Greetings and a very warm welcome back to the grindstone to all readers. I trust you had a fabulous summer, whether you were drinking in the Dordogne, imbibing in Umbria, or looting in Lewisham. Of course, if you were abroad you will have missed the riots, unless you were lucky enough to catch the local French, Spanish, Italian or Greek riots. In England, the initial scenario of a downtrodden poverty-stricken underclass revolting against an oppressive public-service-slashing government, started to crumble as soon as the first suspects were up before the magistrates. The urban revolutionaries turned out to be designer label-obsessed schoolkids, estate agents, graduates, millionaires’ daughters and a ‘classroom mentor’. I trust the last looter has already been summarily dismissed. Don’t get me wrong – I’ve taught in schools where an experienced and skilful rioter might well have passed on useful information to pupils – but not one who was stupid enough to get caught.
You probably also missed the big education stories while you were away, like the report in The Good Teacher Training Guide 2011, that almost half of the 28,000 students who trained last year to be teachers did not take up a job in a state school. About five per cent went into private schools and a further five per cent went into ‘other’ education, leaving over a third of newly-trained teachers not in any kind of teaching job. Okay, maybe some of them applied for jobs and were turned down, but these figures suggest that maybe teaching is not as attractive a career as it used to be.
It was also announced in August that the Teach First scheme, which encourages top graduates to teach before going into business, has had little success in retaining teachers beyond the two years they have to teach to avoid paying the money back. Of the 149 on the scheme in 2005-06 only 42 per cent continued teaching after two years. Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, pointed out that it cost four times as much as training a normal classroom teacher – ‘but you only get two years work out of them’.
Is this good or bad? Way back in October 2002, when the scheme started, Brett Wigdortz, the chief executive, claimed that graduates who taught for two years in a tough London classroom would gain exactly the leadership and motivation skills that top companies want. ‘We have 35 companies signed up to say that if you have done Teach First, it will be a leg up when you apply to work for them,’ he says. So the fact that more than half of these teachers left as soon as possible might show that they all got high-flying jobs in top companies – which would make Teach First a brilliant success. Unfortunately, we don’t know where the ex-teachers went.
In a consultation document published during the holidays, Michael Gove said: ‘We value teachers highly, but the funding system does not incentivise the best.’ It is proposed that graduates with first-class degrees will be offered up to £20,000 a year to train as teachers in subjects such as maths and science. First-class graduates could also get £13,000 to teach ‘medium priority specialisms’ such as languages and IT. More alarming proposals are that harder maths and English tests will form part of teacher training and new personality tests for prospective teachers may be brought in. I’ve thought for most of my life that the teachers in the schools I attended would have failed just about any kind of personality test, being divided between loonies who were not in touch with the real world and psychopaths. Maybe that’s what Gove means – maybe only people who would have been rejected by the Gestapo, for excessive cruelty and over-obsession with discipline, will be allowed to train
as teachers.
Another highlight in August was the publication of Carol Vorderman’s report into maths in schools, commissioned by David Cameron. The former Countdown star revealed that loads of youngsters couldn’t add ¼ to ½ and get the right answer. This was in the same week that Standard & Poor, the international ratings agency, was accused of a $2 trillion maths error that wiped billions off global stock exchanges and brought total economic meltdown even closer.
Of course the general understanding of maths is poor – but it always has been. Look at all those athletes who say, ‘I’m gonna give it 110 per cent, David!’ without any awareness of the mathematical absurdity of their statement.
You might wonder why Ms Vorderman was commissioned to produce a report on maths teaching. Has she worked in education? Does she have a teaching qualification? Does she have a maths qualification? The answer to all three is ‘No’. She got a 3rd class degree in engineering – so no incentivised graduate bonus for Miss V. if she decides to retrain as a maths teacher. I’ve written to the Prime Minister offering to do a report on teaching English, but as my degree was in English, and I taught English and I was a qualified teacher, I’m not even expecting a letter turning me down. Welcome back to the real world.
