Teachers (Hansard, 25 June 1991)

§ 1. Mr. Bellingham
To ask the Secretary of State for Education and Science what plans he has to raise the status and professionalism of teachers; and if he will make a statement.

§ The Secretary of State for Education and Science (Mr. Kenneth Clarke)
The Government are committed to raising the status and professionalism of teachers. Our proposals to establish an independent review body for teachers' pay and conditions are intended to reinforce this. The end of collective bargaining and poor industrial relations in education will raise still further the esteem in which the teaching profession is held.

§ Mr. Bellingham
Does my right hon. and learned. Friend agree that teachers need greater status and more public esteem? Is he aware that recently I met members of the National Union of Teachers from my constituency who told me that they had made various representations to him? Can he comment on those representations and on his reply?

§ Mr. Clarke
I have repeatedly confirmed that it is necessary to build up the public esteem and the self-esteem of the profession. I have had discussions with NUT representatives and heard their ideas. I have mainly discussed the pay review body with them and have sought to persuade them that its establishment will enable them to build up a career structure for their members and enable their members to be rewarded in the light of the advice of 844 an independent body. It will also turn us away from the history of bad relations which has damaged the public reputation of the profession.
The other five trade unions are quite satisfied—as I believe, are the majority of NUT members. The introduction of the pay review body will be a valuable step forward for the profession.

§ Sir Rhodes Boyson
Does my right hon. and learned Friend agree that one way to raise the status and morale of teachers is to ensure that every curriculum committee set up by his Department has on it a majority of practising teachers, rather than advisers and organisers who live far away from the scene?

§ Mr. Clarke
It is important that there should be active and practising teachers on all these bodies and, most important of all, that the bodies pay particular attention to all the advice that they receive from practising teachers, but it is going a bit far to say that practising teachers must be in the majority. Apart from anything else, there is always a danger in thinking that all teachers agree on these matters. My right hon. Friend will know as well as I do that the more teachers one talks to, the more one realises that there is a wide range of opinion in the profession about the best methods of testing and assessing children.

§ Mr. Skinner
Is the Secretary of State aware that the status and professionalism of teachers would be increased if the Government got off their backs, stopped attacking their pay claims and stopped interfering, while allowing the heads of privatised industries to make money hand over fist? One of them had a pay increase of 66 per cent.—

§ Mr. Speaker
Order. The hon. Member is miles wide of the question.

§ Mr. Skinner
Let us have less of the double standards. If the Government can turn a blind eye to such pay increases for chairmen of privatised industries, they can get off the teachers' backs.

§ Mr. Clarke
I do not approve of the scale of some of the pay rises in the private sector, but neither am I responsible for them. We have implemented the advice of the independent advisory committee which gives all teachers a 9.5 per cent. increase this year and head teachers and deputy head teachers 12.75 per cent. this year. That is far greater than the usual pay increase for the vast majority of people or for those in the public sector. It is right that teachers should have that increase because of the work that they are putting in at the moment and because of the regard in which we hold them.