On a first skim read of the paper, the following paragraph leapt out at me:
"Accrediting new teachers: we will replace the current ‘Qualified Teacher Status’ (QTS) with a stronger, more challenging accreditation based on a teacher’s effectiveness in the classroom, as judged by great schools. This new accreditation will raise the quality and status of the teaching profession, better recognising advanced subject knowledge and pedagogy that is rooted in up-to-date evidence. The new process will put the best headteachers in charge of accrediting new entrants to the profession, and give schools more scope to bring in experts from other fields – for example, a talented musician or coder – and put them on a pathway to full accreditation, where their skills can be recognised." (Page 33)
Note: pedagogy = teaching skills and theory in essence.
So they want to ensure "stronger, more challenging accreditation" eh? Strange that they'd look to American research and theory to discover it... And, given the current performance of this government we need to examine if this really is the case?
Currently, or rather until this Tory government took control of Education, no teacher could even begin to teach, unsupervised, without having first proved academically that they have
the basic skills deemed necessary to enable them to teach. This is achieved via first
obtaining a Bachelor degree in a specialised subject they expect to teach in, or a broader Education degree. After which one has to successfully complete a postgraduate certificate course specialising in Education; or undertake "on the job" PostGraduate Training, which is overseen by an accredited university in a school that is good enough to be accepted as a training school. Following successful completion of these criteria, they then have to successfully complete a probationary year actively teaching in the classroom before being awarded full QTS.
Now, let's look at the paragraph from the White Paper, which seems to skuggest that this rigorous process is not good enough:
"give schools more scope to bring in experts from other fields – for example, a talented musician or coder – and put them on a pathway to full accreditation..."
Instead we have here the possibility of in school training, where the implication seems to be that "teachers" can be employed in the classroom, in charge of developing and educating young minds, without having first proven that they have even the basic skills and/or knowledge necessary to educate those young minds in any subject, or having been introduced to the basics of current and developed education theories and practices that have informed the training of teachers up until now.
The decision will then be taken to award the QTS by the headteacher...? Based purely on their effectiveness in the classroom? Without any academic scrutiny at all? Sounds more like the training Jane Eyre got as a "pupil teacher" at Lowood School to me.
"Give scope to head teachers to bring in people" who actually failed to achieve a university degree, but can program computers? My extensive experience with IT developers tells me that they would not necessarily make the best teachers, no matter how brilliant they were at "coding". And the same can be said about musicians: being a brilliant musician is neither necessary nor sufficient to be an excellent music teacher, although they make great peripatetic teachers and we already have those available to schools don't we? A talented writer, perhaps, should teach English? Again, there is no evidence to suggest that being a great writer would automatically make one a great teacher, or even that they have the necessary knowledge of how language actually works in order to teach it to the current expected standard. A linguist is not necessarily a talented writer either.
Teaching, in my view, is a profession of its own: one that requires you to prove yourself, daily, as a teacher. The implications of this paper overall, and this passage in particular undermines that very important profession. It claims elsewhere that the new accreditation is similar to the requirement of working as an intern in the legal profession before becoming a lawyer. But they forget that in order to become a lawyer one first needs an extensive and rigorous academic training, which seems to be missing from the proposed requirements to teach in this white paper. Nowhere could I find any minimum expected standards akin to those we currently expect: a Batchelor's degree - in Education, or in the specialised subject you will teach - and a Postgraduate Certificate in Education, followed by a probationary year in the classroom actively teaching (and the kids themselves generally ensure the worst teachers fail at this stage, no matter how brilliant their academic qualifications).
If this is not the minimum expectation of this proposed experiment, and it is yet another experiment on the lives of a generation of people, we should dismiss it immediately. Is it merely, as I cynically suspect, an underhand way of getting
cheaper "teachers" into the classroom and thus directly undermining the current professional standing of teachers? In my view Headteachers, no matter how good they are as school leaders, are definitely not qualified to judge academic prowess, or assess the level of in depth subject knowledge of specialist subjects apart from their own. That requirement should obviously remain where more objective decisions can be made: by universities; i.e. where cost is absolutely
not the first consideration.
We should also not be accepting this American Research at face value (in my view much of it emanating from neoliberal state shrinking ideology) and then merely "trying it out" on our kids! We really need to consider just how successful the American system currently isn't before adopting the ideas they've put forward over the last 20 years. In my view it is in a total mess. Finland would be a much better model to consider - if we must change it at all!
With current advances in technology and in Artificial Intelligence in particular, this is not a time to be downgrading our expectations of the capabilities of our teaching profession. Indeed to the contrary, we should be ensuring only the best minds have access to the development and education of young British minds: they are our future. Moreover, we can, with the political will to do it, attract those exceptional minds, very easily, in the exact same way we attract people into the most important business jobs: by paying a very competitive salary, instead of as little as we can get away with. If we want British skills and creativity to be the best, we need the best people teaching in schools, helping young people develop critical thinking skills. And yet, at the moment, we are losing far too many of them because of this government's continual experimentation. It was extremely telling that there appears to be very little said in this paper about dealing with the current issues surrounding teacher retention - at a time when teachers are leaving the profession in droves. I wonder why?
Our kids have only one chance at life, and the success of their lives is dependent largely on what happens during their formative years: in primary and in senior school. Stop allowing our Governments to keep experimenting with their young minds and let our teachers get on with teaching for God's sake. Other countries seem to manage it, let's not follow the failed ideology of American libertarians.
