Should secondary teachers have to pass a subject knowledge exam before being allowed to teach that subject?

[noblegiraffe]

Something I've been wondering lately. The threads about unqualified teachers, teachers teaching outside their specialism, whether requiring teachers to have a degree is meaningful when many teach a subject not relevant to their degree.

I know subject knowledge isn't all, and people can be very knowledgable and still be crap teachers, but can you have a good teacher who doesn't meet a minimum standard of subject knowledge?

I get, by the way, that a secondary school teacher trained in one subject does not want to teach another. I get that if you'd wanted to teach across the curriculum as a primary teacher does, then you would have trained as a primary teacher. I get that ideally it SHOULDN'T happen, and that if an excellent teacher who is also a subject specialist is available for every subject, that is the optimal solution.

However, I also don't see that, at Y7 level (where in September the majority of children are no older than many in Y6), it isn't POSSIBLE between subjects that are not too far apart in content and where the staff will tend to have at least A-level in one or more of the other subjects, given that it is possible at Y6 level (and in Middle Schools, even those that go up to Y9, the swapover between class teachers and subject teachers is more gradual without huge disadvantage)

Come to Scotland. All graduates here. I can be asked to cover with work set and marked by a specialist but only for a short time. We are expected to have a degree and be registered to teach our subject.

That might depend on the middle school. The changeover can be more gradual but sometimes tha's because they start using subject specialists earlier rather than later.

I taught Y7 MFL for a bit. My subject knowledge was fine (it was part of my degree), but I wasn’t very good at teaching it. The workload was immense too, planning each lesson was like being a student teacher again and having to plan minute by minute. I stuck very closely to the textbook. Not sure what I’d have done if there wasn’t a textbook!

But reporting? Assessment? Levels (as was)? I knew bog all and thankfully left that to another teacher.

So why is it acceptable in primary? I know I keep coming back to this, but the children are 6 weeks older at the beginning of Y7 than they are at the end of Y6. Some won't turn 11 until August 31st, while some 11 year olds were taught throughout Y6 by non subject specialists. I don't see why a secondary teacher CAN'T do (a very small proportion of) what a primary teacher HAS to do, in terms of teaching, assessing and reporting across a range of subjects?

Because the primary teacher has been trained to do it? Your teaching toolkit is going to be much bigger than mine.

Acceptable doesn't mean better though does it? Many independent schools and some state schools do use specialist teachers in years 5 and 6 for at least the core and some foundation subjects.

I get the argument you are making that if it's fine in yr 6, then it should be fine in yr 7. But I think it might be worth checking that it is best for yr 6 rather than easiest to organise.

Noble this is something that can be done at school level. At the school where I'm a governor we get candidates to sit a GCSE paper in their subject as part of the interview process (but only if they teach a good lesson first - if they don't do that they never make it to interview).

I remember a senior maths specialist from an outstanding school who did particularly badly in the written test!!!!

It is not really ok in primary schools either. My kids went to a good primary, and had lots of excellent teachers, but also had several teachers who were really bad with maths, obviously frightened of the subject and unable to enjoy it or even understand it.

We also had some extremely terrible music teaching, just a box-ticking exercise from a teacher who knew absolutely nothing about music.

The science teaching was pretty perfunctory too, but that was partly lack of time, though lack of confidence and passion from the teachers played a part.

It is naive to think one person can teach all these subjects, even at primary level.

Some recent research showed that specialist subject teachers in primary schools actually reduced results.

The research was done in the US and I've not looked at it in detail but it's an interesting finding.

www.tes.com/news/school-news/breaking-news/primary-specialists-have-negative-impact-pupil-results

blackcurrant that's an interesting approach, am shocked at the maths specialist not doing well in a GCSE paper!

This school appears to have given up trying to recruit a specialist maths teacher, but at least they are being honest and are saying that they would train whoever they hire. recruitment.outwood.com/vacancies/1627

To be frank, when I see applications I'm frequently shocked by the low academic attainment of some prospective teaching candidates - D's and E's at A Level, followed by 2:2s at degree level seem to be extremely common. It explains a lot about why many schools struggle to recruit good teachers who can simultaneously stretch the most able, whilst also supporting the least able to reach their potential.

That does raise an interesting question then. If (and it's a big if) that finding turns out to hold true, then it might provide an alternative solution towards the difficulties of finding teachers in some specialisms.

I got an A Level in Physics but I would feel very uncomfortable to have to teach Physics lower down the school. I did it years ago and don't remember anything. I am still learning in my own subject and there are questions at GCSE level that I need to spend time to think about or A Level questions from some odd modules that I can't do at the moment.
I have seen interviewees given an exam paper to do or asked to solve problems and then explain to students. All parts of an effort to find teachers with good subject knowledge so a test wouldn't be too much to ask.

I have a degree in, and teach, Classics. I frequently have to learn new material - texts I haven't read before, or periods of Ancient History I haven't studied in detail - but I have the skills and the general subject knowledge to do so (and because I love my subject, I enjoy the opportunity to learn more about new aspects of it).

I could competently teach English and History to A level, although I'd have to put in the work to ensure I was on top of the material. There's enough overlap in skills that it wouldn't be beyond me, though. Equally, I could teach French and Spanish to GCSE level.

I would be hopeless at STEM subjects, though, because I didn't pursue them beyond GCSE myself, and there isn't enough overlap with the subjects I do know well.

I think it really depends on the teacher being intelligent and motivated enough to master new material, and their having a basic level of competence in the necessary skills. Specific knowledge can be easily acquired but the basics have to be in place.

noblegiraffe that is interesting. The article was very short and quite vague. I imagine that if the specialist teachers had a sustained relationship with the students, so a real rapport was built up and behaviour problems stopped being an issue, they would get different results.

This is probably unrealistic in the huge primary schools you find in most US cities, but would be quite a different thing in the typical UK smallish primary school, where children would probably have the same specialist maths teacher, for instance, for several years.

This article has a bit more detail and a link to the paper at the bottom.

Interesting, though I don't have access to the link, (and probably would be too lazy to read it). It sounds like the schools took teachers they had who seemed to be good at teaching a particular subject and got them to teach that subject to all of the children, then measured the results on standardised tests. These weren't necessarily specialist teachers though, and the schools studied seemed to be mainly low-achieving and disadvantaged. I can imagine that having one teacher who knows each child's quirks really well and not having many transitions would be especially important for younger/ less high-achieving kids, with more behaviour issues.

One US primary school where I have seen specialist teaching work well was a small charter school (also serving a very low income demographic); the specialist math teacher was specially trained, brilliant at her job, and had a strong relationship with the kids.

Our year 6 had two classes. The two teachers split some subjects e.g.one always taught maths, one English which seemed to get good results.

My dds school has had problems recruiting MFL teachers and a few are teaching languages they’ve not studied. This is leading to reduced take up at GCSE/A level

I was trying to find out whether they applied it to all grade levels and if they did whether they looked at results for each grade separately or just lumped them together. Not having much luck.

I've found this detailed paper on the study:

scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/specialization.pdf

It sounds like the system they were using it in is quite messy, with classes being split depending on their level of English. When they talked about specialist teachers, they just meant that a teacher didn't teach both maths and reading - they taught one or the other and they were already primary teachers at the school so were just shuffled around classes. This is completely different to the idea of expert teachers who have been trained in and just teach a particular subject.

I've been thinking a bit more about the question of how primary teachers manage to teach loads of subjects in Y6 but secondary teachers can't in Y7. I guess you also have to take into account the personalities of the type of person who goes into primary teaching knowing that they'd have to teach everything, and someone who goes into secondary teaching. The primary teachers I know are all creative types with lots of ideas, imagination, can turn their hand to lots of different things, high EQ types. As a maths teacher who has chosen to study and then teach maths, I'm a bit lower on the EQ, higher on the nerd factor.

How did you end up as an English teacher and when did you acquire your subject knowledge? On the job?