Conservative 'Teach Now' scheme could easily be retitled the 'anyone can teach' scheme

18 January 2010

Commenting on reports of the announcement to be made by David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party, on raising the status of teaching, Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT, the largest teachers' union, said:

"These announcements are not new.

"Teaching will never generally be recognised as the high status profession it is while politicians keep making announcements that implicitly or explicitly denigrate and cast doubt on the quality of teachers currently in service.

"Nothing is more demoralising and demotivating than constant announcements of strategies to attract the 'best' teachers, implying that those in post are somehow substandard and that the bar for entry has been set too low.

"Evidence shows that we have the best generation of teachers ever who are delivering increasingly higher standards of education day after day.

"The proposed 'Teach Now' scheme could easily be retitled the ‘anyone can teach' scheme.

"Teaching is a highly skilled profession and the notion that anyone who has been successful in other professions will have what it takes to teach is just plain wrong.

"Teaching draws on particular qualities, skills and dispositions. Being a multimillionaire businessman or attending a Russell Group university doesn't automatically make a good teacher.

"There is nothing wrong with aspiring to recruit the best, but the best are not exclusively the preserve of Oxbridge universities where the vast majority of graduates are from the elite public schools.

"Teach Now is the Mum's Army policy of the previous Conservative government with knobs on.

"The proposal only to fund graduates with a 2.2 degree or above to train as teachers but to allow others with a lower class degree to still train is difficult to understand.

"In the context of claiming that only those with high qualifications should teach, why then are the Conservatives apparently prepared to allow someone to teach with a third-class degree but not fund them to train, as this policy implies? This seems to belie the claim that this is about investing in high quality education for all and seems to be more about penny-pinching."

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