The Chinese Are Coming To Save Us! Or Are They?

In a desperate bid to make British children better at maths the DfE, via Liz Truss, have decided to jet in 60 Chinese mathematics teachers to run maths classes in 30 "maths hubs", whatever they are. The story from the BBC website is here: click me!

I can see numerous business leaders and politicians breathing a huge sigh of relief that we will finally have a numerate generation ready for employment and a set of Pisa results that can be boasted about around the world. On second thoughts, business leaders aren't that stupid and surely can't believe that these 60 visitors from the East will make any difference whatsoever; politicians, however, are stupid enough to believe that this will work despite being told otherwise by various people (read the comments on the BBC article).

So why won't it work? Why the negativity?

I shall answer the second question first, as it's quick and simple:
This is just the latest in a long running campaign to denigrate the current teaching profession in the UK. For a while now ministers from the DfE have stated in various speeches to anyone who will listen that we need top graduates in teaching, and mathematics is one of those subjects where there are relatively few top graduates working as teachers. This because mathematics top graduates are like rocking horse poo (rare, if you're unsure) and get snapped up on big wages, that schools can't really afford to compete with, by industry. And anyway, would a top graduate really be the best person to get algebra across to a stroppy bunch of teenagers? Probably not, as the aforesaid top graduate won't be able to understand why these teenagers struggle to see the point of "letters in maffs". All the government are currently doing is ensuring that no-one will really want to become a maths teacher and the crisis will build in schools from what is already a critical state.

So now we move onto why flying in 60 maths teachers from Shanghai is frivolous at best:
What ministers fail to realise is that the results from certain provinces in China aren't truly representative; statistics are doctored to show them in their best light, something that politicians, particularly those from the DfE are well practiced in. What ministers, and clearly Ms Truss also fail to acknowledge, is that the learning culture of Chinese students is completely different to that of UK students. I'm not saying that UK students shouldn't be like their Chinese contemporaries, but the fact is that they aren't and are highly unlikely to change due to a guest speaker from Shanghai. The consequences of not doing well in maths in China is poverty and starvation; the consequences in Britain is the entitlement to endless benefits which allow you to have much of what you desire without any personal outlay. The incentive to succeed in maths is just not there in the UK. So no matter what these Chinese teachers, very good they may well be, if the horse doesn't want to drink, forcing its head under water will be pointless and will likely end up in a four-lettered tirade towards the guest. Until attitudes towards mathematics change in the UK, the DfE may as well save on the air fares.

This is yet another example of pigheadedness from a DfE minister designed to fool the public into believing that they actually care about anyone but themselves in the run up to a general election. Fortunately, I think that the general public have been under-estimated by ministers and they can see through their smoke and mirrors; at least I hope they can.

The Problem With Top Graduates...

The government has been on about attracting more top graduates into teaching for a while now. They've offered bursaries (see here), expanded the remit of the teaching recruitment charity Teach First to allow it to recruit greater numbers (see here), and made various announcements that have been lapped up by the media of varying quality (Telegraph, Independent, Mirror, Daily Mail to link just a few). A simple search online will unearth hundreds more articles I have no doubt, if you can be bothered that is.

The requirement to actually have a qualification to teach in the state schools of England has been relaxed in the most favoured types of school for the Department for Education, namely academies and free schools. The qualification requirement has never been compulsory in private/public schools, the type of school that a high proportion of MPs attended, or in the case of my local MP, wish they'd attended. Now you may say that if it's worked in private and public schools, what's the problem? They get great results that state schools could get after all. It's a question of intake, student motivation and support from home that is a major difference my friends. Anyway, that's a separate point; what I wanted to cover is the myth regarding top graduates.

There are a few subjects that have been highlighted by DfE ministers and other MPs on programmes like Question Time that really ought to have top graduates teaching the youth of today; namely mathematics and science. You could throw "new subject" computer science into that mix too, as you are either very good at it and therefore probably did it at university; there is no middle ground with computer science: either you're brilliant or you're crap. I'm the latter.

At A Level and Degree I couldn't agree more that maths and science could do with being taught by top graduates, although they need not be the be all and end all. Teaching of those courses is to children who have chosen to take those subjects and already have an deep-seated interest in the subject. They not only want to know how to do something, they want to know why it works that way; something that a top graduate can explain with ease, whilst others would possibly have to do a little research. So, dear DfE and those in expensive suits in Westminster, feel free to attract top graduates for those posts, but don't disregard others. You will have to dangle numerous carrots in front of these high flyers to divert their attention from the lucrative careers that top mathematicians and scientists have traditionally entered. It might help if DfE press releases and various Ofsted employees didn't consistently criticise teachers in the media too. I digress again...

My main query is whether a top graduate really is the best type of person to teach maths and science to disinterested children who have no choice but to be there and just want to get the minimum grade in order to never have to sit through a lesson again? Unfortunately with a total lack of interest in the subject, the likelihood of achieving that grade is minimal. These students need to be taught in a different way. Empathy with the inability to understand a concept first time around is hugely helpful. A top graduate in their subject will invariably have found most, if not all of their subject pretty straightforward. The trouble is this means that our much lauded top graduates will get increasingly frustrated as their charges fail to grasp covalent bonds or simultaneous equations. A teacher who was not a top graduate probably won't have found everything easy, and can therefore understand the frustrations.

If you couple this lack of empathy for a  student's woes with a lack of any teacher training or qualification then the recipe is potentially disastrous. If there's one thing that my PGCE did teach me it was different strategies for dealing with classes, mainly through teaching placements admittedly, but without it I would have floundered even more than I actually did in my NQT year.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that top graduates couldn't empathise, they are just less likely to understand. So Mr Gove, DfE, Sir Michael and the various other political types who drone on and on about top graduates, they may not actually be the answer to all your problems!