YES

Christine Blower
General secretary National Union of Teachers

Teaching is a demanding profession and not everyone can do it, even those who have first-class degrees.

The idea that teaching is a profession that anyone can do is simply wrong. Teachers are subject to high scrutiny, Ofsted inspections and annual performance management.

Although qualifications are necessary, being a good teacher is not dependent on academic ability alone. Good subject knowledge is not the same as the ability to engage with young people. They are wholly different skills and both are necessary.

A good teacher engages pupils and ensures that they understand and enjoy the learning process. They need to be able to teach in a way that suits their pupils best, and to be able to identify where extra support is needed to tackle the barriers to learning. This is not something that you can measure simply by looking at a person’s ability to gain a B grade in mathematics. It must be remembered that pupils’ progress is not solely in the hands of teachers. Too many teachers see first hand the effects of poverty on their pupils. The achievement gap between children from high-income and low-income families starts young and grows.

We want to attract people with good degrees but defining a degree requirement of 2:2, as the Conservatives have suggested, is arbitrary and could exclude many good teachers.

Teachers are persistently under review. This is in contradiction to some politicians’ concerns that there are teachers who are not up to the mark being left to teach in our classrooms. As the Government says, we now have the best teachers the country has ever seen.

It is important for teachers to keep up their skills, and professional development is critical. One of the main problems is teachers being unable to access professional development because of a lack of funding. There needs to be a guaranteed entitlement for every teacher to match that expectation. We cannot expect teachers to continue to improve standards or narrow the attainment gap when they have to spend so much of their time doing things that have nothing to do with their professional expertise.

In the past decade the Government has pushed through an incredible number of education reforms, and workload has become a central concern within the teaching profession. A reduction in class sizes and matching the spending per pupil in state schools to that in the private sector also would ensure that teachers could give the best possible education to every pupil.

To start stipulating what sort of grades are deemed sufficient is not helpful. What the Conservatives — and all other political parties — need to realise is that you can be the best teacher in the world with the best qualifications, but if class sizes are too big, or if funding is insufficient, your own qualifications become a secondary issue.

NO

Michael Gove
Shadow Education Secretary

Research on countries with the strongest education systems demonstrates that there is a direct relationship between the quality of the teaching workforce and how well they perform in international measures of educational attainment.

If you look at countries that consistently do best in these measures — Finland, Singapore and South Korea — the thing that unites them is that they have highly qualified teachers and a high level of prestige and esteem associated with the profession.

In Finland only the top 10 per cent of graduates can become teachers. In South Korea only the top third of graduates can, and it is even harder to become a primary school teacher than a secondary school teacher. In Singapore teaching comes ahead of everything apart from medicine when it comes to how highly people regard the profession.

One of the problems the Government had felt for a long time was persuading people from top-performing universities to consider teaching. We are now in a position where teaching is the No 1 choice of profession for people leaving university.

Thanks to initiatives such as Teach First it is an increasingly attractive option for graduates from our highest-performing universities. Because of the economic climate more people are looking at teaching and reconsidering its attractiveness as a career option.

This is an appropriate moment to raise the bar. When you have international evidence telling you to get the very best people in the classroom, an increased interest in teaching and more good people thinking about it, then it is the moment to say “in order to become a teacher you need to be among the best”.

Given the number of children leaving primary school without basic literacy and numeracy skills, we want to ensure that primary teachers are equipped with the knowledge to deal confidently with these subjects.

Being a good teacher is about much more than subject knowledge and academic achievement. But the more confident a teacher is about a subject, the more depth they can bring and the more effective they will be if they have all the other gifts we expect.

Evidence suggests that raising the bar attracts more people. If you say “this is a really prestigious job” then more people apply. In Finland being a teacher is like being a trainee with the Foreign Office. Although it may not pay as well as other professions, it is associated with prestige and success.

As a parent, would you rather your child was taught by someone who was clever, knowledgeable and successful? I want children from poor backgrounds to be taught by people who themselves have been educationally successful, who can say: “Education has a fantastic, transformative potential.” Headteachers at the best state schools tell me that the first thing they look for in any new teacher is knowledge of, and enthusiasm for, the subject. That is the most important thing.

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