England’s schools have the potential to be better. Its teachers have the potential to be admired. It’s pupils have in them the capacity to achieve beyond their wildest expectations. It just takes effort, time and investment - as well as commitment, motivation and endurance - to make it so. In time, the nation can be up there with the best of the best. It can be a world leader.

That is not to say that the country isn’t already doing that. There are plenty of innovative schools and creative teachers doing amazing things, which should be lauded. It is just there needs to be more consistency across the board so that everyone is singing off the same hymn sheet.

This is the opinion of the government, which has, this month, launched a consultation into a package of measures it believes will develop a robust teaching profession. One of the main ways in which this is to be achieved is through the development of a new, independent teaching body.

The ethos of the institution will be predicated on the idea of a body that exists to support and champion high standards of teaching, the Department for Education explained. This will ensure that all of the successes that are currently being achieved will be continued and all of the weaknesses eradicated.

“We all know the difference a great teacher can make to the life of a child, and we’re fortunate to have the most highly qualified teaching profession ever, with more graduates from top universities choosing teaching than ever before,” education secretary Nicky Morgan said earlier this month.

“Now we want to do more to recognise and reward them by supporting the profession as whole, through a new college of teaching and the kind of high-quality professional development opportunities that teachers and school leaders have long argued for. We want to work with the profession to raise standards even further because there can be no more important job than being a teacher.”

Other new schemes outlined in the document include the development of a new fund, which would be designed to support “more high quality, evidence-based professional development programmes”. This would be organised and run by a network of leading teaching schools.

In the paper, the government states that in high-achieving countries - like Singapore, South Korea, Finland and Shanghai - there is an understanding that “the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers”. Not only is teaching well-paid in these countries, the competition between entrants is fierce, ensuring that those enter the profession are highly-skilled and highly-motivated.

“Teachers are trusted and autonomous professionals, rewarded accordingly, who respond by taking responsibility for their own career-long development and improvement,” the authors of the consultation state.

“They work together as a professional community, engaging in cutting-edge research and basing their own practice on the best available evidence of what works. They are accountable for the impact they have on their pupils, and they constantly strive to better their own knowledge, skills and expertise. As a result, the voice of the teaching profession is a powerful and respected one.”