Qualified teacher status – who believes what?

Should pupils in free schools and academies be taught by teachers without Qualified teacher status? This question has become the latest game political ping-pong involving all three parties. So much has been said it’s difficult to know what everyone believes. Here is a summary of where all the key players stand:

Tristram Hunt (and Labour) No, well maybe — the Shadow Education Secretary’s position is unclear. In a Daily Mirror interview, Hunt said ‘they have to work towards qualified teacher status or they have to go’. But last night, Jeremy Paxman asked Hunt no less than nine times whether he would send his children to a school with teachers who do not have Qualified teachers status. He never answered the question and some of his responses included:

‘My children are educated and I’m proud they are educated in the state system, where there are qualified teachers’ ‘I will send my children, and they go to school already and their teachers are brilliantly qualified. I want my children, as every parent wants their children, to be taught by the best qualified, the most motivated teachers possible’ ‘I would always want to send my children to schools where the teachers are the most qualified possible’ ‘Our case is if you do not have this baseline you end up with the chaos of the Al-Madinah school in Derby’

Michael Gove (and the Tories) Yes — the Education Secretary has long believed that academies and free schools should have the choice (like the independent sector) to employ whoever they want. In the House of Commons yesterday, the Education Secretary attacked Tristram Hunt, whose favourite teacher apparently did not have QTS :

‘It is the same old Labour party—“Do as I say, not as I do”—a Labour party willing to pull up the ladder from the next generation, a Labour party that has benefited from all the advantages that money can buy and then, when the poor come knocking on the door, saying, “Liberate us from ignorance,” says, “Sorry, no. We’re with the unions. We are not on your side.”’

The public No — according to the latest YouGov poll, over two thirds of voters — including 65 per cent of Conservatives — are in favour of qualified teachers: Nick Clegg (some Lib Dems) No — The Lib Dem leader began this row some with remarks in The Observer, trying to distance himself from some the government’s ‘ideological’ education reforms:

‘Frankly it makes no sense to me to have qualified teacher status if only a few schools have to employ qualified teachers’

David Laws (other Lib Dems) Yes — Following Clegg’s statement, the Department for Education released a statement rebutting his name and Fraser wrote that he understands Laws is ‘at one’ with Michael Gove on QTS:

‘This Government is not going to take these freedoms away. Independent schools have always been able to hire brilliant people who have not got QTS. Free schools and academies now have the same freedoms as independent schools to hire great linguists, computer scientists, engineers and other specialists so they can inspire their pupils’

Yet the Lib Dems abstained on yesterday’s vote, partly because, as Isabel reported, the government had made a mess of its own peacekeeping amendment.