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 covered an English lesson the other day. 'Get the class to go through the text and highlight the adverbs'. Me: Google adverb.
I guess History and English are both focused quite a lot on text analysis so you've got the background skills.
With maths, if I've got to learn a new area of maths, I know I've got the background skills to be able to do it. Not so for other subjects.

I remember my last head saying 'we employ you to teach, not to teach a particular subject'.

joinourclub that sounds like my worst nightmare. I think most likely the head does employ teachers to teach subjects but has found themselves short of a particular type and so is saying that to force teachers to do stuff they won't want to.
I doubt the job advert would get many replies if it just said 'teacher of any subject'.

Pengggwn to be fair there was more to the cover lesson than that, but when you read the first line and don't know what you're doing you know it's going to be a long hour!

It's an interesting question when considering science where boundaries are expanding rapidly and some concepts/understanding is changing. This means that teachers who took a biology degree in 1980, or even 1990 for example, won't have covered many current aspects of genetics. And science degrees can be so specialised that they may be irrelevant to a GCSE or A level. What it should do though is equip you to learn in your subject area. In HE there are times when we aren't far ahead of our students with learning new concepts, but again it's the contextual knowledge that's important.

Hmm, I wonder if being a maths teacher is skewing my perspective? I’m teaching pretty much the exact same stuff I was teaching 12 years ago. Fractions, trig, quadratic equations, even the same A-level syllabus (sadly changed for current Y12 but still calculus and a bunch of algebra). It’s really rare for me to go into a classroom and teach it for the first time, unlike...most other teachers?
So subject knowledge seems more important to me.

noble re adverbs, by the time your little one reaches y2 you will be quite well versed in English grammar, and by the time they get to y6 you will be ace!

DS is in Y4 His school don't really set homework though. I didn't know that 'often' was an adverb, I think I was taught they were ly words.

Medieval Benin, on the primary curriculum, anyone?

I'd be surprised if many teachers had a great deal of prior subject knowledge before that was added as an option

Hopefully teaching 'ly' words is dying out.

I'm a physics teacher and once had to teach an electronics GCSE. I lasted until Christmas. It was the cdt type electronics and I'd never even used most of the equipment myself. Was a nightmare.

But, I teach stuff now that hadn't even been invented when I was at school (new technology on the science spec.) so with an interest a teacher can learn new stuff they've never studied but what really does matter IMO is enthusiasm and passion which I could not personally muster if I had to teach music for eg.

The Scottish system sounds completely sensible, that you can only teach subjects you are trained in. Why does the English system seem to think that subject-training is optional? Is there some ideology behind it before the teacher shortage got so dire they couldn't afford to have any standards?

I fully agree with you noble.

And I would add that even at Y7 level, not knowing your subject can cause problems when you have the bright children in front of you and can just simply see through the fact it's not your speciality.

I dont think it has anything to do with being a maths teacher TBH.

If French isn't your subject but you are given a Y7 or 8 class in french in the basis that youve done some french 15 years ago, there is no way you can give a proper lesson.
History and geography is the same. What is important isn't that the much the deep knowledge of a specific period. It's knowing how to interpret a text, put it into context within that period etc... all the things you have learnt for one period but is applicable to all of them. (And usually applicable in history and geography, which is why, at least where I am, you can do an A level in history if you have a CGSE in geography and not one in history itself). A maths teacher or an English teacher will not have learnt those skills...

Etc etc

Oh you could be right Pengggwn, this is a sage on the stage versus guide on the side thing isn't it? How could the English system promote subject knowledge in teachers while at the same time telling them to stop talking in lessons?

I remember being told once (might have even been by some Ofsted consultant) about a lesson that was rated 'outstanding' even though the teacher didn't turn up. The kids all came in, got some project work out and got on with it, and this was apparently a good thing, that the teacher was totally redundant

I wonder if anything will change now that knowledge and telling kids stuff is coming back into fashion.