Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google

Professor Smithers from Buckingham University, showed that there were more qualified teachers who weren’t teaching than were, something that was ‘likely to be costing taxpayers tens of millions of pounds a year’ according to the
Daily Mail
’s take on the story. 4 Two interesting factors come out of the Smithers report too, that reinforce the McKinsey top two factors. Of the prospective teachers dropping out, it was those with the poorest qualifications to begin with who fared worst. In maths, for example, only 43 per cent have what the report calls a ‘good degree’ before entering a PGCE course and in science just over 30 per cent of entrants had two A-levels before embarking on an Initial Teacher Training course. As Smithers points out:
    these courses do not wilfully take in the poorly qualified; they are recruiting the best available among the applicants. Raising qualifications depends, therefore, on increasing applications among the well-qualified.
    (Smithers and Robinson 2009)
    This last point takes us back to the PISA report, as it is something that successful countries do well. Again, it is not a question of throwing money at the problem. McKinsey states that the top performing countries recruit the best potential teachers ‘by paying good (but not great) starting compensation’ and Smithers concurs when he says that attracting the right people:
    probably will have more to do with the general attractiveness of teaching as a profession in terms of respect, workload, salary and career development rather than short-term incentives such as ‘golden hellos’.
    (Smithers and Robinson 2009)
    If the recruitment of quality people to the job is paramount, then, it is a situation made all the more pressing by the number of teachers who are reaching retirement age. The 2008
TIMSS Advanced International Report
5 (from the people who brought you ‘TIMSS Classic’) looked specifically at ‘trends in student achievement in advanced mathematics and physics in the final year of secondary school’. In their final report, the authors expressed general disappointment at what they referred to as ‘declines in educational yield, both in the percentages of students takingadvanced courses and particularly in their achievement’, highlighting the knock-on effect on the economies and global competitiveness of countries who did not have sufficient high calibre people who ‘enter and survive the pipeline supplying fields related to mathematics, science, engineering, and technology’. (Of interest here is a report from elsewhere that found that the higher up a country was on a United Nations index of human development, the less interested its 15-year-olds were in school science. 6 )To make matters worse, those that do ‘survive the pipeline’ were planning careers in business and engineering rather than taking their studies further leading to ‘serious teacher shortages in science and technology in the years ahead’. Given the fact that seven out of the top ten most highly paid graduate jobs are science and engineering-based that, perhaps, is no wonder. 7 , 8 This was coupled with what the report calls ‘the most striking feature’ it unearthed – that many teachers in the study were approaching retirement age. They conclude ominously that attracting more students into advanced mathematics and physics courses and from there into teaching ‘is becoming a compelling necessity’.
    So, attracting the right people, keeping them and having more of them coming in than going out is one thing. Training them well is another thing. The second aspect that the Buckingham Univeristy report highlights is that it is teachers who have gone through schools-based training who are more likely to remain in the job, compared to those who have gone through a traditional university-based model of teacher training (with its concomitant doubling in terms of recruitment and interviewing costs). A highly attractive 97 per cent of teachers who had achieved their Qualified Teacher Status through what Smithers calls ‘an employment-based route’ were still in the classroom after 12 months.
    The McKinsey report agrees strongly with what Buckingham University found on this matter and also, when it comes to ongoing teacher development, highlights as examples of good practice things that will come as no surprise to the readers of this book who have their fingers on the pulse of what actually works in their school. Teachers develop best (1)