Debate contribution: General Teaching Council Bill: Second Stage

Debate contribution by Mr Paul Givan on 2 December 2025.

MLA

Mr Paul Givan

Party at the time

Democratic Unionist Party

Date

2 December 2025

Type

Debate contribution (made as a minister)

Business

Executive Committee Business

Heading

General Teaching Council Bill: Second Stage

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 5271734

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I beg to move

Thank you, Mr Speaker. The General Teaching Council for Northern Ireland, commonly known as GTCNI, was established as a non-departmental public body (NDPB) under the Education (Northern Ireland) Order 1998. It was intended to be the professional body for our teachers, setting and maintaining professional standards, setting qualification requirements to teach in our schools and taking prompt action where a teacher's conduct or competence was unacceptable. It was also established to provide the Department with advice on teaching standards and teachers' professional development needs, helping us to better support our current teachers and future school leaders. Regrettably, GTCNI has consistently struggled to fulfil those goals. I begin by reminding Members of the breadth of the GTCNI's problems, doing so to illustrate why the Bill is needed at this time. GTCNI was established with a large 33-person leadership council, which was made up of 14 elected teachers, five teaching union representatives, 10 nominees from educational stakeholders and four departmental public appointees. That slant towards a representative membership was intended to ensure that GTCNI's decision-making was always well informed by a broad overview of the needs of the education system. In latter years, that approach proved problematic, since board members repeatedly struggled to separate their decision-making in council from the preferences of the bodies that they represented. That led to the pursuit of different agendas within the council and, over time, gave rise to entrenched positions being adopted. The election and nomination processes that were used also led to some members coming on to the council through their own self-assessment, with very limited understanding of public-sector governance and accountability standards or strategic leadership. Some also lacked any appreciation of their responsibility, as board members, to take decisions that were solely in the best interests of GTCNI. Relationships among council members deteriorated, with council and committee meetings becoming openly adversarial. Rather than seeking to build consensus, decision-making was characterised by partisan voting. Approval of the minutes of previous meetings often required hours of debate, leaving no time for the consideration of any other business. That led to essential operational decisions being left untaken, governance failures being left unaddressed, and GTCNI staff resources being squandered on internal, unproductive work that was of no value to teachers or the wider profession. It would not be unfair to say that, had it been a concerted strategy to render GTCNI ineffective and destroy teachers' confidence in the body, it scarcely could have been more successful. In trying to remedy matters, the Department placed the body into special measures on two occasions, offering additional support and oversight to try to stabilise the very troubled ship. Despite those efforts, by mid-2021, over one third of the council's membership had either resigned or been withdrawn by their nominating body, citing dysfunctionality, toxicity and unprofessional behaviour within the council as the reasons for their departure. In response, the Department commissioned an independent effectiveness review of GTCNI's council and committees, which reported in autumn 2021. It concluded that the leadership of the body was irredeemably divided, with such low levels of trust among its members that it could see no way for the body to be salvaged and brought back into compliance with normal governance requirements. Based on members' feedback, the consultants assessed the leadership council as being the worst-performing board that they had ever encountered. Given that assessment, the review recommended that GTCNI be dissolved and replaced, and that the Department should consult on what form a replacement body should take. It specifically recommended that if a new body were to be established, it should be overseen by a much smaller board, the members of which would all be selected on the basis of their skills and experience and chosen through a public appointments process. In December 2021, the then Education Minister, Michelle McIlveen, announced her acceptance of the recommendations of the review report and her decision, in line with those recommendations, to stand down GTCNI's leadership council with immediate effect. Teachers in any grant-aided school here are legally required to hold GTCNI teacher registration, and the then Minister also therefore decided that, pending the body's replacement, GTCNI staff would, operating under direct departmental oversight, continue to work to register new teachers. Since then, my officials have been working to follow through on those decisions. The Department has undertaken a public consultation and a teacher engagement exercise, seeking views on a GTCNI replacement and the roles and functions that it should deliver. In each case, a majority of respondents felt that all GTCNI's functions were important and that they should be retained, since they were regarded as directly supporting the quality of our teaching workforce. At the same time, under departmental oversight, the GTCNI staff team has managed to transform its operation. It has not simply been handling new teacher registrations; it has reduced application processing times and completed a major upgrade to its IT platform and critical teacher registration database. That replaced an obsolete system and was a critical upgrade that successive councils had failed to progress. Despite the uncertainty over its future, the GTCNI staff team has built a settled staffing structure, helping to protect the organisation's experience and expertise. It has enhanced all aspects of the body's information management processes, systematically resolving all the governance and accountability issues that it inherited from the old council, and it successfully exited special measures in December 2024. The scale of that transformation suggests that GTCNI's staff and structures were always fundamentally correct and that the leadership and operational difficulties identified in 2021 stemmed principally from the body's dysfunctional leadership council. Earlier this year, I received an options analysis and supporting business case that examined many potential methods for replacing GTCNI. Given GTCNI's recent strong performance, that included an option to retain and reform GTCNI rather than dissolve it. The analysis found that retaining and reforming GTCNI provided the quickest and most cost-effective way forward, delivering all the desired functions with the lowest associated risks while avoiding the time, costs and complexities involved in closing one non-departmental public body to establish an identical replacement. I accepted that assessment, so the Bill will now see GTCNI's retention, the reform of its board and the correction of legislative weaknesses that have to date prevented GTCNI from regulating the profession in the manner that was originally envisaged. I will move on to some of the policy changes that the Bill will deliver. I have set out the compelling need to reform GTCNI's board. The second core element will be to create a legally robust framework, allowing GTCNI to effectively investigate and, where necessary, take disciplinary action on allegations of unacceptable professional conduct or serious professional incompetence that it receives. GTCNI will convene independent investigatory and fitness-to-practise panels without board involvement or influence. It will be given a broad range of sanctions, from reprimands and conditional registration orders to suspension or prohibition orders. The Bill will require those facing allegations, and relevant witnesses, to participate in its investigation and fitness-to-practise proceedings and will place a duty on employing authorities and schools to share relevant information with GTCNI. The Bill will establish two new criminal offences covering individuals who falsely claim to hold GTCNI registration or who supply false information to secure GTCNI registration. While such cases are uncommon, a small number have arisen, so we will give GTCNI the ability to respond strongly, ensuring the safety of pupils and, in doing so, protecting the reputation of the wider profession. The Bill will see GTCNI continue to be funded through annual registration fees. Teacher registration and regulation safeguard the quality of our teaching workforce, and annual fees allow those things to be delivered without adding to the pressures on the education budget. Registration fees are charged by professional bodies and regulators throughout the United Kingdom, and it is hard to argue that teachers should pay nothing to belong to their professional body. However, it will be a matter for the GTCNI's new board to review its financial position and determine whether any future fee increase is required. In giving GTCNI greater autonomy over its financial future, the Department will no longer have any approval role in the setting of fees. When legislating, it is important that Departments plan for future needs where those can be reasonably anticipated. The Bill will therefore provide two powers that other teaching regulators already use and that could serve to strengthen the profession and the teaching workforce here. It will provide for a new class of provisional registration for teachers. It is envisaged that that would allow someone whose initial teaching qualification was judged to have minor deficits against GTCNI's qualification standards to be allowed to teach for a period, after which they would receive full registration, having addressed their deficits, or lose their provisional registration and be ineligible to continue to teach.

Secondly, the Bill will permit GTCNI to require all teachers to periodically validate their registration again by demonstrating their continuing participation in professional learning. All student teachers learn the importance of reflecting on their classroom practice to identify specific learning needs and areas where their practice could be improved. Most regulated professions require their members to demonstrate that their knowledge and skills remain up to date if they wish to continue to practise in that field. Our intention is to give greater prominence to the importance of career-long teacher professional learning, raising teacher standards and, ultimately, improving learning outcomes for all our pupils. Rather than adding to teachers' existing workloads, we envisage that, by making those part of a formalised process, teachers will, in most cases, simply need to record the professional learning and development that they are undertaking. I recognise that those developments represent two significant changes and that each raises issues for teachers, trade unions and oversight bodies such as the Education Committee. The Department has therefore already offered a commitment that the powers will not be commenced immediately and that that will happen only after there have been suitable consultations. That summarises the Bill's key elements. Its intention is simple: to provide our teachers with the robust and effective professional body that they deserve while raising teacher standards without compromising the quality of the workforce. Our teachers enjoy a unique level of public trust. In return, they are expected to be technically excellent educators and to demonstrate characteristics such as honesty, integrity and trustworthiness. Those should inform their practice and be modelled for their pupils, which can help to shape the values that those pupils will, in turn, take forward into adulthood. Professionalism among our teachers is already the norm. The Bill seeks to support and strengthen that by ensuring that teachers have a professional body that sets, expects and guards the highest standards for all. I commend the Bill to the House.

1,801 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 14:06 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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