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Education Bill

My Lords, if the only the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, had been in charge of briefing for the Opposition in the other place in February, such a massive and very welcome defence of the GTC might well have given this Bill a different course as it has proceeded through Parliament. Even now, having heard the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, we seem still to be assuming that the GTC is no good. We know that it has not been the huge success that those of us who spoke for it 15 years ago naively anticipated, but it has not been a complete failure either. The GMC, the historic model, has been discussed by the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam. Let us not forget that, even at the present time, the GMC’s wheels sometimes grind a little greasily, particularly over the competence of individual practitioners. That does not mean that any patient would want to see the GMC abolished and its role devolved to Andrew Lansley. The GMC is strong in its institutional mechanisms and it can put right the defects that are inevitable in any human institution. That is true for the GTC. I do not know much about it, and I certainly do not know as much about it as the noble Lord, who directed it during its first, uneasy infant steps. The GTC, I am reliably informed by people inside it, knows that it is not working properly. It knows what is wrong, why it is wrong and how to put it right. The solution surely is to fix the GTC, not to abolish it and then have a string of amendments such as we have in front of us today replacing the bits of the GTC that we see as so essential and putting them into somebody’s hands in the Department for Education. Surely the time has come really to think, ““If this is a failure and if we did wrong 15 years ago, let us look to see whether this is true””. In his Second Reading speech, the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, who said that teachers in the private sector of education, for whom this Bill is not intended, are very keen to join the GTC. In January this year, research was published that showed that more than 90 per cent of parents wanted the profession to be regulated by a body such as the GTC and not by the Government. During all their speeches in this House and the other place, Ministers such as Mr Gove and the noble Lord, Lord Hill, have talked continuously about trusting the profession and letting teachers use their professional judgment. The amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, says, ““Let teachers be the judge””. Let us go to the teachers and ask—as we had thought and hoped that we would—whether they want to be regulated by someone in Whitehall or are big enough to start regulating themselves properly.