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!

As a teacher, I disagree with this too.

I was at uni with people who were way more qualified than me; and many of them were awful at teaching.

What we need is people who are qualified in a subject AND qualified as a teacher AND are effective at actually implementing the theory.

This year she is teaching higher geography, Nat5 and higher modern studies and Nat 5 criminology 🤗 social geography is her preferred subject and she only taught that in another school so that’s why I call her a geography teacher.

You would be qualified/able to teach in academy's/state secondary schools.

I am sure you would be snapped up.

But, if you think that you wouldn't be able to teach a class then teaching obviously wouldn't be your chosen career.

I am very educated but, teaching isnt my chosen career path.

So what does she do if she is short two maths teachers and a physics teacher and there are no qualified teachers with maths or physics degrees applying for the roles? That's the issue schools are having. Your dd can want all she wants but if there isn't anyone applying she and every school in the country will have little choice but to take what's on offer.

My friend is a physics teacher. He has schools desperate to recruit him- literally getting emails trying to poach him because they are so hard to come by. He’d been based in the state sector but has gone into independent because they were willing to bump up pay significantly. It would be an interesting research project to see degree specialism in the private schools v comps.

I have Maths, physics, chemistry and computer science A-levels at the top grades. I did a medical degree and have postgraduate medical qualifications. The only topic that has ever brought me to tears? Doing contour maps in year seven.

Geography is not easy! My kids doing it at GCSE, brought back many bad memories!

I was a school governor at a large secondary school in England about 5 years ago. The schools policy was for GCSE or A-Level the teacher had to have degree in subject. For years 7-9 they could teach subjects they had an A-Level in and related to degree. So for example, Chemistry degree would teach chemistry but might also do biology, in year 7-9, history degree might also do rs or geography in same years.

@WombatChocolate I have one child at school (motivated, achieving), and one at home. Without going into details, I think some parents are already saying they won't stand for it and this is reflected in attendance figures. Many of the children I know who have dropped out of school are being schooled online or through home ed groups.

For what it's worth, in my view there is little added benefit in having a subject teacher with a PhD when teaching school students. Potentially a-level students may gain confidence knowing the person is highly qualified but the level of work relating to a PhD is so far beyond anything that will be taught to a school student that it's like asking if it would help if your driving instructor was an F1 driver.

Beyond a thorough knowledge of the subject, what is required is the capacity to teach and a PhD doesn't confer this

Really? My understanding is that you need a PGCE to teach in a school.

We get them to do a project where they gather data (we do a river study and an urban study) and then interpret their data with our S2 classes.

We also do population pyramids where they have to discuss reasons between differences in two pyramids.

We also do cross sections which are pretty difficult to draw and interpret.

IMO it is pretty difficult to teach geography as a non specialist. All my non-geography colleagues agree it’s the hardest to teach of the humanities, since it’s so broad.

Which is why geography graduates are the most employable of all (with the exception of career specific degrees like medicine)

Geography depends doesn't it? At my university at any rate it could be a BA or a BSc.

I had friends who did quite a lot that would cross over with anthropology and international studies, while others did things that linked more into meteorology and computer modelling topography. Both did quite a lot of statistics, but in very different ways.

I’m sure that made her happy.

Teachers are running to keep up. It’s not her fault she got shoved in front of a class with little knowledge of the subject.

I once had to teach electronics. I knew fa, had to wing it all the time. It was awful. And l had to spend ages learning it for 2 lessons a week. My priorities were my exam classes. So instead of spending the 5 hours trying to learn electronics which is what it needed for the 2 lower school classes,l spent an hour, and looked after my 11 periodexam classes instead.

Psychology has some maths in it but only a narrow sphere of maths. Maths is not one topic. You will need graphs, algebra and statistics. wouldn't be using advanced calculus or trigonometry

Haha!

Id say it’s easy to do geography badly, but difficult to do it right!

I personally found geography easy - but I recognise that it isn’t actually easy; I’m just good at it!

My third child has left home to go to university. Our girls went to a large London private school and we were extremely lucky. They were taught by phenomenal subject teachers. The teachers all had degrees in their subjects.

The only exception was one maths teacher in recent years who was recruited from an IT job. He was clearly very bright, but had only taught adults. He was phenomenally bad at teaching children of school age. He even got annoyed with them asking questions about maths. He left after a year and said teaching was not for him.

I would love my kids to be taught by people who really were passionate about teaching. I would be appalling at teaching children, which is why I don’t teach.

Nope (unfortunately)!

Which is why geography graduates are the most employable of all (with the exception of career specific degrees like medicine)

Isnt it history that’s meant to be the most employable? It was when ds did his degree 9 years ago.

I teach in a secondary school, and I disagree that you need a degree to teach a subject.

I've seen many awful degree qualified teachers, but I've also seen many amazing teachers with no relevant degree who have interest and enthusiasm in a subject.

I don't have a degree in my subject. It's a relevant degree and overlaps in many areas, but not at all in others. Does that make me a bad teacher? I have the best GCSE results, got amazing A Level results, and when I run the revision session I get 4 times the amount of kids turning up!

I might not be the highest qualified in my department, but I am very good at explaining things to kids, and happy to learn as I go along!

A permanent teacher is much better than a temporary one!

One year we had find a "warm body" to put in front of the kids!

I have to say that even schools experience of 5 years ago is woefully out of date.

Teacher supply was a problem before covid, it has absolutely crashed since.

Here's how recruitment has been going against target of trainees needed in recent years (purple is trainees who started training in 2023 so will be starting teaching in 2024, yellow is trainees who started teaching in 2023).

E.g. they only recruited 50% of the secondary trainees needed last year. They overrecruited in PE - 181% of target, but only managed to get 17% of the Physics target.

Incidentally, they only met 27% of the target for music so that music teacher may well be needed back to teach music at some point.

Those extremely low numbers of trainees means that when job adverts start going out for September, many of them will be unfilled.

My son's year 11 second set maths class in an outstanding secondary was being covered by a librarian at one point two years ago.

Also just to say, if you employ a tutor for your child, check they're qualifed. Most aren't. And those that are are say qualified for secondary and claiming it's ok to teach Year 6 maths. They know nothing about primary maths and the exam process at all.

I used to tutor for entrance exams when I was at university. No teaching qualifications, but I had sat them myself. I was good at explaining verbal and non-verbal reasoning which was more than a lot of the other (qualified teacher) tutors could do! Fair enough really, it isn't something they'd ever done.

Off topic

It depends what you're looking for in a tutor I think. I know I couldn't tutor GCSE because I don't know the syllabus. A lot of the time though, the children I tutored really just needed one-to-one as an opportunity to talk through questions, and learn exam technique. It was more about a confidence boost that they felt they were going into the exam well-prepared and would perform their best.

Well it might help bring home just how bad the teaching situation is and that it’s not about teachers being ‘lazy’ and ‘work shy’ 🙄 if anything I think the teachers have completely the opposite problem!

Why not go the whole hog and stick 18 year olds in front of classes?

I think that is the Conservatives latest plan…

https://schoolsweek.co.uk/dfe-developing-teaching-apprenticeship-for-non-graduates/

@noblegiraffe that doesn’t surprise me at all. I was trying more to emphasis even 5 years ago (pre Covid) children being taught subjects by a teacher without a degree in that subject for Years 7-9 was policy - not out of the ordinary. We never had a music teacher teaching humanities but I would have felt that would have fallen within policy if they had done the subject for A-level.