Poorly-trained teachers 'unable to deliver new curriculum'

Tens of thousands of new teachers are not knowledgeable enough to deliver the government’s tough new national curriculum, according to a leading private school headmistress.

A generation of new teachers have “little or no grounding” in many key aspects of the curriculum being introduced for the first time this week, said Alice Phillips, president of the Girls’ Schools Association.

She warned of a significant “knowledge gap” at the heart of the teaching profession because of a failure to give students the proper training needed to deliver traditional subjects such as English and maths.

In an article for the Times Educational Supplement, she said many of the country’s “brightest, most enthusiastic teachers have little or no grounding in English language or grammar”, adding that they are “completely at sea with many aspects of proper usage”.

Mrs Phillips, head of St Catherine’s, near Guildford, said some of her own school’s young teachers were not taught grammar when they were educated in the 90s or 00s, meaning they are often “less confident” about the subject than some of their own pupils.

"Wide reading and a familiarity with formal expression and grammar work to a certain extent, but won’t help you in front of a class of 14-year-olds when you are tasked with delving into the mysteries of subordinate clauses," she said.

Mrs Phillips said some English literature teachers were “unversed in much pre-20th century literature” beyond Shakespeare, even though new GCSEs call for a 19th century novel and a selection of poetry since 1789.

In further comments, she said the new extended maths curriculum would also suffer, adding: “While we undoubtedly have teachers who know the maths, there are not enough of them around to teach the extras.”

Mrs Phillips said a shortage of “rigorously educated teachers” may mean that the new national curriculum fails to fulfil its true potential in the classroom.

The comments were made as the curriculum was introduced as a compulsory requirement for pupils aged five to 14 in English state schools. Although it is not compulsory in academies or private schools, most schools are expected to use it.

The curriculum has been billed as providing a back-to-basics approach to education – emphasising the key knowledge that pupils must acquire at each stage.

This includes important aspects of maths at an earlier age, an emphasis on spelling and grammar in English, more reading in English literature and a narrative of Britain’s “island story” in history.

But Mrs Phillips said action was needed to ensure teachers can meet the demands of new-style lessons, saying many staff are being forced to sign up for “hastily arranged training courses in the new curricula and burning the midnight oil to prepare themselves”.

She called for “subject-focused degree courses” – combined with modules on education theory – to give student teachers better preparation for the classroom. She also said new teachers could be exempt from paying off all or part of their student loans to entice the best graduates into the profession.

“Bridging the knowledge gap for a generation of teachers whose own education may not have included the breadth that the new curriculum espouses is our immediate task,” she said. “Beyond that, we must ensure that future teacher training addresses subject knowledge as well as education theory.”

Tweet