Personal Blogs

There has been much discussion recently about the hiring of unqualified teachers in state schools eg http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/oct/20/nick-clegg-david-laws-free-schools  The discussion seemed to reach a new height of absurdity last night on Newsnight when Tristan Hunt seemed to say quite clearly that he disagreed with it and Jeremy Paxman kept saying he was unclear.

I would not be happy for my son to be taught by an unqualified teacher for the following reasons:

1 Teacher training courses seem to provide useful training for teachers - I know I was much more competent after doing a PGCE.  This does not mean that teachers are perfect at the end of it (they never are) but the fact of having done the course gives skills and experience that will enable them to develop further afterwards.

2 A teacher who is not motivated enough to do a teacher training course is not likely to be a particularly well motivated teacher in terms of thinking about pedagogy.

 

I was reading the book Whoops by John Lanchester and he referred to economics having a case of physics envy, meaning that it often wants to use quantitative data in the way that the natural sciences do.  Later in the book, there are examples where this has proved to be very mistaken - some events that have happened were described as being extremely unlikely - one chance in a number bigger than all the atoms in the universe.   I suspect education does not envy physics so much but some educational research still seems to have too much faith in numbers.