Tristram Hunt, the new-ish shadow education secretary, wants teachers, like other professionals, to be licensed. This means their knowledge and classroom skills would be regularly and formally assessed, perhaps as often as every five or six years. If they can show they’re on top of their game, they’ll get a new licence to teach. If not, they’ll get the sack. Or, to put it less bluntly, they’ll lose their licence.
This amounts to the same thing, as under Labour, no licence means you’ll be banned from teaching altogether (unless a private school will have you). “Just like lawyers and doctors, (teachers) should have the same professional standing, which means re-licensing themselves, which means continued professional development, which means being the best possible they can be,” Hunt said last week. “If you’re not a motivated teacher – passionate about your subject, passionate about being in the classroom – then you shouldn’t really be in this profession. So if you’re not willing to engage in re-licensing to update your skills then you really shouldn’t be in the classroom.”
We don’t yet have much policy detail, and we all know that’s where the devil will be lurking. Still, Labour’s plan to re-licence teachers throughout their careers sounds reassuringly sensible. It did back in 2009, when something similar was first announced by Ed Balls, then abandoned after fierce campaigning by the National Union of Teachers (NUT). Obviously, things are a bit different when you’re no longer in government. All proper Opposition education policies should frighten the teaching unions – or at least make them a bit skittish. And Labour can afford to publicly annoy the NUT, for now at least, as much as it deems useful. It’s what Tony Blair and David Blunkett did in the mid-1990s with just as much calculation as Ed Miliband and Tristram Hunt now.
But Labour is also anxious not to alienate teachers too much, or for too long. The original plan to create a licensing system came after complaints from headteachers that it was difficult to get rid of poor teaching staff, and that under-performing teachers would simply move schools to avoid sanctions or dismissal.
Inevitably, the unions disliked any suggestion that it would become ‘easier’ to fire their members – and among their many objections was the increased power licensing could give headteachers to remove staff they didn’t rate. Under Labour’s latest plan, apparently as a sop to the NUT, heads appear to have been cut out altogether. Instead, Tristram Hunt thinks teachers could assess one another – a kind of on-going peer review conducted by teachers from both their own and other schools. This is an unsettling kink in an otherwise smart-sounding policy from one of Labour’s brightest stars.
And it’s a long way from how other professions treat licensing. Lawyers and doctors don’t pop into each other’s offices or the practice up the road to test one another out – their bosses and employers are the ones who, rightly, get to decide whether or not they are up to the job. It’s not the role of teachers to leave their classrooms to check up on other teachers or to trek around other schools ‘listening in’ to classes; nor should it be. It’s the job of headteachers to create the best school they can, and to work with their staff to keep standards consistently high. Only they should have the right to decide whether a teacher is up to scratch, or deserving of a renewed ‘licence to teach’ in his or her school.
A licensing system is a good idea – but not if it involves taking powers away from heads or increasing the huge administrative burden schools already carry. If Hunt wants to “re-professionalise” teachers and keep them in the classroom, he will have to tough it out with the unions.
His first job is to convince Ed Miliband that consensus is useful, but only if it doesn’t end up looking too much like a compromise.
This first appeared at http://www.speakerschair.com on 13th January 2014
Kath Raymond Hinton 
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