21st July 2010 9:00
By Blue Tutors
The chairman of Ofsted, Zenna Atkins, has recently said that bad teachers are not necessarily bad for pupils. In a report on the BBC, and stressing that the views were her own, and not representative of Ofsted’s, she claimed that it can help children to have a bad teacher, because they learn how to cope despite it. However, Atkins didn’t say that schools shouldn’t attempt to get rid of bad teachers.
This comes in the wake of a Panorama report that only 17 teachers have been struck off in the UK in the last 40 years, despite estimates that roughly 17,000 have not been up to the task. It emerged that some teachers are moved between schools, rather than having their competency challenged. Zenna Atkins says that the school have to take more responsibility in such cases, and not accept excuses and tolerate poor teaching.
Atkins said that poor teachers are most damaging for children at a young age, and that it can crush children. Professor Simon Burgess from Bristol University, recently conducted a study into the effect of a poor teacher on their students. He was surprised with the results of students of those teachers ranked in the top 5% on their teaching ability, and the results of students of teachers in the bottom 5%. “If you took all these people out, stopped them from teaching the children and replaced them even with just average teachers, that would be something like half a grade per pupil,“ he said.