Nick Seaton: These school changes are tough but deserve top marks

This week's announcement that schools will, in future, have to publish the qualifications of their staff has brought a storm of protest. But it's not just that. Schools will also have to publish teachers' pay rates, sickness rates and whether or not they offer value for money.

It sounds tough and it is. The teachers' unions have expressed their outrage and marshalled their support. How many employees, they argue, have their qualifications, sickness rates and the value for money they offer published for all to see?

Nevertheless, there should be no argument about the publication of teachers' qualifications. Only a couple of decades ago, it was common practice for schools to list the names and qualifications of all their staff. No-one thought anything of it.

Now, only independent schools and some of the best state schools do what was common-place until recently. In a majority of state schools, the spread of an egalitarian, non-judgmental culture has kept everyone in the dark. Yet moves to ignore, or play down, the qualifications of teachers was a serious change that needed reversing.

"We teach children, not subjects" has been the battle cry, of progressives while they have simultaneously subsumed traditional subjects, such as English, maths, geography and history into "cross-curricular themes" or "integrated humanities". This almost guaranteed that standards would fall, because an individual subject includes a body of content that is easily lost when the discrete subject disappears.

Of course teachers teach children. But the use of that phrase to disguise the loss of subject knowledge was typical of the progressives' deceitful use of language – capture the language and you capture the culture. Now, it seems, they have been caught out and not before time.

Why, in secondary schools especially, shouldn't individual subjects be taught by people who love them and have studied them in depth? That, surely, is a fundamental characteristic of the professionalism of teachers – the reason they are, or were, widely respected. Primary teachers, too, are likely to be more effective, when they have studied for a serious degree, rather than the ideological nonsense they currently absorb in teacher training.

Some excellent teachers who are not highly qualified in academic terms may feel threatened by these proposals. They shouldn't be. Parents and their pupils know who they are and will support them as they've always done. The key point is that teachers who are unqualified and ineffective should hopefully leave the profession before their weaknesses reach the public domain.

Publication of teachers' pay rates? Why not? Especially at headteacher level. Recent reports suggest that many heads are now earning well in excess of 100,000 a year, sometimes double that. But are they worth it? How many heads are really worth four times as much as an effective, well-qualified subject teacher?

The publication of sickness rates on a school-by-school basis should also be welcomed. Already the teachers' unions and their allies are spreading scare stories about the victimisation of excellent teachers suffering from long-term illnesses who may need regular time off. But what about malingering teachers who regularly abuse their sick-leave privileges?

Many schools spend thousands of pounds each year hiring expensive supply cover for absent teachers. Conscientious colleagues, who suffer in silence, will be glad to see that exposed. And why shouldn't the weak management that allows such abuses also be exposed?

Yes, those with a vested interest will shout and scream to the high heavens. And those of us who have recently developed a cynical distrust of politicians may well suspect this is a clever ruse by Prime Minister David Cameron and his team to pass the buck: if your schools are terrible, it is for you, the taxpayers, to do something about it.

Even so, if it is properly managed, this simple measure could make a massive difference. It could, of its own accord, encourage young people considering entering the teaching profession to choose their A-level and degree courses more carefully – and work harder, if they are serious.

Linked with serious improvements in teacher training, more honest publication of school league tables and, above all, the careful monitoring of what information is, and is not, published, this could bring a return to a high-status teaching profession and the raising of standards across the board.

Even on the information currently available, identifying poorly performing schools and teachers is not all that difficult. Changing things for the better is the hard part.

Until the overall quality of the teaching profession, and those who lead it, is improved, everything else is wishful thinking. This is where it all starts and we have to hope that it works.

Nick seaton, from York, is chairman of the Campaign for real education.