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 would say noble you are a bit defeating your own argument by claiming some subjects can be taught out of specialism... is this perhaps your mathematician's perspective?

I would rather my DS was taught Spanish by a French teacher than the awful Spanish speaking Spanish teacher he actually has, oddly. I think good teaching technique counts for a lot even if one is a bit out of one's comfort zone so long as one is operating within some sort of Venn diagram of related disciplines.

I didn't do Shakespeare at uni at all by the way! I am not sure, if I had , it would have equipped me any better than my A level. In fact my sixth form books are ones I teach more.

Ah I was joking!

I think it's interesting that you think you couldn't teach what would seem like an obviously related subject (to the untrained eye).

I'm envious of the part timer because I'm making the pay sacrifice, but my timetable looks very different and I'm not living the workload dream!

claiming some subjects can be taught out of specialism

I don't know if I have an argument! I'm trying to decide if there are subjects where the main difference is simply subject knowledge. I know as a maths teacher teaching MFL that that wasn't the case, there was a huge difference in teaching approaches.

Yes, I think we agree. It is the teaching approach that is the specialism and requires training. Not sure any school invests time in that though : it's just bunged on the timetable for most of us! And then - if we are lucky- we might be allowed on a course!

Media (to my untrained eye!) seems to involve a lot of IT use - it's rather more down the vocational route than I am able to teach. We don't actually have any computers at my school which is one of the reason we don't teach it - but that also means we attract and recruit (if we actually can recruit...) a different kind of English teacher on the whole.

People with actual media degrees in teaching do sometimes teach English, but not always. Just as those with drama degrees quite often do. Our head of drama has an English degree . But I would rather serrate my eyeballs than teach drama despite having some drama in my degree (shh! don't tell the boss!)