to think that would be teachers need to have good Maths and English

[therealimposter]

Woe betide me that I make a grammatical error in this post.

Somebody was telling me that they would like to train as a teacher but they have failed the essential Maths and English skills tests three times each. They want to teach Science in a Secondary School. I cant help but think that they should find another job that they want to do as their Maths and English just isn't up to scratch.

But clearly I shouldn’t be allowed to teach because I find one aspect of the job challenging...
You completed the skills tests. You've demonstrated a basic level of functional numeracy. If someone couldn't work out how many of their class passed a test then i would say they probably shouldn't be teaching.

I don't get threads like this. The general consensus is that teaching needs to be a more respected profession across the board, that parents want highly educated teachers teaching and then at the same time we've had people on here suggesting that we should have teachers who can't work out something as simple as a percentage or calculate costs for a trip; that we should have teachers without an elementary understanding of literacy and numeracy because otherwise they can't help SEND students because they don't know what it is to find something difficult; and that loads of subjects don't need maths.

Why is it still socially acceptable to say 'oh I don't really do maths' and be functionally innumerate?

Would you say my friend should not really teach because she struggled so much to pass the assessment, or do you think that, perhaps, her experience may have made her a 'better' teacher in some way e.g. more empathetic and more determined to help struggling students to achieve?
She passed the test and demonstrated a fairly basic level of literacy and numeracy.

She's not a 'better' teacher because she required tuition to pass a fairly straightforward test. Good on her for brushing up and getting to the required standard, but people have found things difficult in life and can empathise without

I dont need to have been a top athlete at school to empathise with a students who gets injured mid season. I don't need to have applied to Oxbridge or medical school to empathise with how my 6th formers are feeling. I don't need to have found a fairly basic maths test hard to empathise with studnets who've found something hard. Are the best palliative nurses the ones who've lost someone? Are the best midwives always the ones who've had the most babies, and do they have to have had a traumatic birth to be an even better midwife? Does a doctor have to have suffered or known someone to suffer with an illness to be a better doctor?

Given the amount of shit data churned out by some schools, there’s an argument to make the tests more rigorous, or at least introduce extra elements like ‘is it reasonable to base a teacher’s pay rise on their class meeting their targets?’

People might say ‘oh but you don’t need maths to be a PE teacher’ (ignoring the science element of PE), but those teachers (especially PE tbh) may well go on to be HoD or SLT. They’ll definitely need it then.

I don't think an English teacher in a secondary school needs to be good at maths. I'd 1000% rather have an excellent teacher who knew their own subject matter than one who could add quickly in their head. A science teacher will need be good at maths (at least to a reasonable standard) to teach physics and be up to a minimum standard in English as there is writing involved.

Would-be should be hyphenated in your title because it's an adjective. "Would be" is a modal phrase to discuss hypothetical or possible situations.

"She's a would-be singer."

"I would be so happy if I got the job."

I wanted to teach English but couldn't because I couldn't get my maths O level. In my job, I deal with spreadsheets and pay people. I would be doing the same amount of maths if I taught English. The system is flawed.

I'm just staring preparation for my PGCE and I'm actually grateful for these tests. Before deciding to do the PGCE I couldn't do basic division or my times tables pass 5 without counting up. Nor could I simplify or do anything else with a fraction!

Now I'm studying long division, I can convert fractions to percentages and decimals and so on. I have ADHD alongside some other issues and the test centres provide for this.

I got a C in GCSE 12 years ago, I'm not sure how I managed that!

It's stressful alongside finishing my Msc and preparing for the PGCE but if I couldn't handle stress and multiple workloads I wouldn't be entering the teaching profession!

I don't think an English teacher in a secondary school needs to be good at maths
They need to be functionally numerate, which is what the skills tests show.
They are maths for teaching, not maths to be good at maths.

Does anyone think that a maths teacher doesn’t need to be good at English?

No essays in maths after all.

The Professional Skills Assessment (Literacy) is designed to assess the skills a teacher would use in his/her professional life. This would include: writing reports; writing letters home to parents; reading and responding to articles of relevance to their specialist area (CPD); perhaps reading a child's EHCP or support plan and so on.

Therefore, any teacher would need to have a basic competence in English, irrespective of the subject s/he taught. Furthermore, many candidates who take the test, wish to teach in the primary sector where teachers need to be very good generalists.

The example maths questions listed earlier weren’t hard. I was surprised to hear someone later on say a calculator was available on screen. Most graduate schemes have verbal and numerical reasoning tests which are far harder than the test for teachers so yes I’d have an expectation that all teachers should have a functional numeracy and literacy skills. They have an important role to play in supporting skills acquisition in their pupils.

I was surprised to hear someone later on say a calculator was available on screen.

In real life, you’d have a calculator for doing the sorts of calculations tested in the assessments. The whole point is to make sure you have the functional maths skills needed to teach. I’m very good at maths but would still use a calculator for working out trip numbers, costs per pupil, data percentages etc.

well, I have just done both the numercay and literacy sample tests posted above.

I trained as primary teacher years ago and currently teach adults and small groups of kids in a non school setting.
I have prepared my 3 kids for 11+ too.

The English was easy, except for the punctuation, where they said there were 15 mistakes and I could not find the last one. Also, affected/effected which I always get wrong, but I know that and double check myself every time.

The maths was interested. I had no problem with how to do them, but it wasn't clear (I didn't look that hard) which ones had to be done as mental maths and which ones you can use a calculator. I could do all the harder ones in the second section, but may have struggled with time without a calculator.
All except the box and whisper graph, which I have never seen before.

They could be passed by any kid sitting the 11+ actually, and by any confident kid doing year 6 SATs. If that is the level they require, it really isn't that high!

The maths may have been interested, but it was also interesting!

and I think it was a whisker graph (it wasn't whispering to me anyway)

Yy box and whisker graph, I did the tests several tears ago, but many years after I level maths, and I had to mug up on that as I had never seen it before!

I agree with most on this thread, the skills tests test basic skills which I would want any teacher, of any subject, to have.

Haha several years ago and it was after O levels obv

Does anyone think that a maths teacher doesn’t need to be good at English?

It depends on whether or not parents are happy with a report with spelling mistakes etc

I hope that you are good at English

Here in NSW, Australia, teaching has, for the last decade or two, been the degree people tend to go into when they're complete dopes and didn't get the marks required to get into anything else. Thankfully, they are finally reviewing this system and making it more difficult for people to not only get into teaching, but to get a job afterwards.

Unfortunately for some time now we have not been in a position to remedy the situation ourselves. We need teachers to the extent we have to scrape the bottom of the barrel three times over - yes obviously in an ideal world someone who struggles with basic maths is not an acceptable candidate for giving children what may be their lifetimes understanding of, say, physics, but it is marginally better to have someone there who isn't great but can make them read and check off the requirements for the curriculum, than it is to stuff 90 kids into every classroom 🙁

To be honest passing the English and maths tests isn’t that difficult. They are basic English and maths to ensure teachers have the ability/intelligence to teach children of all abilities. If people can’t pass these tests, because of lack of ability or effort then I wouldn’t want them teaching my children.

I corrected my maths teachers spelling and grammar in class a lot in high school. This was final year in high school too, so she should have known better.

In my defence, I wouldn't have, but she had called me stupid in front of the class and said I'm never going to pass maths. So she kind of deserved it.

On the positive side: if your friend ever becomes a teacher, they will be perfect for senior management.

Most teachers are employed as teachers rather than teachers of a specific year or subject. Therefore a headteacher could direct a teacher to teach any subject if required. Of course, there's a preference for employing people to teach a subject who have a degree in that subject. I once knew a secondary Dance teacher who, due to the fact that Dance doesn't give a full teaching timetable, was also teaching Geography, Drama and Maths to KS3 classes.

So saying that different subject teachers need different levels of English and Maths competence is ridiculous.

The Skills Tests are relatively simple. Having to revise and revise for a test doesn't mean that the skills have been embedded, just that they've been learnt for the test. Therefore, when it comes to using those skills in the workplace, the application is sometimes lacking.

For context, I did maths as my minor pathway at Uni and Further Maths to A Level.

Personally, I hated the skills tests in Maths. I'm good at Maths and English but I have bad anxiety - the tests are all on a whiteboard with no calculator which is what we expect children to do - in some ways this is fair...however I do think in secondary school your arithmetic lapses a bit because you are taught to rely on a calculator.

I'm good at spelling and grammar so I did find the English one hard but the ticking clock on the test freaked me out and I almost had a panic attack.

You do need a basic level of both (which btw is GCSE level in parts of the skills test) and I don't think that's unreasonable. But I do think the way the skills tests are delivered might put some people at a disadvantage.

I passed mine thank goodness and now teach Yr 6 :)

trumps

How do you think senior teachers become senior teachers? I know fast tracking is a thing, but even being fast tracked a potentially senior teacher would be expected to spend a couple of years actually in a classroom doing some actual teaching.

They are struggling to recruit so the rules will get more lax I suspect. I still have trouble with the fact that science is treated as a single subject in school tbh.

QTS is QTS though- so someone qualified in a humanities/arts subject at secondary level can go on to teach in primary school if a school is happy to employ them. Secondary schools also often ask teachers to cover other subjects.

So even if some people think you don't need maths for some subjects, surely it makes sense that everyone has to pass the same tests?

The rules have got more lax this year- before this year you had three attempts (one free one) and a 2 year lockout if you failed the tests during which you couldn't retake and consequently become a teacher. Now you can retake as many times as you want, and only pay after the third failure.

I think that this may have changed people's behaviour towards the skills tests a bit, which may be why some people are failing a few times then passing. However, it's also clear there are some people who will never pass the skills tests no matter how many times they try.