MPs hear that the Office for Standards in Education wants supply companies to come under its jurisdiction. Cherry Canovan reports
SCHOOL inspectors may be given powers to inspect teacher supply agencies to prevent a repeat of the Amy Gehring case.
Education ministers are considering the idea after the chief inspector of schools, Mike Tomlinson, complained that the Office for Standards in Education had no powers to regulate supply agencies.
Ms Gehring, a Canadian supply teacher, was cleared of indecently assaulting Surrey schoolboys, but later admitted having sex with a 16-year-old pupil.
Mr Tomlinson’s most recent annual report, published last month, showed that supply teachers’ lessons tended to be of much poorer quality than those given by experienced teachers.
In secondary schools, supply teachers taught more than four times as many unsatisfactory lessons and less than a third of the proportion of excellent ones.
Mr Tomlinson told MPs this week that he had raised the issue of OFSTED inspecting supply agencies with the Department for Education and Skills.
“We would be very happy to undertake it,” he told the Commons education and skills select committee.
A DFES spokesperson said: “We are very interested in his comments and that is one possible way forward which we are considering at the moment.”
Mr Tomlinson was responding to an attack from committee chair Barry Sheerman, who accused him of being complacent. Mr Sheerman said he would have expected OFSTED to be “knocking on the door” asking to investigate the operations of agencies.
But Mr Tomlinson said he had done just that: “I am not complacent at all. We are reporting very clearly to the department about the problem.”
Select Education, one of the largest supply agencies, said it welcomed initiatives which would raise standards.
A spokesman said agencies would look closely at the parameters of any inspection regime, but added: “We would expect it to focus on standards of recruitment practice and the placing of supply teachers.”
Mr Tomlinson also told the committee that there was nothing more the law could do to curb so-called “authorised absences” of pupils, and that current laws were not acting as a deterrent.
He said that the only answer was for schools to work with parents to stop children missing weeks of lessons, usually to take family holidays.
