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!

What is a 'textbook' ? Ours are all on line now.

I love it when the internet fails - I get to teach with my trusty whiteboard pen and just me. To be fair, I do anyway, but we have to have a PowerPoint for every lesson (most of my slides have about 5 words on just to keep SLT happy 😊).

Who said class sets? One between three is fine 😂

We have textbooks; but they are as old as the hills. Which is fine; because they are quite literally about the formation of aforementioned hills.

It isn't a major deal for that age. GCSE I would say more so but even then most teachers have lesson plans and look into the subject while planning lessons. And I assume the Music teacher would do the same. They have those qualifications. It's called transferable skills.
I have 2 friends/family who are teachers and they sont remember everything form the subjects they have to do less on plans and look into things.

When I was last teaching it was one book per teacher.

When was this? Our textbooks are from the 90s, some even older. I don’t use them tbh. 90% of pages have penises or hash leaves on them.

6 years ago. Teaching a new GCSE course.

When I get our textbooks out the kids love looking at the name plates at the front and finding that the textbooks used to be owned by Osama bin Laden or Adolf Hitler.

Our geography department never updated their maps after the dissolution of the USSR, I was about 20 by the time I realised that Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia no longer exist (which was more than 2 decades prior!) 🙈

You must work at my school because they're definitely past users of our class readers.

A couple of weeks ago a friend gleefully told me that the fancy new secondary that is very hard to get into doesn't have a computer science teacher with a computer science degree. I asked her what qualifications her child's computer science teacher held. She looked confused.

We live in an area surrounded by tech companies. Chances are anyone with a computer science degree will be on £100k plus a year in a plush office, not on less than half that in a crumbling building with shitty equipment and wild teens to deal with.