Clause 1. — (Power to Make Orders as to Remuneration.)

Part of Orders of the Day — REMUNERATION OF TEACHERS (Re-committed) BILL – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 18 June 1963.

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Photo of Dr Horace King Dr Horace King , Southampton, Itchen 12:00, 18 June 1963

I wish to support the Amendment. Of all the Minister's alterations to the Burnham proposals, what he has done on assimilation is about the most niggling and least justifiable.

Let me remind the Committee of the issue which is at stake. Up to the present a teacher is trained for two years and, when he is two years' trained, he is fully qualified. He has achieved all he has to achieve. From now on teachers will have to train for three years. Unless they train for three years they will not have obtained the minimum qualifications. This is a great reform for which many of us have pressed for many years. It seems a great pity that it should be marred by this salary anomaly that the Minister proposes to insert in place of what Burnham proposed.

The Burnham Committee argued, I believe quite rightly, that as the two-year trained teacher was fully qualified in exactly the same way as the new three-year trained teacher will be qualified, according to the law governing the training of teachers at the time they trained, they should be treated alike for salary purposes. It is this equating of the two which is called assimilation. The Minister agrees with the Burnham Committee on this. There is no need to argue the principle in Committee. The simple issue is whether we make the assimilation in one fell swoop, as the Burnham Committee proposed, or spread it over a period, as the Minister is proposing.

I do not share the fears of my hon. Friend the Member for Flint, East (Mrs. White) that this anomaly will remain for fourteen or fifteen years, because I am quite certain that this Government and this Measure will be out of the way long before that time. The simple issue is that Burnham wants to put right what the Minister and Burnham both agree would be wrong if it remained. Burnham wants to do it at once and the Minister wants to do it gradually. By deferring it, the Minister can save a little money inside the global sum, and the global sum is no battle between the two sides. What he is saving on assimilation he is distributing elsewhere. He says that he wants to use it to reward age and experience, but many of the teachers concerned in this anomaly are themselves of age and experience. Quite a lot of them are obviously older than the three-year trained teachers who will come in in an anomalous advantageous position.

As I pointed out in Standing Committee, if the proposals go through in their present form there will be a shocking anomaly. The three-year trained teacher is the one who will benefit, but the Minister has arranged that those teachers who take a special two-year course can come out of it as fully qualified as the three-year trained teachers although they have done two years.

Unless this Amendment is accepted, the position will be that some of the two-year trained teachers, the youngest entrants to the profession, will have the benefit of the Minister's proposals while the rest of the two-year trained teachers, including men and women of age and experience whom, the Minister says, he wants to reward, will not get the benefit.

My hon. Friend has pointed out that the cost of the Amendment cannot be very much. But it need not cost anything. The Minister can put right this anomaly by drawing back some of the largesse which he has distributed so haphazardly inside the rest of the scale. But whether he does it either by increasing the amount of money which he provides, leaving his own pet projects untouched, or by redistributing it inside his own proposals, I would plead with him to put this anomaly right. It will be a source of irritation among the teaching profession, and when he has conceded the principle, it seems to me foolish to leave the irritation to rankle when he could so easily put it right.