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?

18yos teaching GCSE

No one has actually come up with a reason why this couldn't possibly happen. 'It would be ridiculous' isn't a good enough answer for people who are well aware of the sort of crap that goes on in schools.

I posted upthread news stories about apprenticeships where the apprentices had been screwed over to increase profits for the employer. How can you guarantee that this won't happen in schools where unqualified cannon fodder are already being screwed over?

And I'm pretty sure apprentices training in secondary schools will also be required to already have a degree.

Oh, well that's ok then! As long as you're pretty sure.

When I have a trainee that I'm mentoring the class is fundamentally my responsibility along. Their other classes are the responsibility of the class teacher. There is an expectation that thr class teacher knows what is happening and they are accountable for their class even though a trainee is teaching them. If there were any issues then thr class teacher would be back in there.
There is a safety net for the trainee and their students (remember they only get one shot at that year in school).

In my career I can think of cases where lazy class teachers/mentors allowed trainees to do whatever and the STUDENTS were the one who paid the price. But under that situation it was a half term and recoverable. I dread to think what it would be like if the trainee didn't even know their subject and they were the main teacher for a year whilst they got their head around teaching.

Staff KS3 with cheap apprentices and then stick all your strong teachers in KS4 fire fighting and undoing the damage. Stressful for the trainee, stressful for the teachera and unfair on the kids.

feweek.co.uk/2017/10/01/greening-announces-27-new-degree-apprenticeships-but-no-new-money/

No money? Gosh, how unexpected.

I'd forgotten about bloody T-levels too.

No one really knows what's going on. Apparently the DfE told the Chartered College of Teaching that no one is going to get QTS without a degree.

Leeds Trinity and the University of Hertfordshire have apparently been given the go-ahead to create the apprenticeships which they expect to start next September. So plenty of time to think them through

schoolsweek.co.uk/leeds-trinity-and-university-of-hertfordshire-to-create-teacher-degree-apprenticeships/

Blimey. Uni of Herts is an interesting choice.... Can't really say what I have heard about TSA's faith in them.

I'm not sure how they're going to claim parity of esteem of qualifications when there certainly isn't parity of esteem of universities.

Lots of mixed messages here about teaching degree apprenticeships and a lot of scaremongering.

So currently, someone with a degree (no teaching experience) can go and do a PGCE and with a few placements under their belt can, at the end of the PGCE get a teaching job.

Under an apprenticeship degree, they will spend (approx) 4 years on placement, under the supervision of an experienced and qualified teacher and do 20% off the job study (day release teaching degree).

At the end of the 4 years, they have 4 years worth of supervised placements and a degree. (And no debt).

No one is going to allow an inexperienced 18 year old to teach a class unsupervised. This will be written into the apprenticeship standards during the trailblazer.

It's not just teaching that will have apprenticeship degrees. Nursing, surveyors, engineering (due by November). They are a no brainier for a lot of young people who don't want to do Uni full time and get in shed loads of debt and no guarantee of a job at the end.

@Lucyccfc I was wondering how it can be the case that the degree they will earn in 1 day a week for 4 years can be the same depth/quality as a 5 day a week for 3 years degree? Also, how will it be funded for them to be supervised to the extent necessary by existing teachers? How will teachers manage this with their existing workloads?

Read the thread assassinated. Your questions have been answered here already by me several times

If you want the popular answer though, the degrees will be worthless. Despite the fact that the same modules will be taken, taught by the same lecturers, in the same classroom, the same essays and exams sat - cos everyone knows that part time degrees are worthless.

Now that's not was said, titchy. Incidentally, one of my colleagues got a part time degree through the OU and I don't consider it to be worthless at all.

What I did quibble with was when you said that a degree earned as part of an apprenticeship based on one day a week study over not very many years would contain as much academic study as any other degree. Given the way more than 7 hours a week of lectures that I took, I don't think that could be possibly the case.

Yeah, I was wondering what someone else though @titchy, I'm not looking for "answers" I was after other people's thoughts, not yours, again.

It absolutely is! There's a reason there's an actual primary teaching degree....

Under an apprenticeship degree, they will spend (approx) 4 years on placement, under the supervision of an experienced and qualified teacher and do 20% off the job study (day release teaching degree).

Which means that a qualified teacher is going to have years of additional work for no extra pay ir time given to train and mentor.

I love mentoring for PGCE but I don't get extra pay or time for it. Equally, i make a timetable across the department and they teach different classes with different staff.

Will they be included in staff numbers or extra? If included in staff numbers then that means that unlike a pgce they will be alone with classes for the year, which is concerning. If they are extra then why would a school pay extra to have a non-specialkst teach their classes when tbry have qualified specialists?
Under this apprentice system it sounds like there will be clasees taught almost exclusively by people without a degree for a year. Given the Wasted Years report on KS3 there's been a massive push on making sure KS3 pupils get a challenging diet, very difficult if the person planning doesn't know their subject. Like now, an apprentice won't get y11 and only reasonably strong ones would get y10 (and even then it is closely monitored).

I would be happier with a 4 year BEd with subject study and teacher training running alongside each other, ran like the primary BEd. Placements should probably start in y2 though once trainees have a bit more subject knowledge.

I have to admit that I am taking a guess at the 4 year p/t degree. At the moment the apprenticeship surveying degree is done in 5 years, however there is a fast track version where they don't get time off over the summer. One of our apprentices has chosen the 5 year and one the 3 year. Neither will be deemed fully qualified until the end of year 5 as there is an on-the-job programme to follow.

The apprenticeship standards will not specify the delivery method in the workplace I.e. If they stay with the same teacher as a mentor for 4/5 years. That's up to the school to decide. Our Surveying apprentices have a line manager, who has overall responsibility for them and 2-3 mentors over the duration of their programme, who will teach them on the job. I imagine that teaching appreciates will be no different. They will have some amazing mentors, as they do now, who are happy to develop the next generation of teachers and those that don't want to be involved.

As an employer a part time degree is worth the same as full time - as the modules are the same. My sister did a 'full time' degree (she is a primary school teacher) and she was never in Uni full time from 9-5.

The youngsters where I work, who work 4 days a week for us and do a part time B.Eng degree are far better engineers at the end of their degree than the graduates. The grads have an academic background but no work experience.

Just had another thought -

The apprenticeship standards are 'employer ' led. To even get a trailblazer off the ground and put in an expression of interest, there needs to be a minimum of 10 employers involved. The Uni's won't lead this, employers will.

I have been involved in numerous trailblazers and as an employer, we invited a number of colleges, training providers and awarding bodies into the group for their expertise.

The trailblazer will decide on the standards and once that has been accepted, the end point assessment will be designed. The end point assessment will give more information about mentoring etc but it will still be down to each academy chain or local authority to decide on the actual delivery in the workplace.

There are 2 different ways the apprenticeship degrees will be funded. (The funding band/costs will be £27k in total).

1. If the employer (academy/local

Authority) has a salary bill of over £3 million per annum, they will pay 0.5 of that in a levy. This can fund apprenticeships for new staff or for current staff. There is no age barrier now for apprenticeship quals.

1. If an employer doesn't pay into the levy (salary bill under £3m) then they can claim 90% of the costs and they contribute 10%

No one knows yet how this will all work for teachers, but this will be decided by the trailblazer group over time. The trailblazers I have worked on have taken 12-18 months to be finished.

The B.Eng is still on-going and will have taken 2 years to design.

"They will have some amazing mentors, as they do now, who are happy to develop the next generation of teachers and those that don't want to be involved."

See, this is really mealy-mouthed. Asking teachers to extend their workload for free, with no additional time allowed for this either is a massive ask. Workload is one of the reasons teachers are leaving the profession in droves at the moment. To suggest that teachers don't want to and aren't happy to develop the next generation of teachers is wrong. Teachers do so at the moment, with PGCE students, NQTs and all the other routes into teaching. Not just their mentors but all the teachers whose classes they take are involved.

Fortunately schools are rolling in money so it will be easy to find the 0.5% levy or the 10% of the costs.

Lucyccfc
If well considered, well resourced and well organised then apprenticeship routes can be good.(I did a practical based course for my previous career).

The thing is that the government are CUTTING funding to the point where most schools in my area are considering redundancies, despite increasing intakes. To avoid this they are having to cut other things such as trips, equipment etc. So i dont think it will be well funded ir resourced.

I don'r know anything about engineering but I would imagine that the trainees learn modules of knowledge and then when on site they train in the bits they've been working on.

When there is a class of 30 students in front of you then you need the subject knowledge before you can begin to plan a lesson.
Even if we start with starters/plenaries, they need to know thr subject, know how the content fits together etc. So my trainee is applying their degree knowledge to planning a 15 minute section of a lesson.
Although they may not have studier the exact book at uni, they know the historical era, know how to approach a text etc they also know enough that if a child asks a tricky question they can answer it.

Put it this way, I've seen teachers with degrees (ususlly from a local university that isn't that respected for most academic subjects) who know a reasonable amount but aren't well-versed in their subject really struggle because the class work out quite quickly that their subject knowledge isn't ad good as other staff.

If i had faith in the government to do a blended routr like a 4 year BEd and to do it people needed to have 2 years working in schools to get on it then I might feel better. But i don't trust them to make decent decisions in the interesrs of schools and pupils

I think I can see how some of this might work as an alternative path to BEd , but - PE teaching aside- BEds really don't exist at secondary level.

At secondary, if this apprenticeship becomes a post grad thing, I really can't see how we need yet another route to becoming a qualified teacher : and am guessing it would be a one year course if post grad? There are already - off the top of my head - five different ways to become a teacher, as opposed to when I did my PGCE when there was one!

This genuinely is a way of plugging , and raising the profile of, apprenticeships , rather than improving the quantity or quality of new teachers. Teaching is an easy target because Greening can make it sound like she is addressing the recruitment crisis.

We have two capable trainees in our large department at the moment. I am not the mentor but one of them is assigned to my class. The amount of time and energy this is taking from me is remarkable. They spend one day a week at uni and, from what I gather, the quality of that is disjointed and fairly poor. That may be a vagary of the provider of course.

It's not just recalcitrant teachers who are concerned byt he way. This comes form the Royal College of Nursing and echoes what teachers have been saying on this thread and elsewhere:

Janet Davies said significant increases to training numbers were welcome. “We desperately need more nurses. However, they must be educated to the highest standards. We are concerned at the risk of students plugging the gaps in the current workforce at the expense of quality patient care and their own learning experience."

Teachers in general just need to toughen up a bit, might be good to get them young to explain that it’s a pretty cushy job in the end, lots of holidays and short days. I think the expectations can be moulder better with younger people.