Many years ago, when volunteering in Sierra Leone, I came across a sign on a brightly painted wooden hut – that message was “If you can read this, thank a teacher.”
This simple and effective statement shows the vital role that teachers play in our education.
Back in January, I wrote an article on the problem with ensuring we have enough teachers in England. It’s disappointing to see that little progress has been made to address the issue since then. In fact, the Public Accounts Committee has released a report on the issue, calling for an urgent review of teacher training and concluding that the government fails to understand the difficulties many schools face in recruiting teachers.
This follows a National Audit Office report into £700m spent on recruiting and training teachers said that it could not conclude that this represented value for money.
Teachers were also in the spotlight after the release of the schools white paper, Educational Excellence Everywhere, with the National Union of Teachers (NUT) voting for a strike ballot on the plan to force all schools to become academies and the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) heckling Education Secretary Nicky Morgan when she spoke at their national conference.
The Government has been accused of ignoring the issue for some time now, with Schools Minister Nick Gibb refusing to acknowledge a "crisis" despite recruitment targets being missed for the past 4 years. Indeed, there is a feeling amongst the government that teaching unions themselves project a negative image of the profession and put off potential teachers.
The schools white paper did promise to strengthen Initial Teacher Training (IIT) with a greater focus on subject knowledge and evidence based practice. Coupled with changes to Qualified Teacher Status (QTS), these reforms look to be a move towards a more school-led system. It remains to be seen whether it will have a real impact on people leaving and entering the profession.
There is real concern that the issue will be made worse by the introduction of the Ebacc, as schools may find they don’t have enough teachers trained in expanding shortage subjects, such as modern foreign languages. Mary Bousted of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) union has long been at loggerheads with the government on the issue, and has warned that a crisis may become a catastrophe without radical reform.
Which brings me back to the brightly painted wooden hut in Sierra Leone, the home of a small business called the ‘Hakuna Matata venture’. Hakuna Matata famously means ‘no worries’ and this certainly seems to encompass the government’s thoughts on the issue. It remains to be seen whether they are justified in this view, or whether a catastrophe is indeed around the corner.
