IT should be as easy as ABC for schools to get rid of incompetent teachers, yet it is apparently all but impossible.
There are an estimated 600,000 teachers currently working in our state schools. That’s an awful lot.
How many have been sacked for incompetence in the last 40 years? According to research by the BBC’s Panorama programme last year (and cited in the Sunday Times this week) the answer is 18. Not 18,000, but one-eight. Eighteen. Their unions would have us believe that poor teaching doesn’t really exist.
Strange then, that over the past decade, Britain has slumped alarmingly in international league tables (from eighth to 28th in maths, for example). The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, which publishes the annual league tables, said that nearly 20 per cent of British children leaving school have such low standards of literacy and numeracy that it was “likely to cause them problems gaining employment upon leaving school”.
The inability of schools to sack bad teachers – who are setting our children up to fail in later life – is a national scandal. It would not be tolerated in any other profession.
Yet the mighty teaching unions blindly, and militantly, defend the indefensible and flex their industrial muscle to the point where the sacking of incompetent teachers is virtually unheard of. That is wrong – and grossly unfair on the children who suffer as a result.
This week an idiotic teaching union leader (if you’ll excuse the tautology) described the new Education Act as a “crime against humanity”, rightly getting himself into trouble for using such inflammatory language.
Dr Derek Roach, deputy general secretary of NASUWT, went on to declare a need to “reclaim progressive values within our schools”.
And yet it is those very progressive values which have so poorly served generations of our schoolchildren, far too many of whom emerge from their schooldays barely literate and numerate, and all too often largely unemployable.
Grade inflation, the all-must-win-prizes attitude, poor discipline and poor teaching have all contributed to our stagnation in the international academic arena.
The Education Act, which has just received royal assent, will go some way to redressing the balance by making it easier for the government to close down failing schools.
One of the reasons schools fail is because of poor teaching by a minority of teachers who aren’t up to the job. The size of that minority is a matter of debate – estimates from seasoned experts ranging, apparently, from five to 35 per cent of the profession. It would be interesting to hear what the teaching union leaders make of those figures. Presumably they would disagree vehemently.
Source:
nwemail.co.uk
There are an estimated 600,000 teachers currently working in our state schools. That’s an awful lot.
How many have been sacked for incompetence in the last 40 years? According to research by the BBC’s Panorama programme last year (and cited in the Sunday Times this week) the answer is 18. Not 18,000, but one-eight. Eighteen. Their unions would have us believe that poor teaching doesn’t really exist.
Strange then, that over the past decade, Britain has slumped alarmingly in international league tables (from eighth to 28th in maths, for example). The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, which publishes the annual league tables, said that nearly 20 per cent of British children leaving school have such low standards of literacy and numeracy that it was “likely to cause them problems gaining employment upon leaving school”.
The inability of schools to sack bad teachers – who are setting our children up to fail in later life – is a national scandal. It would not be tolerated in any other profession.
Yet the mighty teaching unions blindly, and militantly, defend the indefensible and flex their industrial muscle to the point where the sacking of incompetent teachers is virtually unheard of. That is wrong – and grossly unfair on the children who suffer as a result.
This week an idiotic teaching union leader (if you’ll excuse the tautology) described the new Education Act as a “crime against humanity”, rightly getting himself into trouble for using such inflammatory language.
Dr Derek Roach, deputy general secretary of NASUWT, went on to declare a need to “reclaim progressive values within our schools”.
And yet it is those very progressive values which have so poorly served generations of our schoolchildren, far too many of whom emerge from their schooldays barely literate and numerate, and all too often largely unemployable.
Grade inflation, the all-must-win-prizes attitude, poor discipline and poor teaching have all contributed to our stagnation in the international academic arena.
The Education Act, which has just received royal assent, will go some way to redressing the balance by making it easier for the government to close down failing schools.
One of the reasons schools fail is because of poor teaching by a minority of teachers who aren’t up to the job. The size of that minority is a matter of debate – estimates from seasoned experts ranging, apparently, from five to 35 per cent of the profession. It would be interesting to hear what the teaching union leaders make of those figures. Presumably they would disagree vehemently.
Source:
nwemail.co.uk
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