What do Stephen Hawking [science], Lord Sugar [business], Jessica Ennis [PE / Fitness], David Miliband [Politics / History], have in common? None are qualified teachers - yet all have provided some form of teaching - why? Because they are experts. Under Labours bizarre education proposals only qualified teachers would be allowed to teach in school. Forget if you have 25 years life experience in the army, or a specialist profession like Alan Sugar, or politics - Miliband. Such people would be banned. This is madness. And it is proposed by the one man who should understand that some teachers are brilliant, even if they are untrained - Tristam Hunt. He is himself a historian, and unqualified. As to Free schools Hunt’s thinking on Free Schools started with a “vanity project for yummy mummies” then became a desire to want to “put rocket boosters under them” to the current “dangerous ideological experiment” only just short of child abuse. To say that the son of Lord Hunt was roasted in the Commons on Wednesday was an understatement.
At the school I visited last week I forgot to ask if every teacher was qualified. But as the numbers of these went up under Labour I better ask my upper school heads when I see them next. The honest truth is that I am interested in the quality of the teacher, not their qualification. The labour policy is still unclear on what happens to the poor unqualified but brilliant teachers that do exist in our schools up and down the country.
UPDATE: I have received plenty of feedback on this, mostlyt very positive, and one criticism that this blogpost was an attack on teachers - it could not be further from the truth. I value the QTS but I do not think its absence should bar a good teacher from teaching, even if they do not have it. Surely that is a matter for the headmaster and the governors?
Further: on the issue of the status of unqualified teachers: Hunt states that every teacher in a state school must have QTS or ‘be working towards’ QTS. Would he sack outstanding teachers who refused?
What does ‘working towards getting QTS’ mean? Could a teacher claim to be ‘working towards’ it for more than a year, three years etc.
Obviously this plan would stop academies and free schools having the existing freedom to hire any teacher for their children, regardless of whether they have a QTS.
Hunt told the Mail on Sunday, ‘we are not going to go back to the old days of the local authority running all the schools’. I would again question whether he will try and ensure local authorities get the power to interfere in academies and free schools.
But my point remains. We should value all teachers. I do not see the absence of a QTS as being a bar to a great teacher continuing to teach. Again this shgould be up to the headmaster, governors and parents.
