AIBU to think getting into teaching should be easier?

I dislike the prejudice that teachers being intelligent and knowledgeable is somehow a barrier to teaching.

Well, yes. I have a Masters in maths and yet being really good at maths doesn't mean I can't teach kids who struggle with maths. I'm perfectly capable of breaking simple concepts down for them.

Absolutely this^^

I dislike the prejudice that teachers being intelligent and knowledgeable is somehow a barrier to teaching.

I am pretty sure you wouldn't hear this expressed in other countries' educational systems. The UK is quite odd in that way.

I teach Economics and absolutely do not agree that "subject knowledge is the easiest part of teaching." You need excellent subject knowledge so it frees up your brain to deal with all the other stuff. You have to keep adding to your subject knowledge and thinking how to get it across to different students and situations. Otherwise what are you even doing in a classroom?

For the hard of reading at the back..... Independent schools do not routinely employ unqualified teachers..even for 6th form level. It is absolutely not the obvious solution to this.

Maybe state secondary isn't for her, if she thinks a PhD automatically means she doesn't need to learn anything to go into a new career.

She can apply for School Centered Teaching Training programmes or aim for independent schools.
She may want to find some humility first though

@KateDelRick Totally agree about PhD not necessarily making the best teachers.

A few years back I used to mentor teachers from Oxford uni who were training to be teachers. They were rarely mediocre and often either brilliant or awful.

The trouble is, good teaching is not simply having great subject knowledge. The skill of teaching is being able to break that knowledge down, to simplify it and communicate it in a way that makes sense to those who are not good at the subject.
Some of the worst PGCE students I mentored were the brightest students because they just couldn’t understand why some kids did not get (what seemed to them to be) quite basic stuff. Because so many of them naturally got their subjects, they struggled to get students who didn’t. This was particularly true of some of the very bright maths teachers.

And again being very bright does not mean that you will be good at classroom management, dealing with SEN students, motivating kids who do not want to be there, understanding and implementing the rubric of the exam board, creating personal relationships, having the creativity to develop new and interesting ways to engage and communicate the students with the content, managing SEND requirements, sequencing lessons and so on.
In fact, subject knowledge is the easy part of teaching… it’s the rest of the stuff that makes it so difficult!

@ReadTheBlurb thank you

They had a structured lesson with a starter activity, main body and end point. They chunked tasks down to ensure students remained focused and on task. They asked targeted questions to check for understanding and think-pair-share strategies so that students could bounce ideas off each other and support one another's knowledge development. They referred to the specification and exam context so that students understood why what they were doing was relevant. I didn't hear a single student voice in the PhD candidate's "lesson" - that's not teaching.

@ReadTheBlurb so what did the trainee do

My DCs independent school had several unqualified teachers, but they were all in specialist subjects that were difficult to do a PGCE in at the time. Plenty of business studies and economics teachers are unqualified for example, but they tend to teach at sixth form rather than younger children and being independent schools, there are usually fewer behavioural issues to deal with.

They need to learn how to teach.
Knowing your subject isnt enough.
It twkes years to become good at ut!

I agree. Before we hand over a fucktonne of cash plus VAT we parents tend to check this kind of thing out.

I wouldn’t bother, personally. It’s a myth that private schools routinely employ unqualified teachers. It certainly isn’t the case that unqualified teachers have been employed in any of the 6 private schools I’ve been involved with. Parents just wouldn’t put up with it these days.

People in universities don't actually 'teach' in the actual sense of the word. They stand up and talk about their subject, and it's up to the students to understand it. In a school, you need to know how to get the pupils to understand it, and all the different things that achieving that for all the different types of pupils you'll have in her classroom, involves. She would be completely out of her dept if she was just thrown into a classroom without proper training, and this definitely wouldn't be fair to the pupils.

For balance, I've worked with a dozen or so PhD qualified ex industry teachers who were perfectly decent teachers and colleagues.

Super specialist knowledge doesn't make you a good teacher necessarily but it doesn't make you a bad one either.

The ability to get on with all sorts of people, organisational skills, home support, a cast iron immune system, a grasp of organisational politics and optimism even in the face of experience are much more significant.

One school where I taught had a regular connection with a teacher training course, and I, as class teacher, played some part in mentoring.
One candidate who came in was, in academic terms, awesomely well-qualified; I wasn't that much older than her, and my qualifications were humble by comparison.
However, it became painfully apparent that possessing all that knowledge, and communicating it, were two different matters, and things did not go well, despite my best efforts to support her. as I said, I wasn't that much older than her, and reporting my misgivings to her supervising tutor almost felt like "dobbing in". I expressed my misgiving to our lovely Deputy Head, who wisely advised me to look ahead to next September, and consider what was best for children in her charge.
And this was a student who had actively opted for PGCE.

If she thinks that then encourage her to go for it OP! She will just have to be a bit patient for a few years while she gets the hang of it.

I did it myself as a career changer and it's mostly been very satisfying.

There is an alternative but it will still require training. FE college, get your DET which will allow you to teach in FE, and then if you choose to, you can do QTLS, which has parity with QTS and will allow you to teach in schools too. But FE colleges are not just for A level students, despite only taking them from the age of 16, so even then you can't cherry pick what you want to teach.

Having a PhD and teaching at university level will not automatically give her the knowledge and skills required to teach children/teenagers.

Subject knowledge is important but there is so much more to it. How to break down concepts, knowledge of the curriculum and how/why it is taught, how to assess pupil learning within a lesson and adapt accordingly, knowledge of SEND and how to support those children in a classroom, safeguarding, pastoral support. I could go on.

If she is qualified in STEM she will get a bursary while she trains.

Teaching in schools is very different to teaching adults. I work with trainee teachers through our SCITT and sometimes, people with PhDs find they just aren't cut out for it (as do some others!). They are undoubtedly very clever people, but keeping Y9 engaged and learning on a wet Friday afternoon requires a whole different set of skills.

If she wants to teach, she needs to do a SCITT course or PGCE.

Just because of her academic qualifications?

How about you go back and read again? Private schools do not just routinely take anyone..increasingly so as they have to justify the fees. No-one is paying £££ for unqualified staff. Unless your friend is prepared to understand go on the job training and is able to perform well at an interview lesson, and teach every year group, she'd best not bother.

The QTS is the teaching qualification. A PGCE is an academic qualification that you can do on top of QTS, and is worth a third of a masters degree. It’s essay/research based, and is not part of the teacher training. QTS is what you get for successfully completing all your actual teacher training. On my course about half are only doing QTS. We all do the actual teacher training together. Those of us who are also doing the PGCE have a few extra lectures and have to produce two 8000 word projects of the sort you might submit as a dissertation in a bachelor’s degree. They do build on the stuff we’re learning in teacher training, but it’s lots of reading journals and writing in an appropriate academic style, not really useful for classroom skills to be honest.

We could all say “I think my friend would make an excellent doctor” or “my friend would make an excellent teacher” or “my friend would make an excellent plumber” but without the proper, relevant training and qualifications, they don’t, and shouldn’t stand a chance. I wonder why you think it should be so easy to be a teacher? I guess it shows you have no real concept of the job.

PGCE training IS “getting into teaching”.

Paedagogy is important.