Licensed to fill in forms

The recent announcement that teachers are to be required to be officially licensed seems to me to be yet another initiative which creates more problems than it could ever solve. On this week's Question Time simple Harriet Harman asserted that doctors and lawyers have had a system of continuing professional development (CPD) for years and that the purpose of this initiative is to ensure the standard of teachers is universally high.

I can't talk of doctors, but I certainly can say something about lawyers. It is important to start from the correct position. All lawyers are either self-employed free-lancers or they are employed by a firm or company. If free-lancers are no good they will get little if any work. If employed lawyers are no good they will be sacked. In both fields there will be exceptions - some incompetent free-lancers will get referrals from chums and some hopeless employed lawyers will remain in post; but as a general rule lawyers are like anyone else, if you're no good you need to find another job or a lower level of the same job.

In the real world there are relatively few qualified lawyers who cannot find some position to which they are suited. Plenty of administrative jobs within solicitors' firms, business and the Court Service require a little legal knowledge and are filled very well by those who could never make a go of practice as a solicitor or barrister. And those in practice find their own level over time. Some deal perfectly competently with small cases but struggle with the juicy stuff so they stick to what they can do, do it decently and earn a living. Those who take a position requiring particular skills cannot expect to last long if they lack those skills. After all, that is what happens in business all the time. Someone appears to be competent, is given a job, turns out not to be up to it and is either offered something more suitable or off-loaded before they have been employed long enough to qualify for statutory redundancy pay.

Whether they are comfortable in their current position or struggling, all but the dangerously negligent do their best to keep up to date with recent developments in the law and the procedural rules of the courts. In fact I can take that further, you simply cannot give competent advice without researching the law to see if anything relevant to the case you are working on has changed since you last dealt with that field of law. Practitioners do not keep up to date for fear of professional disciplinary proceedings, they do so because they want to provide a proper service.

Continuing professional education has almost nothing to do with competence in your everyday work. At the time I retired I had to undertake twelve hours of CPD each year in order to get my practicing certificate for the following year. Numerous companies provide lectures, seminars, courses and DVDs through which it is possible to clock-up the necessary hours. It is a requirement to gather the prescribed number of "points" in fields connected to your main areas of work but there is no requirement to do so at any particular time provided you do it by the 31st of December. It was my practice to use the period between Christmas and New Year to watch some DVDs of lectures in areas I found interesting. I won't deny that I learned something from each presentation but I will deny that it made any difference to how I did my work because I had to do individual research for each case even if the subject had been covered by one of the DVDs. A judge asking "has there been any new law on this recently Mr Bigot?" would not be satisfied with the answer "oh yes, My Lord, and I have a very interesting DVD here in which someone talks about it".

I doubt that the introduction of CPD for lawyers has had any significant benefit at all. The extremely good are still extremely good, the good are still good, the competent are still competent and the duffers are still duffers. Frankly, if you don't check for developments in the law each time you give advice you are too dangerous to be let out in public and you are unlikely to be any less dangerous because you attended a half-day seminar six months earlier. It's all a box-ticking exercise, there is no substance to it. Whether you are able to make a living depends on whether you have clients or an employer willing to pay you, not on being able to satisfy a pen-pusher that you have garnered enough "points" to be allowed through for another year.

I fail to see how five-yearly licences for teachers will make much difference to anything. They could provide a way for schools to sack the incompetent, but in such a highly-unionised and state-funded field many a headteacher and board of governors would not want the hassle. If they cannot or do not sack the incompetent now why should it be any different later? The same test will apply and the same obstructions will be in place. Indeed, it could make it even worse because the grant of a licence will, I suspect, make someone unsackable for five years in the absence of gross misconduct. I have no reason to believe it will be anything other than another box-ticking exercise with a vast army of assessors and inspectors being employed to pore over the forms. And what will the system provide for those rare cases when the headteacher says "sorry, Mr Quelch is past it, I don't recommend renewal of his licence"? Being a government scheme I can imagine a body being created to hear appeals which will be a rich fighting ground for the unions.

It shows every sign of being a bureaucrat's delight.

And when will teachers be required to undertake any CPD courses that might be included in this scheme? Let me guess. At the moment children get a day-off from time to time for teachers' "study days", something unheard of just twenty years ago. They won't be giving those up, their unions won't let them. Maybe they will undertake their CPD hours during their ten or more weeks of annual leave. I'm sorry, I have just read that sentence, how foolish of me to write something so fanciful.

A thought on private education

One of the great ironies of life in Britain is how those who argue loudest for the State to have a monopoly over the provision of a particular service always seem to use private provision of that service as the benchmark of quality. We see it particularly in both education and health care. State schools seek to achieve the levels of discipline, participation in sports and academic achievement seen in the independent sector and NHS hospitals aim for the levels of cleanliness and patient care BUPA and their competitors have to maintain to stay in business.

While trying to match the private sector, our friends on the left want to abolish it. We hear various arguments in favour of abolition, the most frequently occurring is that private education and medicine allow the rich an immoral advantage over those unable to pay. Just to hear this argument gives me huge pleasure because it accepts that privately-funded schools and hospitals provide a better service than those controlled by the State. It also makes me wonder why they do not argue for all schools and hospitals to be administered and operated like the private ones so that everyone can wallow in immorally high levels of learning and physical wellbeing.

Of course it is unfair to make a direct and total comparison between independent schools and hospitals and those funded by taxes. I want to say a few things about schools today, hospitals can wait.

Generally speaking it is probably the case that a higher percentage of children attending independent schools have been raised to have good manners and a positive approach to learning. This makes time in the classroom much more productive for pupils. Although it could probably never be measured, let's assume this makes a difference of just 1% per year to what the average pupil achieves. Over the 11 years of compulsory schooling between ages 5 and 16, the total difference between the outcome for the same pupil entering a state school or an independent school amounts to just over 11.5%. Johnny Blob will score 100 if he attended a state school but 111.5 at an independent school. If the difference is 2% per year the total discrepancy after 11 years is almost 25%. These are massive figures in this context because they relate to how well a child is equipped for life by their school at the tender age of 16.

This discrepancy (whatever the true figure) is not the fault of the state schools, it is the consequence of the way the parents of their pupils have raised them and this should not be left out of account when considering how well or badly a state school is doing. It is not just in the world of computer climate models that garbage in = garbage out. I have no reason to believe that state schools do not try very hard to make up for a lack of parental discipline, the state schools I attended certainly did so. Nonetheless, the disruptive elements who can do so much harm to the prospects of their peers are predominantly in the state sector.

Independent schools also select many of their pupils by academic ability, a privilege denied to the vast majority of state schools these days. Some counties still have grammar schools and if they are anything like the one I attended they will be very fine institutions, but their numbers are few.

These two factors make me wonder how much better independent schools really are than state schools at the basic art of teaching stuff. If we remove the "mark-up" resulting from having generally brighter and better behaved pupils, we might well find that there is little difference. I can only speak anecdotally about the posh end of education (having attended a village primary school, the local grammar school and then non-Oxbridge universities) but those whose parents forked out the cost of a new car each year for over a decade tell me tales of some brilliant and some awful teachers with the majority being pretty average. Just as one would expect and just as I experienced in the state sector.

When the lefties bleat about the immoral advantages independent schools give their pupils they never identify the standard of teaching as one of those advantages. They often carp on about better sports facilities while state schools sell their playing fields for housing developments. Fair enough, independent schools can afford to teach pupils golf and rowing because they charge extra for the coaching. No doubt it is easier to take an interest in tennis when your school has well maintained courts. But state schools still have sports facilities and they have access to parks and municipal sports centres. Their playing fields have been sold because they weren't being used. Hand-wringing cries of "what can the kids do in the evenings and weekends now that the school playing field has been turned into a super-brothel?" presume they would otherwise be teeming with bronzed teenage athletes perfecting the Fosbury flop. It's complete nonsense.

So what is the immoral advantage if it isn't standards of teaching or sports grounds? I suspect it is the thing that caused that hard-left Labour MP Dianne Abbott to send her son to an independent school. It is that independent schools aim to encourage personal discipline and to get the best out of every pupil. It is more to do with character development than teaching quadratic equations. It is more to do with letting young people know they are responsible for what they do than with listing the welfare benefits they might be able to claim. It is more to do with opening their eyes to possibilities than with encouraging a sense of worthlessness. A well-rounded education to bring the best out of each pupil is an immoral advantage compared to being at a school with no discretion, a school constrained by box-ticking and form-filling to give the government data they can manipulate into a tale of unmitigated success when the real world knows the opposite to be true. The only reason it is an immoral advantage is that the way government controls the state schools is amoral.

Relationship lessons, I don't think so

When I was at school things were pretty straightforward. At primary school it was reading, writing, sums and a bit of history, geography, plants and animals. Practical stuff everyone should know. After all, we were little children with an awful lot to learn. There was a sex education class at age 10 or 11, as I recall, a biology class really. No pretence of "this is something you might think of doing in the next couple of years", just "this is how it happens" in the same way we were taught that 9 x 12 = 108. They taught a fact, something we should know at that age. At grammar school the same pattern was followed with the addition of far more reasoning because that was needed if we were to develop our minds as far as possible.

At no stage was I subjected to the modern educational fetish of emotionalism. When I learned that crocodiles enjoy a dinner of raw wildebeest it did not occur to anyone that I should consider how the wildebeest felt about being held underwater until it was dead and then consumed. Its feelings will never stop a hungry crocodile from killing it and there is nothing I or any other human being can or should do to prevent nature taking its course.

On this week's Question Time someone asked about the government's proposal that children as young as five should be taught about human relationships. The question, and all the answers, presumed the proposal to be for such young children to be taught about sex but that is not my understanding. I believe they are proposing that little children at primary school should be taught about relationships and sex education will follow later. There seemed unanimity among the panel that teaching about relationships is appropriate and that made me ask what that means.

I can recall just a few specific events in my life up to the age of about 10. What I acknowledge is that principles and standards inculcated in me from my earliest days are with me still even though I cannot recall ever being taught them. This suggests to me that teaching esoteric concepts to young children must be done with great care because they will absorb the principles without question and use them as the foundation of how they live their lives and treat other people in the future. I do not, of course, ignore that a bad principle can be corrected. A child taught at home that stealing is acceptable can be persuaded at a later time that his parents were incorrect. Similarly a child taught that stealing is wrong can change his mind or be persuaded to change his mind when he is older. Nonetheless, if a principle is taught there is a high probability that it will be carried into later life. This means that we must be very careful about teaching principles of behaviour and, in particular, we must be careful to ensure that the principles we teach are sound and will serve the child as he or she goes through life. They should not be matters of current fashion which have not already stood the test of time as solid principles.

What is it that small children are to be taught? This has not yet been decided, the proposal to introduce the subject of relationships into the syllabus is just a proposal. So, what might they be taught? What principle is there that should be inculcated into little children to stand alongside the most important principle of all, namely, treat others as you would like them to treat you? I cannot see any underlying concept in the subject matter of relationships that is of sufficient importance as a foundation for life that it should be introduced as a matter of principle before children are old enough to understand what it really means.

We cannot ignore that the standards we teach small children are essentially based on the Ten Commandments and are taught because we accept them as being a good foundation for life. Yet we must not pretend that we know them to be good standards because of our own experiences. They are a body of fundamental principles of behaviour that have been tested by time and proven to be worthy of transmission to the next generation. That is what justifies them being pushed into children's minds before they develop critical faculties. History proves they are sound and we want the next generation to follow them so, in effect, we brainwash children with them.

I would rather leave brainwashing where it is and concentrate on ensuring the little darlings can read, write and do basic maths. After all, if something is to be added to the syllabus, something else must be discarded. With levels of practical literacy and numeracy still worryingly low despite ever increasing sums being spent on compulsory education it is, to my mind, plainly more important to teach children the three Rs.

What is poverty?

With food and fuel prices rising by huge amounts we will hear much over the coming months about poverty and it will all concentrate on money. It is quite right that money should feature high on the poverty agenda because most definitions of poverty look at nothing else. My intention is to address the monetary side of poverty in a series of ramblings over the next few weeks, but today I want to challenge the concept that a lack of money is an adequate definition of poverty.

Lack of money is a common theme in politicians' rantings whenever problems arise in the inner cities. Many examples can be given: teenagers terrorise a council housing estate, the child of a teenage mother starves to death, children are found to be eating burgers and chips as their main meal seven days a week and so it goes on. Often, the first thing that is said is to blame lack of money. If that really is to blame, an increase in income for the people concerned would prevent the problems being repeated. I doubt very much that that is the case. I can explain why by looking at the particular examples I have given.

When a gang of teenagers terrorises an estate you can be sure of one thing. There are far more teenagers living on the estate who do not join the rampage. When a child dies in horrible circumstances you can be sure that many more children of teenage mothers are being cared for very well. For every child eating burgers and chips every day you can be sure there will be many eating sensible balanced meals. The well-behaved teenagers will not have parents markedly wealthier than the parents of the hooligans, the teenage mothers of living children will not be markedly wealthier than the mother of the dead child, the parents of the children on balanced diets will not be markedly wealthier than the parents of those fed burgers and chips. It is not money that differentiates between those who behave well and those who behave badly, it is values.

That is not to say that values are absolute things, they can be affected by all sorts of external influences. Peer pressure can persuade a teenager to join in with the terrorising gang even though he would never dream of threatening anyone if acting alone. A bad example can temporarily override a strongly held opinion that something is wrong. Money can also play a part, as in the case of many poor people who steal goods from shops when they would not do so if they could afford to buy them. Of course that raises the question why they chose to steal when others would just go without and the answer is simple, the values of those who steal are less powerful than the values of those who go without. It must not be overlooked, however, that financial poverty is only a cause of theft when the theft is necessary to be able to provide the basics of life (housing, heating, food, clothes) which, in my view, is never the case in this country.

I do not suggest for one moment that life is easy for those on low incomes. They have little if any opportunity for discretionary spending, the vast majority of their money has to go on housing, heating, food and clothes. I can understand why someone in that position who has become accustomed over many years to having two packets of cigarettes a week will buy smuggled smokes at £3.50 rather than paying £5.80 for exactly the same product in the shops, the difference of £2.30 a packet is significant to them. What I cannot understand, and do not accept, is that a lack of money causes people to behave in a way that is harmful to others. Such behaviour is a consequence of the people concerned not having good values.

There is another non-monetary aspect to poverty. So far I have discussed only poverty of values. Values are taught by our parents, our schools and others who have had a significant effect on our lives. Those influences generally apply in our early years and they provide us with the individual moral standards we carry into adulthood. When in adulthood, most people have children and they hope their children will learn the values they learned. They also hope their children will receive a good education to give the opportunities they had to build a career or start a business or have a steady job. Sadly we seem to have reached a position in this country in which education is viewed by government as a means for social engineering and a statistical resource rather than a means for developing minds and teaching skills. Unless schools allow each pupil to develop to the best of his or her ability they fail in their central purpose.

These days the curriculum is crammed with touchy-feely eco-multicultural nonsense. Children are taught that Nelson Mandela is more important than Isaac Newton, Al Gore more important than Winston Churchill, rights more important than duties and equality more important than quality. There are so many tests and league tables that it is more important to get the marginal fail up to a marginal pass than it is to teach the bottom few to read or the top few to excel. One of the greatest successes of schools in the fifties and sixties was to get those from modest backgrounds into the best universities and the most challenging professions. Means tested grants were given to the best students so that their nascent talents could flourish. Naturally some withered, but that will always be the case, those who flourished were able to pursue careers their parents could only have dreamt of, but not now. There is genuine poverty of opportunity because state schools have to follow political diktats.

Lack of money is the third type of poverty, third in my list and third in importance. If you have no values it does not matter how much money you have you will harm others throughout your life. Poverty of opportunity condemns future generations to under-achievement and, necessarily, condemns the country to fail to benefit from their talents. Monetary poverty is not a barrier to high values and should not be a barrier to good education. I will return to various aspects and effects of monetary poverty in future musings, today I have endeavoured to explain why I believe that poverty of values and poverty of opportunity are more detrimental than monetary poverty.

Are we cleverer than we were?

Today I want to start by saying something with which, I think, everyone will agree. Some people are better at sports than others. We know this because we all witnessed it as children and have continued witnessing it ever since.

When a dozen boys gather at a park to play football the two captains make alternate picks until each side has six members and week after week the same boys are picked first and the same boys are picked last. There is nothing nasty about it. Everyone knows Jimmy is the best player so he is picked first, then Tom and so it goes on until only Ed and Charlie are left, and Charlie is almost always picked ahead of Ed. Occasional variants might arise by which Ed becomes first pick on his birthday or he is picked ahead of Charlie because one of the captains likes him more, but the overall pattern is always the same. And it is the same for the very obvious reason that the boys have different levels of skill.

Some would consider this exercise in team selection to be a divisive practice which humiliates Ed and Charlie week after week. It is nothing of the sort and we only need to ask Ed and Charlie to know this because, you see, Ed and Charlie know why they are picked last. They do not turn up at the park in order to be the best players, they turn up because they enjoy the game. They do not pass the ball to Jimmy or Tom because they do not want to dribble forward and score spectacular goals themselves, they do so because they know Jimmy and Tom can do it and they cannot. One of the great joys for Ed and Charlie comes when they have a particularly good game, when a tackle is executed perfectly or a long pass lands in the perfect spot, on those days they get more praise from their teammates than anyone else because all recognise a special achievement. They are not humiliated by being the two worst players, if they felt humiliated they would not turn up at all.

Sporting achievement is not all about basic physical coordination, that is obvious; technical skills are required as are physical fitness and concentration. However, no matter how fit you are, how much coaching you receive and how well you can concentrate, your level of physical coordination will determine how far you can go in your chosen sport.

Recognition that there are different levels of skill helps us to engage a lot of people in regular sporting activity. Take cricket clubs as an example. At the top level we have the England team, full of people with a standard of skill possessed by only one in tens of thousands. Then there are County Cricket Clubs comprising those who play for England and those who play extremely well but not well enough to play for their country. Next come the County Leagues from which some players will move up to play for a County but most will not. All these strata of the game involve players of very substantial skill. Within such a select group there are still discernible bands separating the very good from the exceptional from the brilliant. Not surprisingly, there are very few in the top band, more in the next and far more in the next again.

The level below County League standard is more difficult to define because the number of participants is much larger. There are many clubs like my own in which the best players in the First XI could hold their own in the County League but most could not. We run a number of teams on Saturdays and Sundays (as well as many junior teams). There are dedicated players of reasonable skill who only ever play in the Saturday Third XI or the Sunday Second XI because they would struggle at a higher level but, by playing against players at their own general level of skill, gain great enjoyment from the game.

What is probably not known very widely is that clubs at the lower levels of the game also make room for those who simply do not possess the level of basic physical skill to make a meaningful contribution in any match. They will not play often, perhaps just a couple of times each season, but if they are keen to play and are prepared to stand up and say they would like a game they will be accommodated. By organising cricket in a way that reflects different abilities we maximise the benefit for all those who want to play. Movement between the different levels is not only possible it is to the advantage of the higher ranking clubs, thereby allowing those who improve their game to achieve their potential. The same applies to football, rugby, hockey and the rest.

Exactly the same pattern arises when we look at academic ability rather than sporting skill. Some people are staggeringly clever, some are irredeemably thick and the vast majority are somewhere in between. We do not need any studies by governments or think tanks to establish this obvious fact because we have all witnessed it at every stage of our lives. We have also witnessed clever people who are lazy and average people who worked hard, each might gain the same grades at one level but at the next level the lazy clever person can cope and the hard working but not very clever person cannot. Everyone finds their level, but only if the standard of measurement recognises different abilities and says "you can go this far but no further".

The task of schools, so far as academic study is concerned, is to recognise the different abilities of the pupils and seek to get the best out of them. In the same way that physical coordination provides the absolute limit to what a sportsman can achieve, so what we usually refer to as intelligence sets a limit to academic achievement. Also, in the same way that good coaching, fitness training and enhanced concentration can improve sporting performance, so good teaching and motivation can enhance academic achievement. But to what extent, and how do we measure it?

There is a lot of rubbish spouted about exams. Formal written tests have their limitations but there has to be some measure of attainment, some way of letting others know what each pupil can do. Until a better method than exams is found, I will support them (yes, I know this is a self-fulfilling prophesy, but this is my blog so it is allowed.)

For generations we have had tests at age 16 ("O"-levels, now GCSEs) and tests at age 18 ("A"-levels). In recent years there has been a seemingly unstoppable upward movement in average grades awarded. More and more children at 16 are gaining passes at grades A-C in their GCSEs and more and more are gaining As at A-level. The government claims these figures show their education policies have increased standards in schools, their critics claim the exams have been made easier in order to manipulate the statistics so that the government can take credit.

It is obvious that easier exams will improve average grades but so will harder work and an improvement in teaching standards. The difference between making exams easier and improving teaching standards and greater industry is that the latter two factors can only do so much. The pupil of average intelligence who is taught badly might get a grade D whereas good teaching might result in a C and a combination of good teaching and very hard work might squeeze into the bottom of the B bracket, but that pupil should never be able to attain a grade A because his intellectual ability cannot cope with the more difficult aspects of the subject which must be understood in order to justify a top grade.

I find it difficult to accept that children work so much harder and are taught so much better than in times gone by that exam results should improve by several percentage points each year. To me it just does not make sense. Perhaps on average they do work a bit harder and they are taught a bit better, but my idea of common sense leads me to conclude that a modest increase in average grades would result from that and a plateau would be reached fairly quickly, not a year-on-year upward leap. I find myself forced to conclude that the standard of achievement required to secure each grade has been reduced.

This conclusion appears to be shared by some of the country's most distinguished Universities who feel unable to accept "A"-level grades at face value because they have experienced growing numbers of students with straight As who have been far below the standard of straight-A students a generation ago. Employers also complain that young people with high grades at GCSE are incapable of reading, writing and doing basic arithmetic.

The tragedy of grade-inflation is that it cheats everyone. It cheats the pupils because they are given a false impression of their ability when the truth would benefit them more in their future lives. It cheats employers who take on young people only to find they are not up to the job and have to let them go; thereby evidencing the need for young people to know the truth about their limitations. It cheats colleges who have to undertake remedial teaching to bring new charges up to the true entry-level for their course. It cheats true straight-A students who lose places at their university of choice because someone with pretend straight-As has been given a place (and so it goes down the scale with courses requiring AAB, ABB, BBB and so on). It cheats past generations who see their C grades now being awarded to the barely literate. Perhaps worst of all it cheats those at the bottom of the intellectual pile, those with no formal qualifications at all. They appear now to be deemed officially worthless.

Who is responsible for teaching children?

I start from what I believe is an indisputable principle, namely that parents are responsible (in the causative sense) for creating children and, therefore, they are responsible (in the legal and social sense) for bringing-up those children.

We all know that some parents are simply not up to the task of rearing children and that others encounter difficulties they do not have the capacity to overcome without help. Society must make a choice between upholding the sanctity of parental responsibility and intervening, by compulsion if necessary, to try to cure or alleviate problems. In past generations it was the grandparents, aunts and uncles, or village elders who would step in to fill the void and such interventions still happen very often. Where there is no other option the organs of the State have residual powers including, in extreme cases, forced removal of children and their placing for adoption. The role of the State should always, in my opinion, be one of last resort. That does not mean there is no place for experienced nurses or social workers to give advice to an expectant mother where the signs are that she might not be able to cope when the baby arrives, but it does mean that compulsory intervention should be limited to situations in which there is both a real problem and a real chance that the State can make things better.

It is noticeable, however, that the growth of State services over the last 50 years has led to many believing that the State is primarily responsible for certain aspects of rearing children. I believe this to be a fundamental misconception, a misconception seen most vividly in the field of education. If you were to ask 100 people in the street who is responsible for educating children I guess a majority would say the State. This is not so, parents are responsible for educating their children just as they are for housing, feeding and clothing them.

The State's proper involvement in education is two-fold. First, in its capacity as the mechanism through which we seek to maintain certain standards, the State has a role in laying-down a minimum standard for education. In this role its position is the same as in law enforcement, we have certain collective standards which the law upholds (not to kill, not to steal, not to assault and so on) and the State enforces these standards by prosecuting and punishing offenders. Giving children a basic education is another standard which we adopt collectively because accumulated wisdom tells us it is beneficial for all. The only collective mechanism through which we can enforce that standard is the State, so the State must have the power to step in where children are not being educated to a proper standard.

The second role of the State is to provide schooling but in this respect the proper role of the State is limited. Where parents can provide education at home (either themselves or by the use of tutors) there can be no objection to them doing so provided the standard of that education does not fall below the national minimum standard. Similarly, where parents pay for their children to attend privately run schools the State's only role is as enforcer of a national minimum standard. It must be accepted that the vast majority of parents cannot afford private education for their children and do not have the means or the time to educate their children at home, so we all pay taxes and we delegate to the State the role of providing formal education. It must always be borne in mind, however, that the State is simply acting as delegate, it does not provide schools because it has an innate duty to do so, it provides them because we pay an element of our taxes in order to pay for that service. The mere fact that the State provides the vast majority of school in the UK does not give it primary responsibility for education, that duty rests first last and always on parents.

To suggest, as is done regularly by dinosaurs of the political left, that parents should not be allowed to pay for their children's education or to teach their children at home it to say that the State bears primary responsibility for children. This relegates parents to the role of servants of the State. Government is always at its best when it is reminded constantly, and with penalties for recalcitrance, that it is the servant of the people.

Is teaching a profession?

Every job seems to be described as a profession these days. But it was not always thus. Three factors have been at work. One is good old muddle-brained egalitarianism - "Everyone is equal, therefore, if your job is called a profession so must be mine". The second is self-importance - "My job is more difficult than others, therefore, it must be distinguished from the easier ones by being called a profession." The third is a negotiating position - "If my job is not called a profession I cannot demand as much money as I could if it were a profession, therefore, it must be labelled a profession." Each factor is perfectly reasonable from the perspective of its proponent, but each has a practical flaw.

The egalitarian approach ignores the fact that "profession" is not a synonym for "job". Perhaps it will become so through usage, but it is not so yet. If the two ever become synonymous someone will invent a new way of categorising jobs to reflect the reality that not all work is equally demanding.

The self-important approach might well be the explanation for certain jobs being called "professions" in the first place, but it does not provide a definition of a profession it simply means that certain jobs become classified as professions when previously they were not. Because it is not definitive there is nothing to prevent every field of work other than the single most menial being brought into the same classification. Were that to happen the last would be brought in too because the synonym would be established.

The negotiating-position approach necessarily recognises that the job in question is not a profession but seeks to give it that title for a particular purpose only. Some jobs are generally recognised in our society as deserving greater pay than others. The criteria we use are many, varied and not necessarily substantive, but attaching a label to a job is not one of them.

So what is a profession? Conventionally (as reflected by dictionary definitions) a profession is a field of work which requires specialist knowledge acquired by academic training and a formal qualification. A set of standards (often called a code of conduct) to which each member of the profession must adhere is a necessary consequence of the basic definition because there is no point requiring someone to pass difficult exams to become a "professional person" if they can then act as they wish when conducting their calling. And it is a necessary consequence of the set of professional standards that there must be penalties (including disqualification) for those who do not perform their work to an acceptable standard.

I have long wondered whether teaching is a profession. The reason I am in a quandary is that I believe very firmly it should be a profession because I was lucky enough as a child to benefit from the work of many highly skilled and highly dedicated teachers. Unfortunately I also witnessed a few who were simply incompetent yet remained employed because there was no mechanism for sacking them. My schools were state schools, a village primary and a grammar school. Each had the luxury of being able to select the (ostensibly) best candidates for any teaching vacancy from a huge number of applicants but, life being real and not a fairy story, some who appeared impressive turned out to be donkeys.

Unless and until the incompetent are excluded from teaching, teaching can never be viewed as a profession. After all, what happens to the incompetent lawyer or accountant? He sets up in practice but gets no work and cannot earn a living. OK, that's the theory, in fact many of them gain lowly positions with local authorities or central government where incompetence is not a bar to employment. That might do no harm in many instances because an incompetent lawyer or accountant can still do something useful within a large department, he just cannot be let loose on anything important.

Teaching is different because there is no equivalent to giving the incompetent lawyer responsibility for collating documents in a file or the incompetent accountant responsibility for arithmetical calculations. Teaching is nothing without an audience of pupils who need to learn. Retention of incompetent teachers in a school is always an unmitigated disaster and their incompetence drags down the standing of their colleagues who deserve recognition as professional people. Until they face the same practical requirement of good quality performance as lawyers and accountants in private practice I have to conclude that their field of work cannot be classified as a profession. That does not prevent the good teachers from claiming, justly, to be professional (adjective, not noun) people but it does hold back the collective body of teachers from deserving to be labelled a (noun, not adjective) profession.

This conclusions saddens me enormously. If I may (which I may because this is my blog) let me tell you a true story from my schooldays to explain why it saddens me. I will name the teacher concerned because he deserves acknowledgment by name (incidentally I am not the one pupil to whom I make reference).

It was necessary for all of us to grasp a particular concept of mathematics in order for us to be able to understand the remainder of the year's syllabus. I was either 14 or 15, I cannot now remember which. Our teacher, Mr Colin Chubb, explained the principle in one way and one or two grasped it. Then he explained it is an entirely different way and more got the point. He could see who had "got it" and who had not, so his eyes concentrated on those in the latter category. Then a third different explanation came, then a fourth and a fifth until there was only one pupil who had not yet understood. We were not the best behaved of classes in general, but you really could not hear a pin drop because we all realised we were witnessing a display of skill equal to anything Federer and Nadal produced during today's amazing Wimbledon final. Mr Chubb produced his sixth explanation and asked the one remaining pupil in his eyesight a question which would show whether they understood; the answer showed they did not. The seventh explanation, again different from the previous six, did the trick.

Such an extraordinary display of skill might only have been required of him that one time in his whole career. He would have faced no sanction had he given up after three, four or five attempts and said "we must move on". There was no code of conduct by which teachers could be sacked if they did not do their work properly. But none of that was of any consequence to him, he applied a professional standard because it was the right thing to do and, I have no doubt, gave him great satisfaction. If ever I witnessed something that labelled someone a "professional person", that was it. Sadly the system retains hangers-on - time serving incompetents - and the Mr Chubbs of this world are demeaned by that system.