Education and higher standards

Should schools employ only teachers who are qualified? Here “qualified”

means attending university and gaining a bachelor of education degree. If Nick Clegg gets his way, no unqualified teachers will be eligible to work in any of our state schools, including so-called free schools. Mr Clegg argues that a professional teaching qualification is “the only way”, as he put it, to “guarantee” standards. Labour’s new shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt agrees with him. That sounds reasonable enough, but consider the following case: Howard Bowden studied geography at Trinity College Cambridge and decided to become a teacher. He had no professional educational qualification. So he joined a scheme that took students to help out in inner-city schools in London. Working at the chalk-face with children from tough backgrounds convinced him he should dedicate his life to teaching. He said: “I enjoyed the smiles on the children’s faces and the feeling you were making a difference.”

His decision to become a teacher came midway through the third year of his degree – too late to apply for the following year’s training courses – so, after graduating, he took a job at Sherborne School, an independent school for boys. Thirty years on, that decision could cost him his job.

Mr Bowden is now head of geography at Batley Grammar School, which was one of the nation’s first free schools in 2011. The department has won national awards for the quality of its exam results during his tenure.

Yet, under plans adopted by the Liberal Democrats and Labour, he would face the sack.

For 40 years I have taught in state and private schools, secondary, junior, sixth form colleges and university departments and yet I have no professional education qualification.

Despite this grievous omission, things don’t appear to have been an unmitigated disaster.

Forgive me then if I emerge for a minute from Mr Clegg’s naughty corner and blow a trumpet on behalf of the unqualified.

Besides teaching English and RE and, for my sins, writing books on these topics, I’ve worked with colleagues in music departments where I wrote music for a production of Toad of Toad Hall. I enjoyed introducing kids from poor backgrounds to philosophy and helped set up the country’s first philosophy A-Level. Would I have been better able to do these things if I’d held a professional qualification?

In a lifetime’s teaching I have come across many professionally qualified teachers who were so incompetent – and in some cases only semi-literate – that they ought never to have been allowed within a schoolyard’s shouting distance of a child.

In fact, the notion of the professional qualification is a fairly new fad, unheard of until the middle of the 20th Century. If you had some knowledge and a desire to teach, you simply got yourself a job.

For centuries this easy-going arrangement produced great and inspiring teachers. I never went for a postgraduate certificate in education, but I was obliged to attend many fatuous professional courses run by education departments. Here I learnt, for instance, to quote Rousseau to the effect that the ideal man was “the noble savage” and the nonsense spun by Piaget that children are not capable of abstract thought until the age of 11.

“Give us a child until he’s seven and you can have him for life,” said the Jesuits. Bureaucratic secular educational dogmas are more pernicious than anything dreamed up by the men in cassocks.

This article first appeared in the Northern Echo.