Unqualified Teachers

[everychildmatters]

Why is there not complete outrage re the above? I'd rather my daughter not be "taught" full-time by someone who potentially does not need one formal qualification to their name.
I'm glad I walked out of teaching profession last year after 20 years in.
Enough is enough.

My training costs worked the same way as @ShowOfHands. School paid for it.

I have a PhD myself so I know that researching something for 4-5 years would not make me a good teacher. It doesn't even make me exceptionally knowledgeable about anything other than the specific topic I was researching (which isn't on the GCSE or A level syllabus).

Teachers need sufficient subject knowledge, teaching skills, enthusiasm and energy. They don't need a PhD, but if they have a PhD on top of those other skills then they will be able to add something in terms of life experience. Students benefit from having teachers from a range of backgrounds who can impart wisdom beyond their subject specialism.

This debate feels like a distraction from Labour. While we weigh up all the advantages and disadvantages of certain qualifications, deciding who REALLY has the right to be a teacher (and who doesn’t), we lose focus on the fact that there are not enough people who want to be teachers in the first place.

My niece has had a supply English teacher for 18 months, not even the same one! I am horrified. She is a good kid, but she won’t be reaching her potential and most worrying is the kids who need some motivation won’t be given any!!

There will be even fewer teachers soon

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/feb/09/cash-strapped-schools-plan-to-lay-off-teachers-in-blow-to-labours-promise

@soundslikeDaffodil I agree.

The government do not have a serious or achievable strategy for schools (the recent curriculum review made that clear, as does their flailing over SEN) so they are just tossing things out like "all teachers should be qualified" because who's going to disagree with that?

I know an older guy, a highly skilled musician who has had the odd brush with secondary education as a peripatetic teacher and so on.

He said to me when I was qualifying about 15 years ago: "you know, various governments have been saying 'all teachers will be required to be qualified' since the 1970s...". 50 years! It's the Crossrail of education 😂!

Although the latest lot have dropped the "to Masters level' part.

I don't think it was ever specified if it was a Masters in education, however.

This has been tbe norm in private schools for years

How, when most teachers come from state sector? Or are you peddling a myth?

I am an unqualified maths teacher but I have a PhD (as well as other qualifications) and many years of teaching experience ranging from early years through to adult education. I can pick and choose where I work and thoughout my career I have restricted my teaching to motivated students. I have never wanted to teach a state school class as I would feel under-qualified in dealing with difficult behavioral issues.

These days I just do tutoring, but I still consider that my teaching methods are sound and my students do well in their exams, understanding concepts that they have failed to learn in school.

I believe there are many great unqualified teachers, and QTS is not necessarily the best measure of one's ability to teach. There are plenty of us around, particularly in the independent sector that are excellent teachers and have a very high level of subject knowledge. Please be more specific when talking about unqualified teachers as I think it is unfair to slate us all when we are doing a great job.

I work in a special school where we deliver vocational options. Our Hair and Beauty teacher is a qualified hairdresser. She doesn’t have QTS but she does a fantastic job. Similarly our Catering teacher is a professional chef and our students learn to prepare all the lunches every day under her guidance. No QTS there either. People forget that not all teachers are classroom-based, and vocational courses will really suffer if the teachers have to have QTS.

My experience of independent schools is that the vast majority of teachers are qualified (sometimes overseas but that's increasingly true of the state sector too) but there are more PhDs and Oxbridge degrees as that stuff is good for marketing.

Parents pay a lot for those school places. They absolutely expect staff to be appropriately qualified.

The last independent I worked for listed all staff qualifications (including QTS) and institutions on their website. State schools generally don't do that.

Labour listens to the Trade Unions. Teaching is a highly unionised profession.As most teachers are qualified, I suspect the unions would support an end to them being undercut by unqualifieds.

On the job training would involve training you in whatever the purpose of the training is. A PGCE is a certificate in education so is training you in education. You say in a later post "I'm not sure you can be truly skilled at teaching something you don't fully understand.". I would say 'you can't teach someone how to teach if they're also trying to learn the thing they are teaching at the same time'. You think that the PGCE provider should teach the course that is meant to be taught by the teachers that it is training at the same time as training them to teach - I think that subject knowledge should have been sorted first, before starting the teacher training.

What works? Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction would be a major one. Dylan Wiliam''s Assessment for Learning. Yes some cognitive science - in maths teaching knowing about working memory and cognitive overload is very important.

And people think that recent retirees can just go into a classroom and be enthusiastic and know their subject and that will be enough to be a good teacher. Upthread someone said that unqualified teachers put more effort into their lesson plans - a real danger there that they're planning lessons of the 'make sock puppets of Romeo and Juliet' type where the kids learn nothing about Romeo and Juliet but remember the socks...."memory is the residue of thought" etc.

DH 's friend is an unqualified teacher, he's head of department in a private school, because he did his degree, masters, education qualifications and teacher training in the US where he's from, he taught there for 15 years before moving to the UK, from high school to college (university) level. I'd be thrilled if he taught DS. He can't teach in the state sector here without doing a PGCE or similar, which he feels is a waste of his time.

I don't disagree. That would be a wise approach. Sadly my training was nothing like that, the two trainees I've recently worked with had training nothing like that and I spend a fair bit of my limited free time helping people online who've had entire departments dumped on them, who don't have an A-level in my subject. They are qualified teachers as far as I'm aware, but they absolutely don't know the subject well enough to teach it. And yet there they are.

To be honest I'm more worried about the ones not reaching out for help.

The plus side is there's a social enterprise that has leapt into the government gap so at least there are good, cheap resources and CPD. It's run by ex-public school teachers, boo, hiss.

That's not true @RIPVPROG. He could if he wanted, but he'd have to take a pay cut.

When he came here 25 years ago he couldn't, he tried, he probably could now but he's been where he is quite a while

The 'assessment only' route to QTS for people who don't require any teacher training takes less than three months.

I didn't actually do any theory of learning on my full time uni based PGCE many many moons ago. But what I did get was four contrasting placements (including a primary school and a school for the Deaf) which helped me to decide what kind of school I could see myself in , lots of time to discuss approaches to teaching texts and schemes of work (thus giving me the confidence to plan my onw), an opportunity to think about and practise teaching drama (often landed on English trainees) and a second subject. and learn about form tutoring We had lots and lots of mentoring and feedback and support , both in school placements and at the university - and we built camaraderie. Plus , I still got to be a student and have fun, and wind down and stuff. I was only 20. Teacher training seems so serious, intense and driven now, comparatively. As is teaching.

I still ended up teaching MFL in my first school - but I had German lit in my degree and a fair amount of misguided confidence! On the Facebook group for my main subject people are always requesting full SOWs, lessons , ppts, marked work, moderation. It's like teachers have lost the skills of planning and lost any sense of autonomy. Some of these appear to be unqualified teachers or non specialists shoehorned in. I think a lot of this is the quality of in school training where students follow a departmental scheme and never have a chance to think for themselves.

I think we have to remember whilst quibbling over whether people have A levels in a subject, or even degrees that there are quite a lot of GCSE and A level subjects where the A level might not have existed when teachers themselves were at school and where there are no or very few teacher training routes (psychology, economics, sociology, media, film, medical science, child development all spring to mind). But I do know that getting someone in from the 'film industry' to try and teach GCSE or A level often ends in unmitigated chaos.

Teacher training seems so serious, intense and driven now

I think they have it much easier now than I did, probably because they don't have to spend so much time cutting out card sorts.

Really? That's all ours ever do!!

I quite liked those bits - I like the creativity. But that's when we handwrote resources!! I used to draw things !

Kids get better at maths by doing maths, not moving bits of paper around.

I guess card sorts might have their place in other subjects, but I hope it's not being done to 'engage your kinaesthetic learners'!

No idea, it probably is - I just roll my eyes. It's 'busy work'.

I actually handwrote some resources for GCSE Economics last week and the students liked them. It gave me an idea of how much they could fit in the space too.

Sometimes I write an A level essay myself and get the students to grade it and (if they have poor handwriting) I handwrite it. Revenge is sweet!

I also quite like a card sort. I came across an awesome tool in the pandemic used to design websites where participants essentially do card sort to create hierarchies for each page, decide collectively what should be on the home page etc. It adapted really well to year 7 Geography taught online.

Like all tools, card sorts can be poorly designed and overused, but the idea of sequencing data isn't bad in itself.

I like web systems like Mentimeter where you can upvote questions too. I've noticed girls ask more questions when they're used at mixed events.

I suppose in Maths a card sort could be used to help students think about which steps to do in which order, or to select a method when there are equally valid options?

I agree things have got a bit grim and dismal these days. Our system does seem designed to squash the creativity out of students and teachers to some extent.

Of course creativity means things go pear shaped sometimes.