Education (Cities)

Part of the debate – in Westminster Hall at 9:30 am on 25 June 2002.

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Photo of Stephen O'Brien Stephen O'Brien Shadow Paymaster General, Shadow Financial Secretary 9:30, 25 June 2002

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. She makes a real and palpable point. Increasingly across many sectors, the transfer of functions to the younger, less experienced element is all too real. That is particularly serious in the teaching profession. Not only does one lose the experience, which is half the secret of motivating pupils and delivering education, but the Government's actions and the raising of false expectations have led to a serious crisis in morale, which is exacerbating the problem of the teacher demographic time bomb.

In our cities, as elsewhere, more and more teachers are being forced to teach subjects in which they are not trained in a desperate attempt to meet teacher shortage problems. That acts as a deterrent to those thinking of entering the profession and exacerbates the difficulty of attracting teachers, resulting in even higher percentages in city schools of teachers on supply teaching contracts, which eat away at the stability of a school. I hope that we can all agree that that is an essential element for raising pupil confidence and thus standards.

In addition, the Government have inundated schools with centrally produced paperwork. In the 12 months to March this year, the Government issued documents totalling 4,440 pages to primary and secondary schools. On average, that equates to 17 pages of Government documents for each working day. Many of these involve surveys that have to be completed by busy teachers. A recent report by the National Union of Teachers found that 57.8 per cent. of teachers leaving the profession said that one reason for doing so was the work load. There must be an immediate reduction in bureaucracy to ease the bureaucratic burden on heads and teaching staff, but with the current regime at the Department for Education and Skills, and the Government's obsession with centralisation and control, evidenced not least in their attitude to further education colleges, I am pessimistic that the desperately necessary shift in that direction will take place, to the huge detriment of teachers' morale, their recruitment and retention and the interests of children alike.

I shall leave my hon. Friend the Member for Altrincham and Sale, West to deal with the misery, stress and highly questionable educational efficacy of AS-levels, which are having such a negative drag on teacher and pupil morale and on our city schools—I hesitate to suggest that my hon. Friend or, indeed, anyone, can be called an expert on these embryonic and unproven exams—and the Government's failure to widen access to higher education, which the Minister responsible for higher education appears to have admitted.

I draw to a conclusion by saying to the Minister that there are only a very few simple answers that I and the teachers, pupils and parents of schools in cities and elsewhere are looking for. These are that the Government, despite their dangerously arrogant self-belief, admit that they do not have a monopoly of wisdom on education; that they admit also that they have failed to deliver for more than five years, despite their rhetoric, electoral and post-electoral spin and after raising so many hopes and false expectations; that they are now willing to think again and go back to the drawing board—not least as the Secretary of State is now saying she would not touch some schools with a bargepole, having sworn undying allegiance to the one-size-fits-all comprehensive system for the whole of her career—and recognise that the way forward is for the Government to back off setting more and more targets for a demoralised teaching work force, especially in cities, as that will not raise standards.

Above all, the Government must trust teachers with the resources to deliver what we all crave, for the sake of the children and the future of this country: an improving—not as it currently is, declining—education system in our cities, where the most vulnerable children in the country, on the whole, reside. The Government need to break their meddling, gimmicky habits, stop slagging off teachers and trust them to teach children in cities and elsewhere, and free the necessary resources from the centralised diktat of the Government so that they can run schools for the children of our cities, not for the daily diet of new Labour-spun headlines.