United Kingdom Internal Market Bill — House of Lords, 2020-10-28
Topic: Education
Natalie Bennett (Green Party, Left): My Lords, I beg leave to move Amendment 79, and also to speak to Amendment 106, both of which appear in my name. I acknowledge support in preparing these amendments and presenting this information from the General Teaching Council for Scotland. I also draw on the submission of the Education Workforce Council of Wales to the UK Internal Market White Paper. The Welsh submission noted: "There is no public register of schoolteachers in England. There are many aspects of the regulatory system in England that are different. For example, there is no requirement for employers to refer cases, and the teaching regulation authority has only one disciplinary sanction it may apply. The rest of the UK and Ireland have registration and regulatory arrangements." In its equivalent submission, the General Teaching Council for Scotland said that it "does not consider that a system of mutual recognition can or should be applied to the teaching profession within the UK." It noted, as did the Education Workforce Council, that the systems are structured differently in England from the rest of the UK. The General Teaching Council continued: "GTC Scotland is not prepared to lose this control over the standard of teachers entering the teaching profession in Scotland in this way and given the devolved education function within the UK, it does not believe that it would appropriate to do so." In Wales, the registration and regulatory arrangements were strengthened in 2015 with the reconfiguration of the General Teaching Council for Wales as the Education Workforce Council. That extended registration and regulation from just schoolteachers to include seven education professions. From 2022, Wales is introducing a new curriculum for initial teacher training relating to the specific circumstances of that nation and its systems. In Scotland, the teacher training system continues to be based on formal education, rather than the classroom-based learning that has been adopted as an alternative system in England, where unqualified teachers, who operate primarily in free schools, are allowed. I am assured that almost all teachers coming from other parts of the UK who apply for registration in Scotland achieve it. This is not about discrimination, but keeping control and maintaining an existing and separate different system and rules, without seeing them swept aside by the Bill—or "bulldozed" in the powerful metaphor that my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb used with broader application earlier this evening In referring to Northern Ireland, I start with a very useful 16-page briefing paper from the Northern Ireland Assembly. It begins by noting that there is a "complex educational structure" there. It notes that the Assembly has overall responsibility for the education of the people of Northern Ireland and for effectively implementing educational policy. Northern Ireland’s General Teaching Council is an arm’s-length body for the Department of Education, responsible for registering all teachers in grant-aided schools and approving qualifications for the purposes of registration We have here four very different systems that have evolved in different ways, for different purposes and for different situations. Three have registration systems under local control. England does not. Forcing them into mutual recognition is, I argue, clearly inappropriate. That is why these two amendments together aim to add the profession of teacher and teaching services to the scope of the exclusions from the Bill, in the same way that the legal professions and legal services are excluded. Mutual recognition is in no way appropriate for this situation. It involves sweeping away established, working, respected different systems. That of course was the point of devolution generally: to allow the nations to head in different directions to fit their particular cultures, circumstances and needs I stress that the Bill already acknowledges the different legal systems and the need for these to be treated differently. My amendments are minimalist in that they simply mirror the different treatment of lawyers in the treatment of teachers. However, the issues that I raise may well extend beyond teaching, and certainly beyond Scotland—for example, regarding social work in Wales. The Government have a great deal of work to do before Report to disentangle these complications and possibly extend the amendments even beyond what I have presented here. But adopting my amendments, or something very like them, would at least, by aligning the different treatment of legal systems with teaching, solve one of the problems I will continue to pursue these issues to that stage if I need to, but I very much hope that the Government will acknowledge the clear issues raised here and find their own solution to allow the existing, working, devolved systems for the registration of teachers, and possibly other related professions, to operate in all the nations of the UK where that is relevant. If they do not, I hope that some of the noble, and noble and learned, Lords in your Lordships’ House, who I am sure welcome the exemption for the legal profession from the mutual recognition provisions, might be prepared to join in the work to assist another profession to keep independent control of its own activities, as befits professional organisations in the nations of the UK. I beg to move.