Who’d be a teacher these days? Until about 50 years ago, your outlook didn’t matter very much provided you were reasonably competent. Today the profession is coming close to saying that anyone who doesn’t profess progressive and morally relativistic views shouldn’t bother applying.

Glawdys Leger, an experienced Catholic teacher in a Church of England state school, expressed her views on LGBT issues during a religious education lesson. Leger also raised objections to teaching LGBT material. She was sacked by Bishop Justus CofE School in Bromley, south London, in May 2022, but her troubles didn’t end there. Leger also had her case sent to the statutory teachers’ disciplinary body, the Teaching Regulation Agency (TRA), for disciplinary action which could have led to her being banned for life from teaching in any school in the UK.

Glawdys Leger’s troubles didn’t end there

In a decision on Wednesday, much to her relief, the TRA declined to ban her from the classroom. As a result, she remains free to teach.

A happy ending? Unfortunately, not. Although it did not disqualify her, the TRA found Leger guilty of unacceptable professional conduct. There seems little doubt that this will make it harder for her to get a job in future.

Public confidence in the profession, the body added, ‘could be seriously weakened if conduct such as that found against Ms Leger were not treated with the utmost seriousness when regulating the conduct of the profession.’ This is worrying for any number of reasons.

The TRA comes across as a depressingly managerialist and blinkered organisation with little understanding that children at school, not to mention society as a whole, might actually benefit from classes being exposed to provocative viewpoints and the rough and tumble of moral and political argument. The TRA’s report talks of the importance of ‘showing tolerance of and respect for the rights of others’, but what about tolerance for Leger’s deeply-held religious views?

Equally disconcerting is that the body in charge of the school in question was not a collection of functionaries from some grey and faceless local authority, but the Aquinas Trust, a CofE education outfit, which, according to its website, has values ‘founded on Christian principles.’ Things are coming to a pretty pass when even an organisation of this sort finds itself embroiled in such a row. Organisations like the Aquinas Trust need to be reminded of their own values and the need to be faithful to them.

But we also need to think carefully about the TRA, with its broad remit to deal with what it sees as good professional practice. The reason schools are subjected to a body like this is, one suspects, largely connected with a perceived need for professionalisation: if doctors or lawyers have their professional bodies, teaching must have its regulator too. But does education really need close controls of this sort? Put bluntly, cack-handed doctors or venal lawyers are an immeasurably greater threat than teachers with opinions seen as unorthodox or harmful. There is a strong case for cutting back the powers of the TRA and having it as a mere regulator of last resort for really serious matters. Schools themselves should be trusted to determine whether a teacher’s views, or classroom manner, are suitable for its pupils. If it is happy with a particular teacher, it should not be the business of a body such as the TRA to tell it that it is not allowed to appoint them.

There is, after all, a desperate shortage of experienced classroom teachers – especially of modern languages, which ironically was Leger’s speciality. The last thing schools still recovering from the effects of Covid need is artificial bureaucratic obstacles to the hiring of competent ones from self-important bodies like the TRA.