Missing the point on teaching qualifications

Fresh back from a fact-finding trip to the United States, Education minister Anne Tolley is proposing a new solution to the teacher shortage: untrained teachers!

Prospective teachers could skip specialist university training and be fast-tracked into the classroom under a plan to cope with an ageing workforce.

Under the scheme, anyone who already has a master's degree could bypass teacher's college and learn on the job.

Because obviously, throwing them in at the deep end and letting them figure it out for themselves will result in better educational outcomes for students. I have to ask: is Tolley on crack? Or does she just not give a damn?

I'm also dubious about her fetishising of higher qualifications. A masters is not an undergraduate degree, only better. It has a completely different focus, on self-directed research rather than basic knowledge. It is true that once upon a time a masters was the licence to teach - but that was 750 years ago, when universities were rather different beasts. Being good at research doesn't necessarily make you a good teacher, and having completed a thesis doesn't give you a broader base of knowledge to work from. Quite the opposite, in fact: a masters is the first step down the road to knowing everything about nothing.

The push for lower standards is driven by the teacher shortage, and is clearly aimed at increasing the supply of new teachers. But this misses the point entirely, because the problem isn't supply - its retention. Our teachers colleges churn out more than enough new graduates each year. But huge numbers of them drop out in the first few years, going overseas for more money, or deciding that teaching really isn't the career for them. There are obvious ways of solving this problem, most notably by offering more money and better conditions. MPs like Tolley are happy to make such arguments when justifying their enormous salaries as necessary to attract the "best and brightest" into Parliament. But I forget: the equation of money with talent applies only to the rich - not to mere plebs like teachers.