Bbc article about unqualified teachers

[rollonthesummer]

The tories are defending it by saying there were more unqualified teachers under labour anyway...?!

A Tory spokesperson says...

"There are some brilliant teachers who have not got qualified teacher status - nuns, great linguists, computer scientists, engineers and other specialists that inspire their pupils.

Nuns?!

I don't know of any unqualified people in schools near me that sound like that list. The ones I know are very young-no time to have been a nun, great linguist or successful in business- and have not yet passed NQT for various 'unknown' reasons.

LegalConfidence - I don't have any kind of teaching qualification but I do have a MFL degree and an "expertise" in certain areas of language acquisition that means that I regularly rage against the so-called teaching of "qualified and experienced" MFL teachers and end up plugging a lot of gaps left right and centre for both individuals and institutions. This is a lot of work! Hence my strong feelings about the importance of subject knowledge which goes a long way in preventing people from implementing idiotic practices and gullibly swallowing passing fads!

Legal - what is your "niche" subject? I don't really know why you're so precious about saying.

EvilTwins Both my parents got their DipEds in the 60s too but there were plenty of unqualified teachers in the school I attended in the 70s. Independent schools still employ lots of them in the 21st century.

Midwifery and nursing require qualifications because medicine has moved on.

What teachers need to know, how they should be trained, and the extent to which they should feel able to question that training have all been discussed on this thread and elsewhere.

Unqualified teachers can be good teachers. They can also be reflective teachers who go on to take MAs in Education and to study theory in depth.

I know some unqualified teachers who have moved from other professions. Family and financial pressures prevented them from spending a year on a PGCE. There have been changes in teacher training which might have allowed them to earn while learning now but their misfortune to miss such an opportunity in the past is not a reason to treat them as outcasts from the profession.

Whatever goes on with staffing in independent schools is completely irrelevant to state schools.

It's become relevant, noblegiraffe, ever since Michael Gove gave academies and free schools the same freedom as independent schools to recruit unqualified teachers.

As OP has rightly said, there is little evidence that this freedom has been properly used or brought any benefits in state schools.

What it has done, though, is to unleash invective against unqualified teachers ("crap" and "shit" have both been used to describe them upthread). They're not exactly grateful to Gove for that. They can be perfectly good teachers and deserve respect.

Ok, what I meant was should be irrelevant. It should certainly not be used to inform state school policy. Saying 'independent schools have some great unqualified teachers, therefore state schools should be allowed to recruit whoever they like too' is just stupid, they are completely different set-ups.

And when I said upthread that exceptions are meaningless, I meant the existence of the occasional wonderful unqualified teacher is not something upon which to base policy.

Midwifery and nursing require qualifications because medicine has moved on.

So has education.

Noble speaks a lot of sense. I'm beginning to come to the conclusion that lots of people simply don't get that teaching is as complex as it is.

The person I'm interested in at the moment is Guy Claxton. I intended to read his latest book this holiday but have nearly run out of time (hanging out with yr 11s doing exam rehearsal in school has eaten into the "holiday") Until recently, I'd not heard of him. I'm a good teacher because I spend time reflecting and learning. That all started with my PGCE though.

Yes education has moved on - behaviour management used to be hitting the kids, inclusion used to be exclusion, and preparing your resources meant fetching some coloured chalk. Now it's a bit more complicated than that.

I'm not a teacher myself but I'm surrounded by teachers in my family and amongst my friends, qualified and unqualified, working in state and in independent schools, all conscious, as I am, of the complexities and challenges of education.

Schools are different but it's a single profession and it dismays me, as it does the teachers around me, that members of this same profession have taken to turning against each other like this. It does nothing for the respect in which the profession should be held.

Teaching is hard! You can be a great subject expert but have no idea how to lesson plan, manage a classroom, assess for instance. Qualifications give a minimum standard of what the teacher can be expected to know.

It does nothing for the respect in which the profession should be held if people are given the impression that anyone can teach, and that learning how to teach is a bit of a waste of time.

It's nothing personal against individual unqualified teachers. But as a group, it doesn't do qualified teachers any favours to support the rights of unqualified people as a group to take their jobs.

Evil, I have sent you a private message. There are plenty of people from my town on mumsnet and I don't want to out myself as my job profile already makes me identifiable and there is information on mumsnet about my children.

Not muddled, Noble. On the contrary, very clear and compelling.

Cannot quite work out how I feel about legal advisors who have never been solicitors or barristers. I think I am ok with it but I have always been in business law where the clients are not vulnerable.

No PMs...

Dammit, I could have saved myself some typing earlier. Tom Bennett, whose work I very much admire, and who incidentally also thinks group work is crap, blogged today almost the same thing as I posted about earlier. Except his post is obviously better.

community.tes.co.uk/tom_bennett/b/weblog/archive/2015/04/11/evidence-based-education-is-dead-long-live-evidence-informed-education-thoughts-on-dylan-wiliam.aspx

A poster asked earlier for learning theorists worth reading. Tom mentions Dylan Wiliam who is definitely worth checking out, with Paul Black.

It was a couple of days ago. I name-change regularly because there is material about my children on mumsnet.

Anyway, thanks all for the discussion. Will read noble's link with interest. But I feel that I have put enough personal info on this thread so will retire.

Yes thanks Had been there all along.

Noble, I don’t think that anyone would claim that group work isn’t appropriate for drama! Your mention of Tom Bennett made me remember that he recently wrote an article on that subject, by the way, which I thought was also very good: www.aft.org/sites/default/files/ae_spring2015bennett.pdf

The thing about evidence is that it’s partly a question of attitude, of adopting a rather counter-intuitive approach toward your knowledge-base as an expert. It’s the difference in attitude between an old-fashioned doctor who “knew what worked” for his patients, and thus resisted new evidence about what worked best, and a modern doctor who understands that “best practice”, like all science, is provisional, and may change as more evidence comes in.

I’ve been told, for example, that a clear-cut scientific finding about learning “can’t be true, because it doesn’t fit with any of the learning theories I was taught on my PGCE”. These are the attitudes that prevented the adoption of phonics for a long time, despite the overwhelming evidence from psychological research that supported it, and that still keep some schools from teaching it well. I wonder if at least some PGCE courses are, perhaps inadvertently, reinforcing this attitude.

Noble sorry I went away for a couple of days and just read the comments about covers. No they aren't 'supposed' to teach but they do- as in they deliver the lesson to the best of their ability for the benefit of the children. All long term cover is done by agency cover staff BUT I will say the covers normally do a better job than the employed cover who are qualified.
They know the children, they are invested in the school and see through punishments. I work in a run of the mill secondary in kent but I have seen some appalling qualified cover. Uninterested, rude, refuse to mark etc. I understand why the 'cover' is the better fit for us.
I don't think it's a one size fits all problem.

I went away, and the thread moved on, but I should say that for the half term our CS acted as an unqualified teacher, we paid her as an unqualified teacher. And I'm sure other schools do it differently, but we did not. Had we not been allowed to do it, we would not have been able to provide a qualified teacher with a degree in that subject. We tried. The appalling supply teacher was not competent to teach our students. Some subjects are just not represented in supply.

Agreed fallen.

Just as there are appalling qualified supply staff, there are also excellent ones just as there are excellent CS and also apalling ones.
Therefore I think there needs to be some kind of 'qualification' in order to be able to teach-how this is devised is another thing as I do believe 'experts' in subjects can be as good/better than qualified staff but similarly I have seen native MFL teachers with abysmal behaviour management.
Similarly, just as there are degree level CSs there are also some with appalling grammar, spelling and very basic maths/literacy knowledge. I have witnessed this in my own school and to be frank, would be horrified for my children to be taught by someone who has limited knowledge. Obviously this can happen with qualified staff too and this is why at the moment it is pot luck whether you get an excellent educator for your child regardless whether they are qualified teachers, experts in their subjects or CS.
I am half Finnish and when I look to my Finnish counterparts, the profession is held in high esteem which will never happen in this country while schools give class responsibility to whoever they fancy, whether it's for convenience, save money, qualifications, experts, etc , etc. there is no one clear policy.