5/27/2008 7:16:00 AM
The Guardian 27 May
Every school has at least one incompetent teacher who should be helped to improve or "moved on", the schools minister, Jim Knight, has said. Over the course of a career, one bad teacher can undermine thousands of children's education, he said, adding that it was a "social justice issue" to ensure every teacher is up to scratch. The government is developing plans to remove more under-performing teachers but is hoping to enlist the support of the teaching unions in order to avoid a "massive fight" with the 400,000-strong profession, Knight said. The schools secretary, Ed Balls, promised new moves to root out teachers whose "competence falls to unacceptably low levels" in his children's plan last year. The General Teaching Council for England (GTCE) has suggested that under-performing teachers should be moved to neighbouring schools to retrain. In an interview with the Guardian, Knight dismissed estimates over the last year of between 17,000 and 24,000 incompetent teachers in schools, saying there was no firm evidence to put a number on low-performing teachers. But he said: "If you spoke to anybody about their experience in school and asked them whether there was a teacher who probably should have been doing something else, probably every one of us would say, yeah, we remember that teacher. What we need to do is be able to find a way of helping those people either achieve what they came into teaching for, the moral purpose of helping every child achieve their full potential ... or helping them move on to something they will be better at. But we've got to do that with the support of the profession, because it's about raising the esteem of the profession." Teachers should receive extensive support to improve, for instance from in-school training with high-performing colleagues, he said. He wanted a discussion with the teacher unions about "what we can do to help those teachers teach better, and if they are not capable of teaching better how to help them move on. That's a discussion I need to have about whether or not they [the unions] can help us with this."Guardian
Lead Story | General
E-mail a friend |
del.icio.us| Bookmark|
Permalink |
Comments
(0) |
Post RSS