Eight members resign from General Teaching Council as body tells MLAs it can’t guarantee safeguarding of pupils

The safety of pupils in schools across Northern Ireland is being put at risk due to the inability of the General Teaching Council (GTC) to operate effectively, Stormont’s Education Committee has been told.

LAs heard how eight members of the council had resigned in the last week as it addressed concerns of bullying, harassment and the undermining of staff.

Council members admitted there was no easy fix to the problems which have plagued the body responsible for overseeing the profession for the past five years.

Facing a series of tribunals, 112 complaints by whistleblowers and placed in special measures by the Department of Education, the chief executive of the GTC, along with the chair and deputy chair, were all giving evidence to the committee amid ongoing concerns over dysfunction within the organisation.

The resignations are the latest blow to the troubled GTC, with chief executive Sam Gallaher admitting some had simply given up at the ongoing crisis.

“Going by the information that’s been cited in their resignation they have been concerned about the functioning of the council,” Mr Gallaher told MLAs.

“There is concern that, whether the chair recognises or not, people must feel that they are being bullied or harassed.

“They are just concerned that the council is not pulling together and business isn’t being conducted.

“Certainly the meetings have been, for the past year, I would determine, to be ineffectual.”

Earlier chair of the GTC, Brendan Morgan, had told the committee he had been unaware of complaints over bullying and harassment and that the council did not have the necessary permission to view the whistleblowing complaints.

“If you are a teacher and a pupils asks you where they had made mistakes in their work, here we have the teacher saying they can’t tell you,” he said.

“They’re confidential so we don’t know.”

He added that some members of the council refused to recognise his authority as chair of the council and he told MLAs that others refused to communicate with him and the vice chair.

Mr Morgan said the council was currently “unable to guarantee” the safeguarding of children and young people in Northern Ireland.

“No professional can guarantee the safeguarding of children by the mechanisms in place in GTC because we cannot remove teachers from the register,” he said.

“We have, for many, many years, put our concerns on record.

“To be fair, there’s nobody in GTCNI to blame for the non-regulation of teachers,” he said

“That problem lies with the Department of Education. The former minister for education made a statement to the Assembly committee in November 2014 in which he said: ‘There’s a grave problem facing education’. Nothing has been done about that since that time.”

Further concerns were raised by the impact of Brexit, which will see teachers from EU countries subject to more rigorous, and costly, vetting before they can work in Northern Ireland.

“As of September 2021, we will no longer have access to the database which screens professional teachers,” said Mr Morgan.

Teachers from the Republic of Ireland could have limited job opportunities, something that would particularly affect the Irish-medium sector.

“Those people will have to be treated as rest of the world applicants,” he said. “They will be viewed the same as a teacher from Venezuela.

“In future they will have to go through ‘a more costly process for GTCNI’. That figure was estimated as 10 times higher than the current £44 registration.

“It will possibly keep teachers out who want to come up to the Irish-medium sector.”.

SDLP MLA Daniel McCrossan said he now “firmly believes the organisation may be beyond repair”.

“Children in Northern Ireland may be at risk today because the regulator doesn’t have the necessary power to remove teachers deemed to pose a risk from the register. That is totally unacceptable,” he said.

“What’s worse is that successive Education Ministers have been aware of the problem and have failed to act decisively. The failure to restore Stormont for three years put children at risk for that period. That is a damning indictment of the DUP and Sinn Fein.”

When asked by Sinn Fein MLA Nicola Brogan about the working relationship between the chief executive and the chair and vice-chair of the council, Mr Gallaher said: “The relationship that currently exists and has existed since the beginning of 2020 is not what I would envisage a proper working relationship between a chair and the executive should be.

“We don’t meet regularly, everything is done on email, so it’s difficult, okay? It’s difficult, not for the want of trying.

“I try to do my job, but quite clearly you’re trying to operate in very difficult circumstances in relation to the board.

“I just get an impression that there are different agendas at work and that’s not helping.”

Belfast Telegraph