To expect my child to be taught by a teacher with a degree in that subject?

[northlundunmum]

My child is in year 8 and in their school
has “Humanities” which is history and geography combined rather than taught separately- not great in my view but ok. However, this year they are being taught by a music teacher. No doubt a very talented musician but according to my child they admit not being very good at teaching history or geography.

I do understand there are teacher shortages and sometimes some teachers will have to cover for others but this seems to be a permanent arrangement at least for this year.

Does anybody know what the DfE / Ofsted rules / guidance are on this? I understand you have to have a degree in a subject in order to train to teach it at secondary level (or at least used to) - does that not extend to actually teaching the subject in school?

Grateful for advice from anyone who knows the law / regulations here as want to approach the school about it and want to be clear what’s reasonable to expect and what they should in fact be doing according to govt policy.

Thank you!

Less pointless then telling the school what they already know though!

Most schools have unqualified TA’s acting as teachers.
Soon unqualified PAs will be acting as GPs

Don’t vote Tory

@mumsneedwine

Well you see people said if you don't like the job, then leave. So they did.

Yes I don't think people understand how exhausting it is. Then add in the stress of OFSTED & criticism from all angles.

Yesterday there was a thread about a school taking a ski trip and asking the students to pack lunch. Mum was outraged at the idea & was going to demand to see the risk assessment. No wonder nobody wants to run a trip.

What do you think is going to happen here? Oh Mrs X thinks there should be a teacher with a geography degree, let's get one. They are using the music teacher because they don't have the funds or the ability to recruit another specialist teacher. This is common. Some teachers can and do teach more than one subject, many are simply obliged to.

@Answersunknown the PA situation is frankly terrifying. 2 years MSc then treating patients ? I want a 10 year trainee proper doctor thanks v much. But our government hate doctors too. People saying, if you don't like it then leave to them too. So they will.

And they already are acting as GPs. And last night the government voted, behind closed doors, for the GMC to register them. So v difficult to tell not a real doctor. Not seen that in the press ? Wonder why.

Timetabling is also tricky, especially in the state sector, where each pupil is allocated just over £5,000, aa you can’t afford to be overstaffed, with lots of teachers on light loads.

You can’t get a Geography teacher to just teach a few classes, so teachers with light loads, typically those with only A level subjects like economics and politics, are asked to take these classes.

It really isn’t an issue at KS3.

@northlundunmum

The level of cynicism that this is just what it’s like now is deeply depressing.

Well teachers have been warning that there was a crisis for a while. It's more concerning for those with younger children. Those of us in our 50s will be gone & it's unlikely there will be teachers who stay in same school for more than a few years.

It would be really helpful if parents & the press were less critical.

With the exception of medicine, which actually can be life and death, how concerned are you about other professionals having the relevant degree?

Lots of lawyers don’t have law degrees.

This is what happens when you downgrade the teaching profession by introducing all sorts of unnecessary beaurocracy, failing to back them up against unreasonable complaints and aggression from parents and pupils and turning the job into one that takes up most of the teacher's free as well as working time.

People leave in droves.

I do think there is a lot of naivety on this thread- the idea that all children get qualified teachers at GCSE and A-level is definitely not true!

Yes, to some extent, schools will protect exam years wherever they can- but this really means Y11 first, maybe Y13 second, with Y10 a distant third. And sometimes, especially if a teacher leaves mid year, it's not possible to protect even Y11 classes. A few years ago, I taught a GCSE science class which was a shared group between two teachers (in theory). However, there was no-one to teach the other half of the lessons, so they went through about 5 different teachers (plus multiple cover/supply lessons each term) in that year. It definitely had a huge negative impact on their GCSEs. That same year, two Y10 classes were in the same situation as well.

In order to try and help, my timetable changed multiple times that year- that meant my KS3 groups and my Y12 class had changes too, and in some cases multiple teachers and periods of supply throughout the year.

Many of those students definitely got far lower grades than they otherwise might have done!

I know schools who now make timetable decisions based around how many lessons they can staff, not what's best for each subject. I know schools where class sizes for e.g. triple science or A-level are massive because that's the only way to get all the students to have subject specialists.

For those saying that the lessons or scheme of work etc are provided by a qualified subject specialist- yes, that may be true, but that doesn't help if students have challenges/questions/misconceptions in the classroom AND it also increases the workload of that subject specialist.

If I'm teaching your child in Y11 who didn't have a science teacher last year, you probably want me to have time to put on revision sessions, to mark additional pieces of work, to really plan what I'm doing and tailor it to the gaps that class have... I can't do that if I'm producing KS3 resources for a non-specialist to use at the same time. If I'm teaching your child in Y10, and they don't have a specialist for all their lessons, then all the marking etc for that class falls to me. If I've spent all weekend marking more than "my share" of mocks, then the lesson I plan for the non-specialist to teach is probably not going to be my best work...

None of that is made up, by the way, it's a real situation I've been in.

BTW, they would have got qualified subject specialists at A-level, but a lot of the students in that Y11 class who wanted to do science A-levels ended up not being able to get the grades they needed to study them....

I've now left that school, moved to a school where it was promised I would only teach within specialism, but ended up this year teaching Y12 a niche A-level subject which I'm not qualified in at all. But the qualified teacher of the subject can't cover it, and the other option is an A-level class of 35. I know that I'm doing those students a disservice in lots of ways, but there isn't another option, really. IMO, the school probably shouldn't have run a second class of subject but equally we're the only school that offers it in a 20 mile radius, so that's also a hard decision to make.

I'm not happy about it, by the way, but it's not like there's someone else qualified waiting around to step in and teach that subject on something like a 0.1 timetable spread across 3-4 days a week...

I also think there's a lot of people on this thread acting like having no teachers in an inevitability- but it wasn't this way 5-10 years ago even. If serious action was taken on workload and pay, then we'd recruit, we'd retain more people for longer, and we'd maybe attract some skilled and experienced people back to the profession.

Well, yeah, quite...

I know of lots of schools making choices around staffing/timetables/recruitment/class sizes etc which parents probably wouldn't agree with. I don't think any head teacher is doing this for fun, or because they want kids to do badly!

They're doing it because they can't recruit and they're under massive budget pressure.

It's only in the last 40 years that teaching has become an all graduate profession. There were Teacher Training Colleges, subsequently called College of Education, accessible with A levels, they awarded a Certificate and then in the late 1960s also offered a B Ed if you did a 4th year. I took that route, later doing OU degrees.
During WW2 when male teachers were conscripted a lot of women went to teach in schools, eventually, in the 1960s I think, they were awarded Qualified through Experience status, many of these were excellent teachers too, usually in Primary schools.

I think it's pretty relevant when you're a teacher, yeah. Not just because of the subject content- I actually think to some extent that's secondary, although still important!

It's also (particularly in options subjects) about having the ability to inspire students around the subject, to tell them what it's like if they take that subject further, to give them ideas around careers etc that might use that subject...

Within my specialism, I have loads of expertise to offer students around progression options post-16 and post-18, as well as careers advice etc (I worked in my field before teaching). If I was teaching e.g. history, I could probably manage to communicate the subject content okay but I wouldn't be able to offer that.

Within science (and other similar subjects), I also think having the skills and confidence to deliver practical work safely is very important. I wouldn't expect an art teacher to be able to run a titration, and I couldn't lead a session on screen printing. And I think there would be health and safety issues in both cases.

My DD is a Head of Maths and she won’t hire a teacher without a Maths degree. Large academy chain.
Surely it’s complusory for Maths / Science, if it’s not then it bloody well should be.

You don't seem to understand. How can you possibly make it compulsory if there are simply not enough subject teachers for the number of jobs? You tell schools 'You must only employ maths teachers who have a maths degree' and when they advertise and get no applicants, what are they supposed to do?

My DC's school appears to be able to, though I assume it is unusual as they make a point of telling us that all the Science departments are fully staffed by specialist teachers. My DS is doing physics A level currently and has had a teacher who has an engineering degree for the engineering module and one with a theoretical physics degree for most of the rest. They didn't have any shortage of applicants for a recent vacancy which occured as a result of retirement and don't seem to have a huge staff turnover either.
I presume it is something of a self perpetuating situation though. It's a good, and by state school standards, very well resourced school that compared to many is probably quite an "easy" school to work in. If I was a physics teacher and had the choice of a school with a fully staffed department where I was only going to have to teach physics vs one where I might be the only subject specialist or where I could also be asked to plug gaps in other departments I think I know which I'd choose. So I'm afraid it is something of a case of to those who have shall more be given. It must be very hard for schools who are already struggling to recruit staff into shortage subjects.

I am a French /Spanish teacher, but have had to teach many subjects over the years, including subjects I don’t even have a GCSE in to GCSE classes! It’s all down to money.

I teach geography Y7-13 and I’d be perfectly happy teaching history to Y7-9. Geography is a really broad subject. It’s not all volcanoes and oxbow lakes… I’m currently teaching my Y8s a physical geography topic that wasn’t part of my a-level or degree. Ideally a humanities teacher would have a humanities degree, but it’s not really an issue pre-GCSE.

My dh is a science teacher - this year his timetable has more IT & Maths on it than Science (& he’s horrible at maths).

YABU to think complaining to the school will achieve anything. They already know the teachers they have / haven’t got and how difficult recruitment is.

Years 7&8 you should just be grateful they have a teacher. Staff get used to ‘fill in’ gaps to ensure that everything is covered and that they work a full timetable.

Some of us go part-time to avoid teaching Year 7 Computing or Geography or whatever.

Some of the older science teachers will have done O levels in separate sciences and will have probably have done either chemistry/biology or chemistry/physics and not all three but still qualified to teach combined and separate sciences at gcse

I'm not saying you OP but more making a general point here. The last time there were teacher strikes there were seemingly a record-breaking number of "well why don't they just leave then?"s.

Well we are... and we did...

I do not think YABU to expect it but I think YABU to think the school can do anything about it. Do you really think they interviewed a long line of maths teachers and decided to go for the music teacher for a bit of a change?

I don't see why you would complain. They all agree with you. Teaching is an awful job now and so nobody wants to do it. What are you hoping the school would do?

I hope that all of the people who told us that we were just complaining because we never had a real job before are starting to believe us now they realise we somehow aren't all coming crawling back with our tails between our legs.

Almost everyone I qualified with has left and joined different careers and we are all so much happier. We all went into teaching because we wanted to teach and if things were different I'd have stayed teaching forever.

When I applied for my first Science teaching job in the 90s, I was one of 71 applicants. Blows my mind.

We had zero applicants for our last few jobs. We’ve made class sizes bigger in order to change the timetable, and since then more teachers had handed in their notice. We can’t make the classes any bigger now, but if we don’t get applicants again then we’re screwed after Easter. We’d either need non specialists to apply, or have supply in. It’ll probably put pressure on staff and more will leave. I don’t know how it will resolve.

It has been an issue for ages - I was taught GCSE Chemistry by a PE teacher with a degree in sports science in the 90s. He knew nothing and should never have been allowed to teach that subject. I got far more from reading the textbook than him.

It is even worse now in some schools where you can be lucky to get a qualified teacher of any description at all.