What steps she is taking to ease teachers’ work loads and increase the proportion of the time they spend teaching.

High-quality teaching is the single most important school-based factor determining how well pupils achieve. This Government are committed to supporting the profession, and reducing unnecessary work load is an absolutely priority. We have already reduced the burden from the centre by increasing autonomy and streamlining unnecessary paperwork, and we have received more than 44,000 responses to the work load challenge, which asked teachers to share their experience and ideas. We are discussing the results with teachers and unions, and an action plan will be published shortly.

Does my right hon. Friend agree that what teachers need from a Secretary of State is someone who listens to their concerns and respects their professionalism, as opposed to the patronising attitude of the Shadow Secretary of State, whose latest gimmick is asking teachers to take an oath?

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend that it is not my job to tell teachers how to do theirs. This Government are committed to treating teachers as mature and confident professionals. It was on the “Left Foot Forward” blog that somebody had written:

“It is genuinely difficult to fathom what was going through Tristram Hunt’s mind when he decided that a Hippocratic oath for teachers was a good idea.”

I suggest that the Shadow Secretary of State might want to look at the reaction on social media to his Hippocratic oath.

I am afraid that 44,000 teachers responded not because the Secretary of State has reduced the burden; this Government spent four years increasing the burden on teachers and then spent many months suppressing the evidence in the teacher work load survey by not publishing it. Andrew Carter has said:

“What…matters most in a child’s education is the quality of the teaching.”

Can she confirm to the teachers of this country that, following his review, the Conservative party will go into this election with a commitment to expand the number of unqualified teachers?

In May, the Conservative party will be committing to have the highest-qualified teaching profession ever, something we have already achieved under this Government. We now have more teachers with 2:1 or first degrees in our schools, and the successful initial teacher training system, as Andrew Carter has reported in his review today—[Interruption.] If the Labour party wants to talk about unqualified teachers, it ought to look at the Shadow Secretary of State, who teaches in his local schools as an unqualified teacher.