Unqualified Teachers Are Welcome

A mate of mine watches Top Gear every week, but I wouldn't ask him to fix my car.
My sister is a big fan of Holby City and Casualty, but I wouldn't expect her to take my appendix out if the need ever occurs.
In which case, why do the government think that it's acceptable to have unqualified people teaching the young people of the UK?

Supporters of Michael Gove will tell you that people have been teaching in the top private schools of the land for centuries and produced the best results, so why not have the same policy for state funded academies? The reason is not that those without Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) don't know their stuff - according to the DfE there are engineers, scientists, musicians and university professors with a burning desire to relinquish their large salaries and swap them for the average salary afforded to a teacher. Of course, academies have the freedom to pay more to the "right" candidates for teaching posts, but with the news that the Natinal Audit Office are refusing to sign off a £63 million overspend by the DfE last year, this "benefit" may not last too much longer, unless savings are made elsewhere.

There is a marked difference between private/public schools like Eton and Harrow and many academies/state funded schools that will almost certainly ensure that those who haven't done a teaching qualification will struggle in the classroom and that is behaviour. A university or school based teaching qualification trains its attendees in two main areas:

1. How to plan a lesson effectively.
2. How to control a class of 30ish kids.

The key for both points is behaviour. If the class is "nice" and has a will to succeed (like almost all classes in private schools) then a teacher will get away with a poor lesson and some learning will take place. In a classroom with less diligent children shall we say, a poorly planned lesson from an inexperienced and unqualified teacher will be mayhem at best, and once that has happened that teacher will struggle to win the class over in future lessons.

Trainee teachers always say that the hardest part of their teaching practise is controlling a class and discipline within the learning environment. To think that anyone who knows a lot about a particular subject can just walk in off the street and be a success in the classroom is frankly naive, insulting to teachers and only goes to show how out-of-touch politicians really are. It is also another stealth dig in the ribs of the profession itself, something that appears to be an active policy from Michael Gove and his chums.

This government has been a disaster for the morale of the teaching profession in the UK. I have to be honest that all I can forsee for the near future are more strikes and disruption as teachers, having been backed into a corner, have little option other than to vote with their feet. Recruitment of teachers will slow and experienced staff will look to get out, leaving a pretty bleak future for the young people of Britain.

Student Teachers Season

It's that time of year when all the fresh-faced trainee teachers begin to arrive in school. They've enrolled on a PGCE (Post-Graduate Certificate of Education) course having completed a degree and realised that the thousands of pounds they've spent on university tuition fees has given them a qualification that offers little in the way of employment prospects. Unless you want to be a teacher of course.

Before anyone says it, I do realise that employers will look beyond the subject of a qualification if the grade is good and use it as an indication to whether someone is willing to put the time and effort into learning a subject/job, but this assumes that you've got an interview in the first place, and let's be honest if an employer offering a well-paid position was to compare similar degrees in say business studies or maths with that of sociology or anthropology, who do you think would get the interview/job? That's not to say that these subjects don't have some worth in society, but perhaps not in the numbers that universities churn out.

Anyway, I digress. Our new and enthusiastic teachers turn up having had their heads filled by university lecturers course tutors with information that is generally totally outdated and impossible to use in practice; stuff like, "if the class is noisy then just put your hand in the air and they will immediately wonder what you are doing and be quiet" - not only will the blood drain out of your arm but once the class has realised that it's just a ploy to get them quiet they will probably just talk even louder, having told you exactly what they think of you.

I had a trainee teacher in with my worst class yesterday, along with someone who's thinking about becoming a teaching assistant. Now when I say that they are my worst class, that doesn't mean academically, it means behaviorally. And that's not to say that they do anything really bad, they just talk/sleep/do anything other than what they are supposed to do. I'm not too proud to admit that I really don't like teaching them as a group, and that's partly because the formulae (the correct plural of formula, by the way) used to calculate their target grades means that most should be getting B grade, which isn't going to happen, even if it does get a bit parky in hell. Most of them are nice individuals, but a combination of a really dull set of topics (you try making statistics interesting!), a very sociable bunch of kids and one or two total drop-kicks who like disrupting those with a chance of employment in the future has led to a number of unpleasant hours spent in each others' company each week.

When people are in your classroom you do try to put on a bit of a show, but it's impossible with this class. You spend most of your time asking people to turn around and stop chatting/sleeping or asking someone a question where they reply "Don't know, I didn't get it" as a default before having actually read the question until in the end I went ballistic. It's not something you do in front of guests, but I'd had enough. I didn't bother to talk to my guests after the lesson, funnily enough I wasn't in the mood. I don't imagine the PGCE student's university tutor ever mentioned that classes can be that bad, so at least the trainee now knows what to expect I suppose. I'm sure, had the university tutor been there they could have suggested different strategies.

Which reminds me of an incident a few years ago when I was mentoring a trainee teacher at another school. His tutor was coming in and had chosen what looked on paper to be a nice class to observe - set 1. They were however, the worst set 1 you could ever imagine, full of arrogant and less intelligent than they thought they were kids, who looked at staff as if they just scraped them off their shoe. Plus a few autistic/Asperger's children for good measure, whom the horrible kids made fun of. All-in-all, a grotty class. The lesson was very well planned with interactive stuff involving the computer, games and all the other artificial stuff that people plan when they are being observed. It looked great on paper until the computer crashed, Johnny went mental and the class erupted. As an observer you are supposed to do just that: observe. And since it was his crucial one, I couldn't jump in and help. By the end though, some learning had been achieved and the best was made from a bad situation.

And so came feedback time, where I allowed the tutor to go first. She was a frail old thing of around 70 (no exaggeration) and praised the planning whilst sympathising with the technology issues (as if she'd know!). And then came her bombshell: "They were quite lively" she said, "and I felt you could have dealt with that a little better. Next time, may I suggest that you sit the class down and discuss their behaviour with them and get them to come up with their own solutions as to how it could improve." I won't go into my response, suffice to say that subsequent meetings with that tutor were a little frosty.

This is what our universities are teaching young teachers - they are clueless and like Ofsted inspectors, so far removed from real life. Trainee teachers need to know what really goes on in the classroom, not some hypothetical clap-trap that worked in the 1950s when the teacher could always resort the cane if necessary.

The best advice to give to a trainee teacher nowadays: "Get out before you're in too deep".

Good News For Current Qualified Teachers

Trainee teachers are a bit of a lottery - you never know who the university are going to send you. We've had a bit of a mixed bunch this year to be honest. The first cohort, before Christmas, were very good and will make excellent classroom practitioners.

The second cohort however was a different kettle of fish altogether. We had one who couldn't write on the board, another who ignored the class entirely and talked to themselves whilst facing the board, and an English trainee who couldn't read - I jest you not!

You'd have thought that all three would have failed, but "No". They are all able to qualify as teachers in the future for reasons beyond my comprehension: if they aren't good enough they should be failed. So perhaps the inability to allow people to fail goes beyond teaching children in schools.

To be honest just one look at these trainees should have told the universities that they weren't up to the job, but in today's market someone will take the money that comes with each trainee, so it might as well be them.

The moral of the story: don't believe the governement when they say that loads of people are training to be teachers, because even though numbers are reasonably high (although not as high as they used to be I believe), the standard of some is appalling. Quantity rather than quality seems to be the order of the day.