‘Disaster’ warning on cuts to teacher training

THE HEAD of the country’s biggest teaching union has warned that Government cuts to teacher training for secondary schools are a recipe for disaster.

Education Secretary Michael Gove has told the Training and Development Agency for Schools that courses will be slashed by almost 14 per cent this year with 2,290 fewer places available.

In contrast there will be an extra 1,090 places available for primary school teacher training – an increase of almost six per cent.

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The coalition is also insisting that from next year only candidates who have achieved a 2:2 degree or better can study for a post-graduate certificate in education to become teachers.

Bursaries, too, are to be scrapped in most subjects as part of the Government’s money-saving drive.

The annual £6,000 payments for trainees will be dropped for those planning to teach topics including English, history, geography and art.

Recruits will still be able to get £9,000 a year to train in areas seen as vital to the economy, including physics, chemistry, engineering and maths, and £6,000 for biology, combined or general science, and modern foreign languages.

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Christine Blower, General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said: “It is nothing short of baffling for the Education Secretary to talk of the importance of teaching while putting in place measures to cut short teacher training programmes. It is a short-sighted reaction to cut the amount of secondary teacher training places.

“While we do presently have a need for more primary teachers, it seems to have escaped the Education Department’s attention that those children will be going onto secondary school in a few years.

“This will send us back to the days of boom and bust in teacher supply which we have actually been able to avoid in the last few years.”

She also criticised the decision to demand that all trainee teaching applicants have at least a 2:2 degree.

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“The result of a degree does not correlate to how good a teacher you can be. Having knowledge of a subject and being able to teach it are two very different things. Many potentially excellent teachers may well be lost to the profession,” she said.

The teacher training allocations show that there will be 14,555 secondary places available for this autumn, a drop of 13.6 per cent compared with last year, and 19,730 primary places, a rise of 5.8 per cent.

While the number of secondary maths places will stay the same, the number for English will drop by around 300, and for foreign languages they will drop by around 100. There are more places available for secondary science and technology subjects.