The biggest critics of bad teaching are good teachers

When I think of what inspired me at school, it was the faith that my most determined teachers put in me – their confidence in my potential was what drove my ambition to succeed.

The ironically named Mr Coward, who taught me A-level Economics was the person who pushed me to set my sights on Oxford University, and with solid help and advice, I became the first person from Southgate Comprehensive to go there.

So it is time to finally put to rest George Bernard’s Shaw appalling dictum, “those who can’t, teach”.

Pupils don’t succeed simply because their school had ‘academy’ or ‘free school’ written on the sign outside. While structures matter, Labour understands that what happens inside a classroom, matters more.

As Professor Dylan William from the Institute of Education has shown in international comparisons, 8% of performance is down to the governance structure, while 80% is down to the quality of teaching.

This is why it is so dispiriting that 80% of the debate in education is about structures and not standards.

So the key challenge as I see it is to raise the status and quality of teaching.

Labour made huge efforts in government to do this. We introduced programmes like Teach First to attract bright graduates to the profession. We linked teacher performance to their pay and conditions for the first time. And we gave head teachers greater freedoms to manage their staff and remove under-performing teachers.

Clearly, there is still much to do. While Ofsted agrees this is the best generation of teachers ever, there are still too many poor or merely adequate teachers in the system – only 4% are seen as outstanding in primary schools, and only 5% in secondaries.

Labour will not hesitate to support evidence-based measures to increase the quality and status of the teaching profession. But the Government’s proposed standards are too static. They apply equally to a new starter as to an experienced teacher. Surely performance measures should be progressive, reflecting professional development and continually challenging a teacher to improve?

The biggest critics of bad teaching are good teachers. So we will look at measures like peer observation to raise standards. The important thing is to have a system that heads can use flexibly but is also fair to staff.

As part of our policy review we will be exploring innovations to increase teaching quality.

These will include peer-to-peer performance measures and continual performance assessment of teaching, including clear metrics for raising performance year after year.

If head teachers says they need more powers to remove under-performing teachers, we will provide them, along with better sharing of information about teachers who under-perform so they are not simply ‘ghosted’ through the system.

And finally, we will give teachers the tools to progress, including high quality training and networks to share best practice between schools. This collaboration will be vitally important in a system that is increasingly fragmented.

We know that poor teaching can blight a child’s future potential.  So we will be tough on bad teaching but fair to good teachers.

Stephen Twigg MP is the Shadow Education Secretary