Debate contribution: General Teaching Council Bill: Second Stage

Debate contribution by Mr Jon Burrows on 2 December 2025.

MLA

Mr Jon Burrows

Party at the time

Ulster Unionist Party

Date

2 December 2025

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Executive Committee Business

Heading

General Teaching Council Bill: Second Stage

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 5271798

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I am glad to speak to the Second Stage of the General Teaching Council Bill. This is the first piece of legislation that I will be involved in end-to-end, so I look forward to providing some real scrutiny. I want to put some high-level points on the record, but there will be detailed scrutiny at the Bill's further stages. The first point is that it is right that there is a professional body that sets and uphold standards for teachers. Of course, that body must role-model those standards, which was not the previously the case. The second point is on the requirement for teachers to have ongoing training, which is in the Bill. It is important that the management of that is thought through for workloads and substitute teachers. There are a lot of substitute teachers working in our schools, and we need to make sure that they are catered for in that provision. It is right that teachers pay a fee to a body, but it must be set fairly and be value for money. Where I really want to bring some insight to the Bill, however, is on disciplinary procedures. I was previously involved in running what is, effectively, a regulated body for the police: the PSNI's professional standards department, That is a stand-alone, regulated professional body for the police. Disciplinary bodies can make many mistakes when they are first created. They tend to become slow and disproportionate; focus on finding blame instead of finding learning; and bring great stress to those who are investigated. Often, the investigators think that their job is to find fault, as opposed to the facts, and to exonerate the innocent as well as find the guilty. I wanted to put that on the record.

There are some key points that we will need to focus on at the next stage. First, if the body is to deal with discipline, it will need, at an early stage of investigating an issue, to differentiate between issues of conduct that are about integrity and those that are about performance. Safeguarding and ethical issues need to be clearly separated from learning and competence issues. Those things must be dealt with in totally different ways: that is really important. The second point is that we must not get bogged down, with everything being dealt with in a centralised and slow way. It is important that, if the misconduct is minor at most, the teacher knows at the earliest stage that their career is not at threat and that the issue will be dealt with quickly, efficiently and locally. The centralised systems should kick in where there is high-level misconduct that could, if proven, result in someone losing their job. That is where you really need investigators to understand their job, which is to get inculpatory and exculpatory evidence that rules people in and out of an inquiry and to understand the rules of disclosure. The professional body that will adjudicate on guilt or innocence must also understand all those things, including disclosure and how to run a proper hearing, because someone's job is at risk. Unfortunately, a lot of those bodies cannot separate the wheat from the chaff. They end up so bogged down in so many minor cases that the real problem teacher slips through the net or, as I have seen in the police and other bodies, sits suspended for years on full pay. That is why, at the outset, you need to strip it down into two or three different lanes. Is it a matter of performance of learning? If it is, deal with it in that way, quickly. Is it misconduct? If it is proven and it is minor, let us get it dealt with quickly and locally. If it is the serious stuff, where someone's career is at risk, let us make sure that the teacher is properly represented; that whoever is running the investigation and the panel to decide on their future is properly trained and compliant with things such as civil disclosure regulations that will apply; that there is transparency and fairness; and that we do not end up bogged down for years, with teachers working under huge pressure and with huge workloads. It cannot be lost on us that there is a danger of getting a culture that does not obtain learning from that. When it comes to safeguarding, first, it is important for fitness-to-practise certificates to be properly policed. That will require good information sharing across every part of the two islands, effectively, so that we do not have teachers moving around and avoiding the fact that their fitness-to-practise certificate has been withdrawn. Secondly, we also need to be sure that there is clarity from the outset on issues such as allowing people to resign during an investigation. That has bedevilled many organisations: someone is under investigation, they ask to resign and the school allows them to do so. That needs to be sorted out up front, because it damages public confidence. It is also a safeguarding risk, because, when that person resigns and the school takes their resignation, three years later, they pop up in another school. It happens in my old job: people pop up in another police service. That has happened time and time again, and those things to be need sorted out at the start as opposed to being dealt with later on. Of course, there are tricky issues to discuss, because it could be that a teacher wants to resign and that it is better for the public purse for the school to let them resign rather than go through years of having to prove a case against them. In that situation, how do you update the system to make sure that they are not allowed to practise? Those are all the little things that need to be finely looked at in the scrutiny stage. Training, a fair fee system and getting the disciplinary processes and safeguarding processes right are really important issues that I look forward to contributing on in the scrutiny stage. We will not divide the House at this stage, and I am glad that there will be a professional body to set, uphold and role-model standards, as long as that is done properly.

1,044 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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