SUPPLY TEACHERS

[cabbage67]

My eldest son is in year 8 at secondary school. The school seems to have an awful lot of supply teachers, who seem to just "babysit" rather than interact or teach. For instance his supply teacher for his French lesson didn't speak French. Is this the norm? He tells me that most supply teachers just tell the class to look through their books for the lesson.

Also his class was meant to have a science test today, but not enough pupils had revised so the teacher said he'd give them another week to revise. I don't agree with this and I would have made them take the test regardless. Is he soft or AIBU?

I'd love your comments as I don't have anything to compare it with or have much experience with secondary school

Thank you

They sound like cover supervisors rather than supply teachers

"“Cover supervision occurs when no active teaching is taking place and involves the supervision of pre-set learning activities in the absence of a teacher.”

OP you already have a very long thread on this already when parents and teaching staff have commented. You won't get any new responses here.

Supply and cover supervisors and even TAs cover lessons when teachers are ill. In my experience the supply teachers are next to useless, often don't have the subject knowledge, don't control the class and are very expensive babysitters. Cover supervisors are a bit better as employed by the school so have a relationship with the students and know the schools behavioural policy and enforce it better and have a little knowledge about the different subjects. Subject TAs whilst not teachers often have better subject knowledge then cover teachers or supply's and often would normally work with the class they are covering and know how the teacher would approach the lesson and their expectations.

It doesn't matter who takes the class though it will be consolidation, copy out the book or do some worksheets it won't be teaching anything new.

Another thread!

Due to the budget cuts, our son's school seem to have stopped both supply and cover supervisors. More and more, my son tells me that it's the head and deputies who "cover" these days, usually by just handing out worksheets or pre-set work from their textbooks - the head/deputy carry on doing their "admin" whilst babysitting. Son actually likes it because the behaviour is better as the head and deputies are usually better at class/crowd control than the usually hopeless supply teachers they used to suffer.