Recent policy on teacher education in England is being implemented at a fast-changing rate, and may lead to huge changes in the field. Academic Reading Group will discuss teacher education policy on Friday in the Library meeting room at 3.00-4.00. Damien Shortt will lead the discussion; all are welcome.
2 responses to “Recent policy in teacher education”
I was unaware that what Gove and Gibb are proposing can be described as policy, more like uninformed prejudice, based upon their own experiences of selective schools, teachers and teaching from a bygone age which they assume was golden – on the spurious assumption that if it worked for them it must work. Gibb famously remarked that he would prefer his children to be taught science by someone from a ‘good’ university with no teaching qualification rather than someone with a teaching qualification from a ‘new’ university.
Those of us leading secondary subject PGCEs will shortly be asked to design ‘new’ programmes that might enable us to anticipate Gove’s and Gibb’s rancid thought processes for courses which might pass their ‘Schools Led’ criteria.
What they are proposing is the equivalent of turning medical education over to St John’s Ambulance Brigade: ‘you know how to stop bleeding – we’ll let you train up the new generation of vascular surgeons, you can put a sling on – do you fancy teaching orthopaedics?’
Yet they fail to appreciate the idiocy of their prejudices, the teaching methods they were subjected to in that remote golden age were probably new and radical in a very different post war world. If they were true conservatives perhaps they ought to be hankering after the monitorial system. I suspect that both Sir Keith Joseph and Sir Edward Boyle would have nothing but contempt for Gove and Gibb, their ill informed idea that pass for policy and the way they pander to the lowest common denominator: the ignorance and prejudice of Daily Mail readers. I’m actually quite glad to be the age I am and can get out soon but I will bitterly regret the lasting harm that they will do to teacher education, to secondary subject communities and to history teacher education in particular.
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