Policy Tourists
Policy Tourists
Policy Tourists
So the long-standing requirement that teachers should have qualified teacher status (QTS) has been ditched for certain types of school.
Why we didn’t see this announcement coming?
Perhaps it was because this Government’s grandiosely-titled White Paper, The Important of Teaching, talked of the importance of valuing and developing teachers and we believed it; perhaps it was because a decision pertaining to the employment of future teachers in our schools was tucked unexpectedly into the last afternoon of the first full week of most teachers’ summer holidays; perhaps it was that the announcement came on the day when so many of us were gearing up to watch the much-anticipated opening ceremony of the Olympic Games; or perhaps we thought an idea like this one - a change to the people we can employ - might have been aired first as a proposal, or a matter for debate, or something the profession might have been consulted about, even if only fleetingly and superficially.
No: we didn’t expect it and here it is.
Now I can’t get quite as worked up as some of the Twitterati because I don’t think most schools in the state sector are suddenly going to rush to employ the first trainee shelf-stacker who applies to teach A-level Business Studies.
In this age of significant accountability, where results matter more than ever, only the most myopic school leader would employ someone patently unsuited to teaching. They would be risking a lot - especially as canny parents are likely to be asking about the number of genuinely qualified teachers a school employs.
And anyhow many schools have long employed instructors for specific purposes - people without QTS who do a brilliant job in teaching students a range of specific skills and subjects. Wanting someone with real credibility to teach Music Technology, someone whose background is in music studios? There have long been ways of hiring them and letting them work as instructors on fixed-term contracts. And their contribution has been important and enriching.
Similarly, many higher level teaching assistants demonstrate how having QTS isn’t the only gateway to being talented at teaching specific cohorts in specific ways.
Plus, in any case, we’ve all been taught by teachers with qualifications - including a QTS certificate - stuffed deep in every orifice who proved to be the worst teachers ever. QTS doesn’t guarantee quality, just as passing the driving test doesn’t guarantee that we’re all brilliant drivers. On reflection, though, I’m glad the driving test exists.
But, no, I’m not going to get so worked up about the decision on those grounds.
But I do think it was unfortunate and misjudged, both in what it signals and how it was announced.
And that’s because this Government, more than any we’ve known, are what Dylan Wiliam has termed ‘policy tourists’ - people who spot eye-catching ideas overseas and bring them back home, gaudy trinkets in an over-stuffed suitcase.
And the trouble is, in education as in life generally, context matters rather a lot. It’s why I’m far more sceptical than many in the profession about all these international comparisons, the rather simplistic notion (in my mind) that we can easily compare the performance of children in Shanghai with those in, say, East Grinstead.
Yet ours is a Government of policy tourists. In their frequent admonishments of teachers for not teaching well enough, or of exam boards for not being tough enough, or of curriculum planners for not being rigorous enough - they, like an insecure teenage boy at a motorway urinal, compare themselves all the time with the big boys further along the line. They look with envy at what others have got.
Which is why the decision about QTS is so contradictory coming as it does from policy tourists. Because it’s absolutely the opposite direction of travel from the jurisdictions we’re supposed to be emulating.
I’ve been reading Andy Hargreaves and Michael Fullan’s Professional Capital: Transforming Teaching in Every School, and these observations of theirs struck me:
Top performing countries don’t just pay attention to bottom and top 20% of teachers: continuously improving the 100% is what the top performing countries do. Their students experience high quality teachers year after year.
In Finland 100% of teachers from top 30% of graduates; in USA it’s just 23%. Just as crucially, the top nations invest in better working conditions on the job
Teaching is an attractive profession in all high-performing countries. Teachers are praised and prized for what they do. They are seen as the builders of their nations.
So why do we seem suddenly to be doing something which - in its symbolism at the very least - sends out a message that teaching (like headship a few months back) no longer merits a mandatory qualification?
Given the current job market, we had a chance to raise the bar higher, to make it tougher to become a successful teacher, to drive up standards by recruiting our brightest and best graduates. This, you’d have thought, was the very time to make becoming a teacher more aspirational at all levels.
It’s what Hargreaves and Fullan describe as a ‘business capital’ view of teaching which views ‘good teaching as technically simple’ as opposed to a ‘professional capital’ view which deems ‘good teaching as technically sophisticated and difficult’.
The more I see great teachers at work, the more I admire what they do, and the more - as in other countries - I want those skills spread more widely across the profession so that more of our students benefit.
That means saying teaching matters, that it’s tough, that it comes with huge levels of accountability, but the deal is that in return for good conditions of service (and generous holidays), teachers must deliver, that mediocrity will not be tolerated.
That would strike me as a reasoned message, a rallying-cry for the profession, and a way that we would be responding to one of the most important lessons we can learn from our international competitors. We’d be showing that investing in the quality of teaching isn’t soft or sentimental: it’s essential if we are to do better as a country.
Lots of people, as we have seen, are reading the QTS announcement as precisely the reverse, as a vote-of-no-confidence in teachers.
I’m not. I don’t honestly believe that the loss of QTS will lead to the employment of armies of clueless people. I don’t think our students’ education is suddenly imperilled.
But I do think that the saddest part of this decision is the furtive nature of its announcement, the sense of a profession not trusted, not valued, and of people in the Whitehall bunker feeling once again that they know best what will work in our schools, telling us rather than persuading us.
That’s not to say that they don’t have the right, as elected representatives, to change things. But experience tells us that change works best when people are involved and carried along. There’s therefore something vaguely contemptuous at the heart of this decision.
As the Italian playwright Carlo Goldoni wrote from Europe’s travel powerhouse, Venice, back in the eighteenth century: “A wise traveller never despises his own country.”
Nor, he might have added, his own people.
Geoff Barton
Suffolk
31 July 2012
Tuesday, 31 July 2012