My Lords, my regret Motion is in response to the concerning report on this SI from the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee. It should be noted that this is the second iteration of the supporting material, which had to be reissued because there was a
“lack of information in the original”
Explanatory Memorandum
“about many key aspects of the policy, and one error that described one aspect of the policy as the opposite of what it actually is.”
This lack of rigour and thoroughness from the Department for Education is extremely concerning. I urge the Minister to investigate the factors that led to such poor material being published in the first place and to ensure that this does not happen again. The DfE is not the only department that has been subject to a flurry of regret Motions on concerning issues, but I would appreciate some assurances from her on the steps that she will take to prevent these happening again. Transparency and full information are crucial to our role as a revising and scrutinising Chamber. We simply cannot do this without being given the data we need—ideally, first time round.
Although process is important, my main source of regret concerns the detail of the policy in these regulations: first, that they will fail to prevent the continued fall in the number of overseas teachers qualifying to work in England and, secondly, that there is currently no coherent holistic plan for the teaching workforce. Can the Minister commit to ensuring that there is a workforce plan for schools and that it will be developed urgently and implemented in time to avert the growing crisis in teacher training, recruitment and retention?
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It is quite clear that teacher recruitment is falling far behind what is required. Retention is also an issue, with nearly one in three who started in the profession in 2014 having left within just five years. What is the Government’s assessment of why this is the case? Have they looked into whether inflationary pressures and comparatively falling teacher pay is an issue?
The truth is that, last year, more teachers left our schools than new recruits started initial training. People qualifying to be teachers are at an all-time low; since 2019, recruitment outside London is down by 33%. This is especially true for some of the subjects critical to our economic competitiveness. Compared to the Government’s targets, we are missing well over 3,000 maths teachers, 3,500 modern language teachers and a massive 6,367 physics teachers.
As the Financial Times has recently reported, we desperately need a determined effort to improve numerical and mathematical ability; to generate the maths graduates we need in the 2030s, we need more motivated and qualified maths teachers now. The Government have missed their secondary maths initial teacher training target every year for the last decade. It is not clear how this will change.
This goes beyond the life chances of students, which is enough of an issue in itself, to the heart of our country’s economic recovery and UK competitiveness in the decades ahead. A new route to qualify is all well and good, but it will not rectify these huge shortfalls and does not form part of a much-needed holistic workforce strategy to get the teachers we need into classrooms.
We also need to ensure that the intended approach does not undermine developing countries. It would be useful to understand whether the Government have done an analysis of any adverse impacts that the changes from this SI might have on developing countries that also need good teachers. Anecdotally, I understand that the level of advertising by schools for teachers in the next academic year is far in excess of what is considered normal. Have the Government undertaken an analysis of the current levels of vacancies and what the pinch points are likely to be in the next academic year? How will the Government stop existing teachers sinking under the unbearable workload of fewer people doing more work and leaving the classroom due to burnout?
If money is the main issue to resolving the issues we face, the Government are very welcome to borrow Labour’s proposal to end the madness of the private school tax loophole, to fund the teachers we so desperately need.
The ongoing pay dispute is also likely to exacerbate this issue. Can the Government update us on how talks with the education unions are progressing and whether the Secretary of State will approach them with a more empathetic approach than one of her Conservative predecessors, who claimed that teachers
“really really do just hate work”?