2nd June 2011 9:00
By Blue Tutors
With the government’s recent announcements to allow some schools more freedom to employ teachers without a PGCE, and to reduce the grace period for under-performing teachers to remain in their job, it seems as though the idea that getting a PGCE is a golden ticket for life might be disappearing. However, there still seems to be an obsession among some parents and some teachers that a PGCE necessarily makes one a better tutor than someone without the qualification.
We see hundreds of tutors a year at our assessments, and one would think that the qualified teachers would consistently out-perform the wannabe tutors with no previous tutoring experience, but it isn’t the case. Of course, we meet many qualified teachers who are brilliant tutors, but we also meet teachers who simply don’t understand the skills required to be a good tutor, and lecture at their students.
The strange thing is the number of parents who say something along the lines of ‘we want a tutor currently teaching in a school’. There is an idea in the UK that a PGCE qualification is almost like becoming a doctor, and of course, you wouldn’t want someone without a medical degree operating on you. What some parents misunderstand is how little time most school teachers spend teaching one-to-one, and how little a PGCE trains them to do this.
An article was recently published on our website where some teaching unions lamented the number of non-qualified teachers currently teaching in the UK. The suggestion was that a qualified teacher is objectively better than a non-qualified teacher, but there was no evidence to prove that this is the case.
We spend all of our time measuring tutors’ tutoring ability, and finding the right tutor for a student, and so it’s so difficult for us when we have the perfect tutor for someone, but because the parent has asked for a school teacher, we might end up matching the student with a school teacher who performed poorly at their tutoring assessment.
There has to be more clarity about teaching standards in the UK. PGCEs should no longer mean jobs for life without continual assessment and monitoring of teachers’ ability, and it would help if parents were aware of the strengths and weaknesses of their children’s teachers. We might get to a stage where we can truly recognise the best school teachers in the country, rather than grouping them all together as part of a ‘satisfactory’ service.