Teaching to stop being a graduate-only profession - 18 year old teachers.

[noblegiraffe]

There were rumblings about this a while ago when the apprenticeship levy was introduced, but it looks like Justine Greening is going to introduce an apprencticeship route into teaching.

schoolsweek.co.uk/greening-teaching-will-cease-to-be-only-for-university-graduates/

I'm very concerned that in secondary schools, specialist subject knowledge won't be a pre-requisite for going into the classroom, it will be seen as something that can be picked up across the years, shortchanging the classes who get the apprentice in the first few years of the training (how long is an apprenticeship?).

In primary school, the education of a class for a full year could fall to someone just out of school themselves.

This isn't just about training on-the-job, we already have that as a route into teaching. This is about deprioritising a certain level of education for teachers and devaluing the profession. It's saying you don't need to be well-educated to teach, because you could be teaching straight out of school. The 'learning how to teach' part of any teacher training programme is so intense, that acquiring degree-level subject knowledge will certainly not be a priority from the start.

The wage for apprentices means this is just another way for schools to get teachers on the cheap and hang the consequences for education.

And knowing how many parents already view young teachers, fresh out of uni and just finished their PGCE, how will they take to having their child being taught by someone who hasn't even been to university?

Whenever I tell my classes that I have a Masters in Maths (normally when they asked me what I got for my GCSEs) the response is 'why the hell are you a teacher then?
I've had that too. It's so sad.
They aren't saying it to be mean or rude either. They just seem genuinely surprised that academic people might CHOOSE to teach.

Ditto with the whole Oxbridge degree thing ! From family/friends/public rather than students though thankfully

Sigh.

The government won't be creating the teaching apprenticeship standards. This one I Imagine will be a consortia comprising NCTL (or whoever...), several schools and universities currently running ITT.

I take the point about no point responding to green and white papers etc (although the HE bill was amended in some significant areas as a result of consultation responses), but this could be a genuine opportunity to have an input into a teacher training route.

Trailblazers

I'm not sure they'd want my input:

Removing the requirement for teachers to have a degree will devalue the profession
We don't need another graduate entry route
Stop fancying around with teacher recruitment, if you put half as much energy into teacher retention you wouldn't be in this sorry mess in the first place

Fancying around? Stop fannying around with teacher recruitment.

Noble for education Secretary:)

Talking of Education Secretaries, I was musing earlier that Gove wouldn't have stood for this sort of thing, he wanted teachers to be seen as intellectuals, experts in their fields.

Then I remembered that he was a smug-faced twat who called teachers The Blob and is responsible for more teachers quitting teaching than any other single person. So I don't really miss him that much.

It's not been great for education/teachers these last 10 years has it... (understatement of the century.)

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I was sure I'd written a post about Gove earlier, but I must have deleted it before posting.

We've certainly moved on a bit from raising academic standards by raising the academic expectations of teachers.

Usually you need a different party in power to get this much of a swing.

I wonder what Gove does think of this?!

Was it Gove that really drove the changes to education, or his SPAD at the time, Dominic Cummings? The blob term sounds a bit more like DC - he recently called David Davis "thick as mince, lazy as a toad and vain as Narcissus".

Disclaimer: I like DC because he was behind the initiative that set up the Kings Maths School and the Exeter Maths schools, and because he did that, i'd forgive him anything.

Dominic Cummings was Campaign Director for Vote Leave and directly responsible for the idea that the Leave campaign should not come up with any sort of Brexit strategy, because having a Brexit strategy would lose them votes and possibly the referendum. He's the reason the country is in the mess it is in re Brexit at the moment. Can you really forgive him that for a couple of maths schools?!

Gove was the person who forced stuff through. A less bloody-minded minister with Cummings behind him would have done far less damage.

Its a bit of both - Gove & Cummings combined - who drove teh DofE decsions. I don't think Gove was a puppet - just that the term blobs sounds like it might have come from Cummings who is known to be abrupt, versus Gove who is generally said to be well-mannered, by those who know him personally (even from former lib-dem ministers) .

I've read All Out war. I know what Dom Cummings role was. He had quite an interesting take on why they didn't go on the economy - he said it was because to the voters he was trying to get, the NHS IS the economy!

Gove wrote this article for the Daily Mail, mild mannered it was not: www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2298146/I-refuse-surrender-Marxist-teachers-hell-bent-destroying-schools-Education-Secretary-berates-new-enemies-promise-opposing-plans.html

And we all know what a total twat he made of himself stabbing BoJo in the back and running for PM. Cummings is an unstable and loathesome individual (see him now on twitter blaming others for how Brexit is turning out), but Gove also had plenty of personality flaws. He would give every appearance of listening to you, then go ahead and do what he wanted anyway.

That's not calling teachers a blob! Its calling an amorphous, and anonymous movement a blob.

Indeed, it's quite clever isn't it? Any teachers who oppose his reforms (pretty much all of them) can immediately be relegated to this Blob, this poorly defined 'movement' linked to Marxists seeking to destroy education with their terrible ideology. Anyone who thinks that Gove's reforms are a steaming pile of shit for entirely valid reasons are now easily dismissed without even have to engage with them.

TBF the tactic may well be Cummings, but the article was written by Gove. I heard from one of the mathematical associations the other day that when reforming the primary curriculum, Gove was very hands on and very insistent about particular ideas of low educational value.
Gove has also taken his reputation of getting things done to Justice and now Argriculture.

I heard from one of the mathematical associations the other day that when reforming the primary curriculum, Gove was very hands on and very insistent about particular ideas of low educational value.

Just to add to this^

We shouldn't forget the almighty fuck up that was the gove written history curriculum that was re-written by the blob as gove got it so wrong.

Any ideas of low educational value in particular noble?

He doesn't know History and got key facts wrong, or he failed to include Women's rights as a KS3 / 4 topic?

The first draft was ridiculous, mmzz. It attempted to cover a huge period of time in great detail across ks2. I think it basically tried the squeeze the common entrance curriculum into 4 years rather than 6.

It was rightly widely slated and totally rewritten. Although Michael Tidd has a blog post somewhere that has a couple of errors that made it into the new curriculum and one is an error with the dates for the ancient Benin topic.

Roman numerals as part of the maths curriculum was mentioned, Rafa. A totally inexplicable inclusion; obviously it would have value in history, but to take time out from a packed maths curriculum to teach it is bizarre. Gove forced it through.

Ancient Benin ??? Good Lord !