Do we need teachers

[Si]

Yeah but you are in the private sector with it's greener grass over the hill - if you don't like conditions you find a new employer......if a teacher doesn't like conditions then they will find exactly the same conditions at virtually all other employers. So given that they don't have the cushy options that you do, they are only left with the option of trying to change the conditions rather than the employer.

But doesn't that all come back down to the fact it's an archaic protectionist system.
Why for example is it not a better system to simply allow schools to run their own budgets and to pay a teacher whatever they feel they need to. It seems to me the current system cushions poor teachers whilst restricting the good ones.

I appreciate there are potential issues but surely none beyond the wit of man to come up with a solution.

Indeed. But the teachers are not in a position to make this change, hence their recourse to strike action.
Although, where schools have acquired control of their own budgets, etc the conditions tend to worsen. And let us remember that they still have to adhere to the national curriculum and to OFSTED. Whereas auditing in the private sector is much slacker......in my experience very few people write quiche-eater code when the heat is on.

And, of course, it brings us back to how you monitor teaching.....as mentioned, exam passes do not mean good teaching, rather they can mean that the school has just spoon fed them exam technique and little else because it is terrified of going on to special measures. This is, of course, an amazingly unhealthy way to run an education system.

[georgew]

I do see jibes of the "anyone can do it"variety.

No you don't - I refer you (again) to the point that addressed this.

Of course this goes without saying and is true of all professions. I provide you with an article about Finland describing such a system and yet you make no comment on it....curious.

Firstly I didn't comment on Finland because I didn't see it as particularly relevant. The whole Finland article wasn't about individual processes but a more holistic approach concerning multiple processes. In the context of the UK it's decades away (if ever) from being relevant.
I see, and this comment of yours isn't holistic then." I'm fed up with public service employees trying to elevate their jobs above all the others and the rhetoric they use to do so - and mainly in order to line their own pockets to boot."

Secondly, it's not actually true of all professions. In my profession we have a mix of the excellent through to the monkeys. They all have their place and the mix keeps costs down.
In contrast it's difficult to see what a below average teacher would do (unless we simply accept that we can have a mix of teachers in which case why are we being subjected to the rhetoric and emotional blackmail they use when trying to justify their demands?)
I'm really trying to understand your logic here and failing dismally. Are you saying that using rhetoric and emotional blackmail would be justified if all teachers were of the same quality?

As to meeting them I've been responsible for firing a few, and in one case forcing them from the profession. That does not mean however that I would say such things as "I can count the number of 'good' teachers I've met on one hand" which you seem happy to do. That is far from the "reasoned argument" you seek.

Sounds like good news then.
I'm happy to say that because in my experience it's true. Am I not allowed to use my own experience?
Heavens forbid. I'm sure it's a rich and varied tapestry of your life's ups and downs (mostly downs from the tone of your posts). I suspect it may be a wee bit threadbare in the area of education however.
Perhaps you'd rather (despite your earlier protestation) that I simply adopt the view of the DM.

Arguing for higher standards in any profession is hardly controversial, and as for leaving them alone I take it that you are unaware of the requirements of all teachers to undertake various refreshment courses and of course their annual professional supervision which sets targets in their professional development. But then I'm sure you know all about these matters I'm sure given your experience of the profession.

Higher standards, refresher courses, supervision, peer reviews, etc etc. Such is the way of life these days in any profession. (I did mention I know some teachers personally?)
Enough said then. Expect to be offered a senior post in the Education administration in short order. God knows we need people with your qualifications.
P.S. I like your use of 'red ink'. Some habits die hard eh?

[kwackers]

I see, and this comment of yours isn't holistic then." I'm fed up with public service employees trying to elevate their jobs above all the others and the rhetoric they use to do so - and mainly in order to line their own pockets to boot."

Not to my interpretation of 'holistic', no. Merely an observation based on watching teachers being interviewed.

I'm really trying to understand your logic here and failing dismally. Are you saying that using rhetoric and emotional blackmail would be justified if all teachers were of the same quality?

Apologies, I'm trying my best to within the confines of my education (or lack of).
What I'm saying is that when they're being interviewed I have to listen to all the pap about "future of our children", "noble profession" etc etc which IMO boils down to emotional blackmail and an attempt to 'big themselves up'.
This contrasts greatly to my (albeit) limited experience of them.

I suspect it may be a wee bit threadbare in the area of education however.

Indeed, but there is the challenge. Teachers need the support of the plebs, to get that support they need a convincing argument. To date they don't seem to be getting very far with that.

Expect to be offered a senior post in the Education administration in short order. God knows we need people with your qualifications.

Fortunately we do, hence my employment record. For a real answer I refer you to the post above.

[kwackers]

Indeed. But the teachers are not in a position to make this change, hence their recourse to strike action.
Although, where schools have acquired control of their own budgets, etc the conditions tend to worsen. And let us remember that they still have to adhere to the national curriculum and to OFSTED. Whereas auditing in the private sector is much slacker......in my experience very few people write quiche-eater code when the heat is on.

And, of course, it brings us back to how you monitor teaching.....as mentioned, exam passes do not mean good teaching, rather they can mean that the school has just spoon fed them exam technique and little else because it is terrified of going on to special measures. This is, of course, an amazingly unhealthy way to run an education system.

OK, so to the way it comes across (whether a fault of the reporting or bad choice of interviewee) is that it's all about wages, pensions and "conditions" where "conditions" seems to be worded so loosely that an observer could be forgiven for thinking they mean nothing other than employment terms and contracts.

The observation that schools in charge of their own budgets makes things worse is interesting. Guess I need to do some research to see what it means. As for the national curriculum and OFSTED I don't see that it's possible to avoid them(?). Even the article georgew linked to suggests that successful education systems still have a relatively fixed curriculum.

As for monitoring - well they do have my sympathy on that. I don't 'get' the idea that everything can be monitored and the data disseminated in a meaningful way to the general public and that assumes that the act of monitoring doesn't break the system (which it obviously does).

[Vorpal]

As for monitoring - well they do have my sympathy on that. I don't 'get' the idea that everything can be monitored and the data disseminated in a meaningful way to the general public and that assumes that the act of monitoring doesn't break the system (which it obviously does).

People behave the way they are measured. Right now, education in the UK is measured by test results, so children are taught to pass tests.

IMO, children and teachers both need to be assessed by a combination of things, many of which cannot be assessed by standardised tests.

The article that georgew linked included

There are no mandated standardized tests in Finland, apart from one exam at the end of students’ senior year in high school. There are no rankings, no comparisons or competition between students, schools or regions.

This is so foreign to the UK. And so crucial to what's broken.

IMO, it's possible to get a very good education in the UK, but the system is designed to provide opportunities to high performers, and get everyone else to score at a minimum level on standardised tests. That is not a system designed for any, but a few, to thrive. The system in Finland, on the other hand, is designed to help each child achieve his or her best potential. And even if any one teacher is not 'good' there are others in the system, supporting him or her in various ways.

[meic]

Until you do Teacher Training you have little idea of what being a teacher is about. We had all watched them as children and could emulate some of their tricks, rather like a Parrot can speak.
On doing the course everything that you thought should be reasonably simple becomes complex and it just gets exponential in the degrees of complexity, the different tasks and things to be considered.

However a good many teachers can "cheat" and just use classroom folklore and apply the same old routines, as a computer would do on a guided course, possibly even worse than a computer would do.

Unfortunately the way to assess a teacher's performance is too complicated to be achieved in the real world with competing influences, conditions and demands. Also to have teachers competing to show they were the one who made a pupil good would just harm the kids.

A teacher is simultaneously working for at least four different bosses, the school, the government, the parents and the kids. The interests of those groups dont coincide exactly and a teacher may have only joined up with one of them in mind, or even with just themselves in mind.
Those who have joined up with just themselves in mind can have an easier life and look good in assessments because that is their target and what they are concentrating on. Those that really have concern for one, or more, of the other four can get themselves really worn out and never have enough hours in the day, week, month or year to do all that they have been trained how to do.

Just consider marking homework, thirty kids per class, twenty five classes per week. Let us say you give an hour for marking a classes homework, that is just a two minute look over each child's work. Two minutes is adequate for a superficial ticking session but woefully inadequate for getting a good insight into a child's learning style, successes and weakness, spotting flaws and giving constructive feedback which is essential to good learning.

So yes if you are the sort of teacher who just slaps it on with a brush, you will be fine. The paint will have covered the empty space, however if you care and do it correctly bearing in mind all you have been taught, you will never see your own kids (many primary school teachers never even get a chance to have kids) and just spend your time thinking about other peoples.

It was doable, even for a conscientious teacher until they introduced all the assessment and tick boxes for the Government. That broke many camels' backs, it was easy for the teachers who sensibly just ticked the boxes rapidly without giving it any thought (they were never actually used for anything useful) but for those who actually wanted to do it right, it took away from time that should have been spent on preparation and evaluation.

When I went in, it was worth the relatively poor pay because it was such a worthwhile career and so rewarding in class. Then they came and destroyed it in all respects by increasing the hours to do time wasting admin and destroying my subject (CDT).

If they got rid of the excessive recording and some of the rubbish that had to be spouted, so you were able to leave at 5pm after a rewarding day of teaching, I would love to go back at almost any pay rate.
If being a teacher was teaching a classroom full of kids during the school day and no more it would be my dream job, again.
But it isnt like that, at all.

[Mick F]

+1
Well put.

My mother was a teacher, my sister was a teacher, our older daughter is a teacher, and Mrs Mick F is an HLTA.

[[XAP]Bob]

My mother as well as both of my in-laws were teachers...

I would have gone into the profession (pref 2ndary science) but the remuneration and conditions just aren't comparable with the private sector.

When I started work in the private sector my first payslip was more than my mother *ever* earned (after 30+ years).

There is something wrong with a society that values the education of the next generation so lowly

It used to be that teachers could teach different kids in the class differently. If one was a visual learner then they'd get more visual stuff, if one was kinesthetic (albeit it wasn't called that back then) then that would be used. Nowadays there come down edicts that "thou shalt teach phonics" despite some kids being seriously impaired by it.

Take a second sibling, who is fairly bright and close in age to their older sibling. They will be interested in the stuff the older one brings home, and so may well go to school already reading the books that kid1 is reading. That's a couple of school years ahead of their peers. Now they have to start doing phonics...
Kid2 is going to be rather bored, and put off reading at all...

20 years ago they'd have skipped all those steps and gone straight into actually reading decent books, even if they were borrowed from the next class, or the class above! Their reading would have been encouraged and flourished.

The most important thing to remember is that these general rules are not set in concrete. They may help some children and hinder others because there are often many exceptions to the rules.

[iandriver]

Children aren't only taught to pass tests, they are guided into the wrong subject areas in many cases. This is my original point about chasing league tables and statistics. Here is a quote from the Russell Group about top university admissions (taken from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/ed ... evels.html which is one of many articles on this subject):

But the Russell Group defended their admissions policies, insisting the blame lay with schools that fail to give pupils the correct levels of advice and support, meaning they choose the wrong A-levels.
Dr Wendy Piatt, director-general, said: "Our universities face real difficulties as they work hard to attract students with the most talent, potential and ability from all backgrounds.
"Neither we nor the researchers can control for individual students making poor A-level choices which lead them to fail to meet entry requirements.
“Many good students simply haven't done the subjects needed for entry – universities need students not only to have good grades, but grades in the right subjects for the course they want to apply for."

Governments obsession with league tables is littered with these types of scenario. In medicine, it's easier for a top surgeon to give medication and let a patient die than to operate with a chance of death during the operation but have a far greater quality of life if they do survive. The deaths brings down their league table score.

[Psamathe]

Until you do Teacher Training you have little idea of what being a teacher is about. We had all watched them as children and could emulate some of their tricks, rather like a Parrot can speak.
On doing the course everything that you thought should be reasonably simple becomes complex and it just gets exponential in the degrees of complexity, the different tasks and things to be considered.

(Without knowing anything about teaching - and thus a genuine question); then how come this government has changed the system so many schools no longer need to use qualified teachers? If the training is so important I would have expected the government to close down the gaps allowing people to teach without qualifications rather than open up more gaps.

A teacher is simultaneously working for at least four different bosses, the school, the government, the parents and the kids.

That is not (necessarily) a problem. In many private sector companies an employee is effectively working for his/her line manager, the company (who is writing out the pay cheques), the shareholders and the customers. And just as with teachers, the different people do not always seek the same things (should, but does not always work smoothly).

Ian

[georgew]

(Without knowing anything about teaching - and thus a genuine question); then how come this government has changed the system so many schools no longer need to use qualified teachers? If the training is so important I would have expected the government to close down the gaps allowing people to teach without qualifications rather than open up more gaps.
Ian

I'm tempted to ask if you've been out of the country for a few years in that you seem completely unaware of the advent of "Free schools"
In what seems to be a completely political move, the present Government introduced the free schools project which allowed any group which had an interest in establishing a school,to do so. The school would more accurately expressed the founders' own attitudes to education, religious beliefs or whatever. These schools would operate under a very loose supervisory regime with no oversight from the local authority. As with "Academies" central control rests with the Education Secretary. The majority of these "Free schools" were established on the basis of religious belief, something that the Government should have foreseen and one which, given the consequences of this principle operating in Northern Ireland in terms of dividing the community, cannot be seen as desirable. In order to make the establishing of these schools as trouble-free as possible Mr Gove decided in his wisdom to abolish the need for teachers to be qualified. Hardly surprising given his declared disdain for the profession.

Having written all of the above, the short answer to your question would seem to be that politicians will always seek short-term political advantage, even if this is at the expense of something so precious as our children's education.

[Psamathe]

(Without knowing anything about teaching - and thus a genuine question); then how come this government has changed the system so many schools no longer need to use qualified teachers? If the training is so important I would have expected the government to close down the gaps allowing people to teach without qualifications rather than open up more gaps.
Ian

I'm tempted to ask if you've been out of the country for a few years in that you seem completely unaware of the advent of "Free schools"
In what seems to be a completely political move, the present Government introduced the free schools project which allowed any group which had an interest in establishing a school,to do so. ... In order to make the establishing of these schools as trouble-free as possible Mr Gove decided in his wisdom to abolish the need for teachers to be qualified.

That was what I was referring to when asking "how come the qualification requirements have been relaxed/discarded if they are so important (but I was not sure if Free Schools was the only change given the Public School system also has no requirement for using only qualified teachers).

Hardly surprising given his [Gove] declared disdain for the profession.

Seems to be a common thread in this government Look at Patterson's distain for the Environment.

Ian

[meic]

then how come this government has changed the system so many schools no longer need to use qualified teachers? If the training is so important I would have expected the government to close down the gaps allowing people to teach without qualifications rather than open up more gaps.

I dont know the answer to that, I got out decades ago.

However some themes have always run in Government involvement in education.

First is using Education as a political football with little concern for the children being ground through the mill wheels, second is constant change so that teachers are never left to get along with the job in peace.

My impression of Gove is that he can not tell the difference from a parrot speaking and a person speaking.
To be fair to him probably the majority of teachers do not use the skills which they have been taught and just are parroting so they can get time with their own wife and kids, instead of trying to meet the workload at home.

There have been some high profile cases where they wanted to get in "experts" like Frank Bruno as teachers without them being able to meet the requirements. I am all in favour of getting outside experts in to tutor or better still sending children outside of school to be tutored by them but sneaking them in as "fake teachers" is not a good fudge.

Then there was the idea of using ex-soldiers as teachers which may lay behind this. I am an ex-soldier and the instructional training we got was very good for instructional techniques, the skills I acquired in the army decades ago are a part of me that will never fade. However that is just one part of what a professional teacher should be doing and far from the most important part.
I think that Gove sees it as the whole of teaching. I am no more anti-Gove than any of the others that have been before him. I would even agree that the aspects of education which he longs for have been neglected to some extent but he is just going to swing the pendulum to the other extreme rather than just tweaking things to get the balance right.
Then the next idiot will be appointed and send the pendulum off in another direction on yet another educational hobby-horse fad diet.

[reohn2]

I look at all these striking teachers who seem to be so sad and I think do we need this lot. I think you practically take someone off the street to teach most things within a fornight. With so many excellent tutorials online I think teachers may go the way of 35mm film and vinyl records and become largely obsolete.

You have simply no idea what you're talking about if you think so.
A good teacher is worth their weight in gold.
It's not so much the what,more as to the how!

[francovendee]

The OP was 'Do we need teachers?' I think the answer is of course we need teachers but the best teachers are not always found in the classroom.
At the age of 16 I had to start work due to family circumstances and started as a dogsbody in a small engineering firm. An old boy who, was a time served engineer, took me under his wing and I learnt mote from him than all my years in school. The skill needed as teacher is to engage the pupil's interest, difficult in some schools even for the best of teachers. I'm sure successive governments have had their own take on this, Gove is just the latest.