9th February 2012 9:00
By Blue Tutors
The recent confirmation that schools and head teachers will have increased powers to sack underperforming teachers has had teaching unions up in arms. Why is this? What has changed, and why do so many people think it’s a bad idea to put more teachers at risk of losing their job?
We recently published an article about how tutors might feel about the prospect of having a guaranteed job for life, and that teachers might want to look at the tuition market for an idea of how badly one’s livelihood can be affected at any time, and particularly in a recession. However, it would be remiss to suggest that teachers and tutors do exactly the same job, or that they are judged in a similar way.
Teachers have far less time with each individual student, and it’s unfair to presume that a teacher should necessarily have as big an impact on a student’s studies as a tutor does. Also, it is students’ parents, and the students themselves who judge how effective a tutor has been, whilst teachers tend to be judged based on results and improvements among a class. Obviously we hope that our teachers are improving our students’ abilities, but there are many outside influences which can make such an improvement very difficult, not least the previous teacher; it’s common for students to only begin to struggle a year or two after a period of bad teaching because a poor teacher hasn’t taught the basics well, and yet it may be the student’s current teacher who is criticised for that.
The statistic that became the strap-line of the new tougher sanctions was that only 15 teachers have been sacked in the last 10 years. It’s unlikely that many teachers will argue that this is a reasonable number. In any other industry, with a similar number of employees, the number of fired people would be probably a thousand times the number of teachers. Obviously no one wants anyone to be fired for the sake of statistics, but are we really claiming that the teaching profession is a thousand times less prone to misconduct or poor performance than other jobs?
Part of the government’s reforms are that we must begin to judge teachers using fairer measures, and that simple attainment results at the end of a year can’t be the sole factor influencing how well a teacher as performed. It is possible that many teachers aren’t aware of this, and are worried about how the new guidelines will be used. From this point of view one could argue that the announcement is a bad thing because it may well demoralise many good teachers.
A loss of confidence and discouragement for prospective young teachers is actually the main argument from teaching unions in the UK. At a time when we are trying to encourage graduates to seriously consider a career in teaching, the unions claim that the tougher reforms can only harm that, and will demoralise our existing teachers. This may appear to be a reasonable argument before one considers the reaction of potential employees to the suggestion that their chosen profession is becoming more competitive. Most young people today want that competition, they don’t want a comfortable job where they’re not pushed and don’t have the threat of losing the job if under-performing, but more to the point, do we want teachers who have a different attitude?
Overall the new reforms have to be a good thing. If we want continual improvement to our education system then we have to make it competitive, and part of that means removing teachers who aren’t doing justice to their students. No one wants to see good passionate teachers out of work, but it should be made clearer that that’s not what the government are suggesting.