Schools advertising for 'unqualified teachers'

[roamingespadrille]

This is what a number of our local schools are advertising. Very low pay attached to it. Job description is a full teaching job.

Unqualified teachers have been around for ever in both sectors. Back in 1993 when I started my PhD i was warned x would be unhelpful as her contract had not been renewed and she was going to teach science as an unqualified instructor in a state comp.

Rosie, just not my experience but maybe by primary/secondary rather than sector of state/private. I am a primary headteacher in an LA maintained school. There is just no way, in my LA, that we could ever have an unqualified teacher teaching for anything other than occasional/emergency. I have never employed unqualified teachers or know of any local maintained school that does. Academies are different of course. Even a teaching assistant known to the school can't teach. Only higher level teaching assistants can teach at times but again not as the substantive teacher in a permanent role. HLTA's are used to cover PPA often around specialist subjects such as sport.
Unqualified teachers would be picked up during any OFTSED inspection, when they go through safeguarding checks and performance of staff. We just can't do it.

''You have weeks of lectures, have to conduct research, reading, write essays. Any time in the classroom is carefully built up, your contact time is tiny and starts with observations and you are constantly observed.''

''exactly this sort of irrelevant faffing about!''

Yep my teacher training was mostly spent in college lecture halls with minimal teaching placement and much time spent doing exams and essays,assignments on complete irrelevant nonsense- complete waste of time,effort and money. The best and only method imho of training teachers is to scrap all theory-essays and exams and go practical- get people straight into the classroom and train them up in schools. Ofcourse they should have to have their GCSES and do a basic literacy/numeracy exam on entering but other than that college placements is completely useless...

What's so bloody depressing about all this is the number of teachers who appear to think that learning educational theory is useless. All teachers need to be able to do is observe a few teachers then give it a go themselves. Teaching as a cargo cult. Wave your hands at the same time as the person you observed waved their hands and surely the good student results will come your way.

Of course if a teacher is handed a PowerPoint that they've watched someone else deliver, then they might be able to give a good semblance of teaching. But ask them to create their own, or if the lesson goes awry and the students need more intervention, or extra challenge, and the 'teacher' is lost. God help them if a student has SEN or needs pastoral support.

This notion that teaching doesn't require book-learning, or any knowledge beyond subject knowledge is total nonsense. Teachers who have never given any time or thought, and especially who haven't read the best of thoughts and research about things like how students learn will be restricted in their classroom development. If not Vygotsky and Piaget, at least recent stuff like Lemov and Christodoulou.

This notion that teaching doesn't require book-learning, or any knowledge beyond subject knowledge is total nonsense.

Who says you need a PGCE to read books? more likely to have time to read books if NOT bogged down in the swamp of a PGCE, I would have thought, anyway.

I totally disagree that no theory is useful. In fact I think teachers don't do enough theory. That's why poorly researched, poorly evidenced nonsense has taken root in the profession. On my pgce, 9 whole years ago I was told that learning styles and thinking hats and brain gym and "deep" marking were all unsupported by any research and at best a bit of waste of valuable time and at worst actively unhelpful nonsense. For years after I continued to see these things lauded as "best practice". More theory and more research might make the profession less faddy. In school training has its place but I fear that you need a critical mass of university trained teachers as university training programmes are less likely to push the latest Ofsted-pleasing teaching fads IME.

more likely to have time to read books if NOT bogged down in the swamp of a PGCE

Bollocks. An unqualified teacher dropped into a full teaching timetable is going to have very little time for reading compared to a PGCE student who has to read as part of their course. And some of the lectures will be telling them stuff from the books too.

Definitely a supporter of research and theory, one vital aspect is child development. Teachers with honours degrees in education, after four years of study, understand so much more about children and about children's learning than PGCE students. Without even a PGCE have even less understanding. My experience relates to primary and may be different for subject specialists in a secondary school.
You wouldn't expect a mechanic to fix your car without understanding what happens under the bonnet, how things work. Why would you expect that we can support children to learn without understanding how they work too😉

Learning styles :) it's all kagan and growth mindset at the minute. Just more unsubstantiated bollocks dreamt up to keep everyone busy.

I'm not suprised, the powers that be send their kids to private school where, as has been pointed out, an unqualified teacher is really someone with vast amounts of understanding and experience without a pgce. The unqualified teacher in the mat is some poor sod on minimum wage who once called the bingo out and is now head of maths.

OP I saw a similar post advertised this week (we could be in same LA) and nearly started a thread about it. It's the thin end of the wedge, I fear ....

it's all kagan and growth mindset at the minute na, that's all obsolete now, The current pie of BS is called "mindfulness"

the problem with educational theory is that it's highly unmotivating and goes over most peoples heads-i got a 2:1 in my teaching degree[mostly theory] and I can say it did not help me in the slighest, I cannot remember what most of the education modules were about and most ppl just got handed down essays, learnt them off and wrote them down in the exam, I didn't have any understanding of most of what I wrote...

Having left college[4 years teaching degree ]I entered the classroom and sunk fast getting fired from several posts for poor performance, I think imho that the best way to learn teaching is to enter the classroom and learn hands on.

educational theory is that it's highly unmotivating and goes over most peoples heads

Maybe if you'd paid more attention you wouldn't have been fired for poor performance? What a bizarre post.

Just more unsubstantiated bollocks dreamt up to keep everyone busy

Like interleaving? Retrieval practice? Research about working memory? Ebbinghaus and spaced practice? How about assessment for learning?

As Daisy Christodoulou wrote about Discovery Learning 'Once these breakthroughs are made, then we are all able to understand and use them, if they are explained to us. If they are not explained to us and we are left to discover them for ourselves, many people will simply never discover them, or will have very imperfect understandings of them'.

''Maybe if you'd paid more attention you wouldn't have been fired for poor performance? confused What a bizarre post.''

maybe if you'd paid more attention to my post you'd see the message I was giving rather than giving a personal attack-my point being that people can leave teaching degrees that are highly focused on the theory with high marks and then flounder in the classroom as the theory is totally irrelevant to running a classroom and teaching.

And maybe you're 'confused' because you're a bit special and can't see the obvious and need it to be pointed out x

Name one school that does whole school inset on interleaving or retrieval practice. They all do growth mindset or learning hats or thunks or brain gym or whatever is flavour of the month and cheap and easy to disseminate. And because it's poor it doesn't work so it's quietly scrapped and we move onto the next one. This, coupled with the constant changes in specs helps with the justification of using unqualified and inexperienced staff as no one has a proper grip on anything anymore anyway as it changes all the time.

can't see the obvious

What, the link between someone saying they didn't understand education theory, that it went over their head in their degree and then they went on to be a failure in the classroom? Several times? If classroom experience was all that, then wouldn't you have at least improved after the first time?

noblegiraffe, your faith in "modern research" is quite touching, but misplaced. What works is what always works. What works now, worked 100 years ago, 500 years ago, 1000 years ago, etc. What doesn't work is "new" ideas on how to train and use brains which have evolved over the course of a million years, and have been trained and used successfully over that entire time span, without anyone studying a PGCE, or filling their heads with the unending torrent of BS coming out of "modern educational research"

Ah, are you the same User who believes that water contains toxins and these 'toxins' can kill people and this can all be undone by the addition of some squash?
My apologies if I'm mistaken.

Noble - agree with all your posts on this thread.

Everyone has been to school for several years and observed teachers in action so everyone thinks they know how to be a teacher. Strangely, we've all been patients, too, but none of us thinks we can be doctors/nurses/dentists etc. In fact I've been involved in house purchases and I've been divorced so, surely, I could become a solicitor next week.

At my school we have an LSA (with a half relevant degree to the subject) who started covering a few KS3 core subject classes when staff shortages meant we were desperate. Instead of being replaced, this 'teacher' has steadily been given more and more responsibility and is now teaching GCSE core subject classes. Despite the best of intentions, this teacher has struggled with the actual pedagogy - the fine art of how to embed knowledge into someone else's brain and the various methods that can help you do that. It's so disheartening to watch this taking place and to watch the pupils learning absolutely nothing.

Very interesting thread. Motivated me to have a quick flick through some of the PGCE reading lists available on line. Of course, that was hardly a representative sample, but nonetheless I think it's concerning that I didn't find any Willingham, Lemov or Christodoulou on there.

What I did find was John Holt, Jo Boaler and Dominic Wyse's 'Teaching English, Language and Literacy'. Wyse is passionately against synthetic phonics, and has no hesitation in including his biased take in this book: for example, on page 19 he writes:"'But even more troubling was the growing dominance of a single method of reading teaching called 'synthetic phonics'."

I come to this discussion from 20 years of following the phonics debate, and the stubborn refusal of most ITT to accept the evidence in support of teaching phonics. I absolutely agree with Noble that there is a lot of research and theory that trainee teachers would find it beneficial to learn about on their PGCE, but I do wonder how many PGCE programmes are actually delivering that.

I just also had a quick Google for PGCE reading lists and on the first page loads of primary PGCEs had books about phonics on the list so that seems positive.

A few years ago every single teacher in our LA was made to go on a 3 day Critical Skills training - often at weekends and in holidays. For some it made them very uncomfortable being made to stand up and perform in front of others.

Now, it's never mentioned as it's all Growth mindset and other such flavour of the month BS. I shudder to think what it all cost our --almost bankrupt- LA.

I know lots of qualified teachers who aren't very good. Qualifications are just a bit of paper.
Sure, there are things you need to learn, like the exam system, how to identify a SEN and probs other stuff (I have no idea what you learn on a pgce course), but good teachers are born, not made. As long as you have a good understanding of your subject matter, you can learn the other stuff on the job - hence the lower salary.

your faith in "modern research" is quite touching

Jo Boaler makes stuff up, there's a lot of balls in Hattie and no one has been able to replicate Dweck. Coming from working in clinical research, there's a lot of educational research which is poorly conducted and the results worse than useless.

That doesn't mean that everything being written about education is rubbish or doesn't work. And of course things have moved on since thousands of years ago or we'd all just be stood around in the marketplace having Socratic dialogues.

But even Socratic Dialogue is a skill that would need to be taught and could be improved. A random peasant wouldn't expected to do it with no prep.