Tag Archives: apprenticeships

No return to pupil teachers

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Teaching should be a reserved occupation. You should only be able to call yourself a teacher if you have a nationally recognised professional qualification. Others can style themselves as tutors, instructors, lecturers or even childminders, but not teachers. After all, not just anyone can be a solicitor, doctor, and accountant, or use many other professional titles.

The next question is then: how do you obtain the qualification of a teacher. For most of the past fifty years, it has been accepted in the majority of advanced economies that teachers need both intellectual knowledge up to a certain level, (degree level in England), plus an appropriate preparation course to add to subject knowledge for those teaching in the secondary sector and proof a certain intellectual standard for those teaching younger children a range of different areas of knowledge in order to gain certification as a recognised teacher. So, where do apprenticeships fit into this model?

I have argued that advanced apprenticeships for graduates might not look very different from the existing post-1991 partnership model of teacher preparation, with a recognition of the need to marry time spent in schools with an understanding of how to be successful at managing the teaching and consequent learning of young people. Whether schools or higher education takes the administrative lead is really of little consequence. For most, higher education may be better equipped to handle the process as it is geared up to do so. Large MATs and even dare one say it local authorities operating on behalf of a group of schools may offer a sensible alternative as some of the successful and now almost middle-aged SCITTs have demonstrated. Such graduate apprenticeships might exempt schools from the punitive apprenticeship levy tax they currently face.

So, is there a place for a short course for eighteen year old as apprentice teachers: emphatically not. Any such course would fail the test of sufficient academic and intellectual knowledge and understanding. It is not the place of an apprenticeship to deliver such qualifications. After all, that is why Robbins moved teacher preparation for school-leavers into higher education in the 1960s, as I have pointed out before. To move back the other way would be an unbelievably stupid move. So, is there a route for apprentice classroom assistants that might later convert into teachers by taking a degree while at work? That might be worth discussing, but not unless the term ‘teacher’ has been reserved as otherwise the temptation to blur the edges of who does what is too great for both schools and governments faced with financial problems to ignore.

We cannot ‘dumb down’, to use a once popular phrase, our teacher preparation programme and still expect to achieve a world-class education system. I am sure that Mr Gibb, the Minister of State, will have realised that fact when preparing for his speech earlier this week on the nature of teaching and knowledge. I don’t always agree with him, but learners do need structure and signposting at the early stages before going on to develop their inquiring minds into independent thinkers. They also need teachers educated to graduate level.

 

Apprenticeship Levy

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In the bizarre world that is education under the present Tory government, stand-alone academies with a payroll of less than £3 million are exempt from paying the new Apprenticeship Levy; all schools in any MAT with a payroll of over £3 million across the MAT will pay the levy, even if they are a small primary school; voluntary aided schools are probably exempt as the local authority is the de facto but not de jure employer so long as the school payroll is below £3 million, but all maintained schools will pay the levy regardless of the size of their payroll because the local authority is the employer, even though in these days of delegated budgets it has no control over spending by the schools.

This is a shambles that does a great discredit to the governance of education. If this is currently the position, it should be rectified forthwith. Either it is a tax on all schools or it isn’t. My position is that the government already takes out of education a sum needed to fund the training of new teachers and it should pray that cash in aid to the Treasury in order to have all state-funded schools exempt from the Levy. I don’t mind if the larger private fee-paying schools contribute since they often employ teachers whose training has been paid for initially by the State, but paid back by individuals through the tuition fee repayment schemes in operation since the late 1990s.

If schools are not exempted from the Levy, then they should make full use of benefits. Sadly, these are by employer, so a large county council with many maintained schools will pay a large sum in levy, but receive little back through the pay-out arrangements.

School budgets face enough other pressures at the present time, including for many small primary schools the loss of part of their block grant under the new funding formula arrangements. In Oxfordshire, the loss per schools equates to several thousands of pounds and may make the difference between survival or closure for village schools with less than 150 pupils.

I don’t know whether it is this government’s intention to redraw the map of primary schooling in England, but it could be well on the way to doing so if the combined effect of budget cuts and cost pressures make such schools unable to breakeven financially.

As I have hinted before, one solution is to downgrade the leading professional in small schools from a head teacher to a head of site paid on a lower salary. The risk is that any savings are then spent on a salary for an executive head teacher paid more than value of the savings. Whether deputy head teachers and other experienced teachers would be willing to take on the role of site leader for less money than the current head teacher will, I suspect, depend upon the terms and conditions offered, especially in the smallest of schools. However, unless some savings can be made, I fear for the future of many primary schools. Hopefully, I am being alarmist, but removing the Apprenticeship Levy from all school budgets would be a start.

 

Creative thinking needed on teacher supply issues

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Vince Cable apparently wants degree-level apprenticeships to become the ‘new norm’ according to recent a headline in the Independent newspaper. As a result, it appears he was thinking about earmarking an extra £20 million to support degree-level and postgraduate apprenticeships in subjects like engineering and construction. Perhaps, he should start nearer home by discussing with his Education counterparts a government sponsored apprenticeships scheme for teacher training. Although to some it might look like the re-invention of the pupil- teacher scheme of yesteryear, could such apprenticeships encourage bright school and college leavers into training as a teacher, and be a part of the solution to the looming teacher supply crisis in our schools.

Take a pupil studying physics who may not achieve an A* or A grade at A level, but is interested in continuing in the subject. At present, unless he, and sadly it is still mostly young men, can find a place on a physics degree course he cannot continue with the subject except perhaps as part of another degree. Is it worth exploring whether by creating a degree level apprenticeship in physics, teaching with a salary attached, we might encourage some of these young people to develop their expertise in the subject and become a teacher without the need for schools being required to compete in the graduate labour market. The apprenticeship can be just as rigorous as a degree, and must leave time for reflection and the other essentials of a successful university education, but might do away with some of the less useful rites of passage of a university education. In addition, it might include a period working in a successful school system overseas, such as say Singapore or Shanghai – today’s government favourite – that would allow the graduate-level apprentices to judge how well students do in their education in other countries.

These apprenticeships could be managed either by the new University Technical Colleges or by training schools already involved in School Direct. With a four year course, starting at eighteen, the new teachers could be awarded a degree after converting their apprenticeship with a final summative module, thus avoiding the need for the payment of tuition fees. The university elements of the course, such as additional subject knowledge, could be bought by the scheme’s providers at cost like any other business buying professional development services.

Without this sort of creative thinking it is unlikely that we will be able to provide sufficient new teachers to meet the demands of the growing school population well into the next decade. There are other schemes, such as the ‘Keep in Touch’ programme for those that leave the profession that might merit revisiting as well as re-training for arts and PE teachers unable to find work at present due to an ‘over-supply’ in these subjects. This might then allow for Qualified Teacher Status to be refined so as not to continue as a qualification that allows any teacher to teach any subject.