Hansard

That is starting with a tricky question. The report looks directly at entry to the profession in terms of both how we ensure that the right people are being brought into initial teacher education and what we can do about the young people who go through that education but do not go into immediate employment. Many of them may be lost to the profession because by the time jobs become available they have developed alternative careers or moved abroad.On the selection process, the story there is really quite encouraging because there is an upside to where we are just now in Scotland, in contrast to a number of other countries. The Netherlands, for example, does better than we do in the programme for international student assessment—PISA—but it struggles to recruit high-quality teachers. We still have applications from across the board to enter initial teacher education, which allows us to select the best from an able set of candidates. At the moment, the process of selection varies quite a bit from university to university, but there is also a great deal of duplication. In many other walks of life, there would be a more sophisticated selection process for candidates than the one that we use to select, from a large group of potentially able people, those who will provide our best teachers in the future.I believe that we should move to a process that is much closer to the kind of assessment centres that are used routinely in other occupations. That means that selection ought to be more broadly based than it is at the moment so that, in addition to academic qualifications, more weight is given to interpersonal, social and communication skills. Moving to an assessment-centre process will help to ensure that the people who find their way into initial teacher education are those who are most likely to succeed.The media has given a lot of attention to what the report says about literacy and numeracy in the teaching profession. Some of that misunderstands what I am trying to say in that regard. The message is quite clear: our teachers ought to have the highest standards of literacy and numeracy; we should not have a teaching profession that does not model the highest standards of literacy and numeracy. For many in the profession, that is the case, but in the course of the review, a very consistent theme came through from a variety of different sources, which expressed concern about the existing level of competence in relation to the high bar that should be set for literacy and numeracy in the profession.What I have suggested in the report is not that we should have a threshold test that says that someone who is 1 per cent below the pass rate is not allowed to go into teaching, but that we should establish a clear understanding of what the competence threshold is, and it should be higher than we expect of the population a whole. Part of the assessment should be about where candidates are in relation to that threshold and then a decision should be made about how big and how bridgeable the gap is. It would then be the responsibility of the initial teacher education course to bridge that gap. That is all about ensuring that we select the people who are going to be in the best position to serve our children well in the future. It is not a denigration of what is happening now, but it is about making sure that we are clear about it.A variety of factors influence the question of numbers of teachers, not all of which are relevant to what I say in the report. There is a disjoint between decisions that are taken about the numbers who enter initial teacher education and about how many we employ at the end of the day. The more steps there are in the process and the greater the gap from when they start to when they finish, the greater is the likelihood that initial assumptions will not match the conditions that finally apply. The report looks at two or three ways of addressing that.The intelligence that is used in the current model needs to be more finely grained than it is at present. At the moment, the model uses national statistics. Universities and local authorities should provide more real-time information about what they know about projected retirements from the profession and the changes that are taking place in the local workforce, rather than operating historically by using the census and data on what went before. There are technical things that could be done to improve the model.One of the recommendations in the report—which is not directly about numbers of teachers—suggests that we should move towards more concurrent degrees rather than a BEd. That will also shorten the timespan because, after two years on a concurrent degree, a student can decide not to continue training to be a teacher and to move into a more general undergraduate degree. They will be at a point at which they can take more responsibility for looking ahead and—if the employment market in teaching does not look all that good—for deciding whether they need to take a more general degree rather than take the risk of going into that employment market. The concurrent degree shortens the process and gives students more of an opportunity to alter their career path, rather than leaving them locked into a degree that is designed to equip them for teaching only.We also need to provide better intelligence. When prospectuses talk about what the university offers in the way of initial teacher education, it only talks about it for teaching. The prospectus for any other undergraduate degree gives a whole host of jobs that someone could do when they have the degree, but for a BEd or postgraduate qualification, it just says, “There will be opportunities in teaching”. Why is a teaching qualification not seen as being more attractive in fields beyond teaching? Contrast it with a law degree. Less than 50 per cent of those who get an LLB become lawyers, but they are very marketable; the degree is seen as a high-credibility qualification. A teaching degree ought to be seen in exactly the same terms. That is partly about who is selected and the level of academic challenge of the degree course, and the changing perceptions in society more generally.During the review, I asked representatives of the main business organisations the straight question, “If you have someone with an LLB and someone with a BEd, who is more likely to get the job?” and they said that they would go for the person with the LLB. The teaching degree is seen as being narrowly vocational rather than a broadly based undergraduate degree that equips people to do lots of things. It has a big focus on communication and interpersonal skills, and it should be challenging academically. That ought to make a person attractive beyond teaching and people who cannot get jobs in teaching ought to be able to get jobs elsewhere.The other recommendation that the report makes is that the General Teaching Council for Scotland should have an element in its register that allows people to keep in touch with the teaching profession. The GTCS knows that there are people out there who have teaching qualifications but are not currently employed, and it knows how to get in touch with them and attract them back into the profession.I am sorry; that was a long answer but this is a big and tricky subject.10:15