the arguments made by the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, with a great deal of care. I thought that with his customary honesty he made the point clearly about some of the shortcomings of the GTC which are linked directly to the decision that the Government took to bring about its abolition. The point he raised powerfully about the disinclination of the profession to pay for its membership and the fact that it is largely taxpayer-funded is important and one on which we should all reflect. I would not disagree with a word that he or my noble friend Lady Sharp said about professionalism and the need to have a profession and raising the status, esteem and standing of teachers as professionals. Earlier today, we spoke about the importance of trust. Before I talk about the specific amendments, where we disagree on the fundamental principle is on whether the GTC as constituted is an embodiment of professional status. We contend that it is not, although I agree with the noble Lord that it is perfectly possible, indeed likely, that in future years something will well up that captures and speaks for the professionalism that he advocates and that I know he feels strongly about, but it probably will not be the GTCE. When we discussed this in Committee, I set out some of the things that the Government are trying to do to raise the status of the profession and the quality of entrants to it and to help existing teachers to develop and improve. As we discussed on the last group, one of the overall themes that we are trying to develop is to give teachers and head teachers greater responsibility for improving teacher quality. I think that is a very good symbol of greater professionalism. I am as keen as other noble Lords to support schools and head teachers to recruit high-quality teachers and to ensure that they are able to access the information that they need to do so. At present, the GTC has a register that contains detailed information from every teacher and employer in the country. This ranges from personal data and qualifications through to information on the types of posts held in previous employments. Schools and teachers are required to update this information at least three times a year. I am told that that costs around £500,000 a year, and that is before one counts the cost of the time spent on it in schools. I do not believe that maintaining that amount of information at a national level is desirable or necessary. However, we have been persuaded by concerns raised in this House and elsewhere that there is a genuine need for the Government to help schools to know who has qualified teacher status and who has passed induction. The profession proposed an alternative to the GTCE register that I think achieves this objective, and the two leading head teacher unions wrote to the Secretary of State to express their strong belief in the need for an online database of all qualified teachers that is accessible by schools to replace the GTCE register. We talked about this in Grand Committee but I can confirm that, having considered this, the Secretary of State has agreed that the teaching agency will establish and maintain a database that will record which teachers have attained qualified teacher status and which have passed their statutory induction period. That database will be available online to all employers from April 2012 and will be in addition to the prohibited list database, which will also be available to employers online. Together, the QTS database and the prohibited list will give employers an important resource in assessing qualifications as well as establishing who should not be employed as a teacher.