Gove takes on bad teachers
Jonathan Jones 12:18pm
Michael Gove’s giving a robust defence of his plans to make it quicker and easier for schools to sack bad teachers.
‘You wouldn’t tolerate an underperforming surgeon in an operating theatre, or an underperforming midwife at your child’s birth,’ he says in the Mail. ‘Why is it that we tolerate
underperforming teachers in the classroom?’ And he was similarly forceful in an interview on the Today programme,
the full transcript of which we’ve got here.
Gove is emphatic about how important this is. ‘The evidence is quite clear,’ he says. ‘If you’re with a bad teacher, you can go back a year; if you’re with a good
teacher you can leap ahead a year.’ Indeed, an extensive American study last week
showed that ‘Replacing a poor teacher with an average one would raise a single classroom’s lifetime earnings by about $266,000’. And it’s not just Gove who’s realised
the importance of the ability to sack teachers. New York’s education chief Joel Klein highlighted it in a roundtable discussion with Gove last year, at which the Spectator was present:
This is a goal Gove’s been focused on for years. His attempts to weed out bad teachers come on top of plans to attract more good ones: a £20,000 bursary for top graduates and clearer guidance and support in dealing with difficult pupils.‘we don’t reward excellence, there are no consequences for non-performance and we tell people if you stay a certain number of years in the system we’ll give you a lifetime pension so after a certain point your workforce is entirely locked in and incapable of changing their methodology... I don’t want to be in a world where people don’t want to improve every day.’
Naturally, the plans have provoked a fiery response from the unions. The NUT’s Christine Blower claims that ‘what the government proposes is potentially a bully's charter’, while Chris Keates of NASUWT calls it ‘yet another depressingly predictable announcement from a Government seemingly intent on destroying the teaching profession and state education’. ‘The draconian measures announced today are totally unnecessary’, she adds. ‘There is no evidence which demonstrates that there are problems with the current system.’ But if that's true, one has to wonder why, when there are estimated to be around 15,000 incompetent teachers, just 18 have been sacked for incompetence in a decade. Fortunately, Gove’s shown that he’s not one to let union opposition block his reforms.
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Tiberius
January 13th, 2012 12:39pm Report this commentAs a school governor, I instinctively laughed out loud when I heard the union response.
When you have seen a headteacher and her colleagues suffer at the hands of a querulous member of staff, who is squaring up for a fight over a personal agenda with a row of baseballbat-wielding union officials behind him or her, you kinda see the irony in the use of the word bully.
James Strong
January 13th, 2012 12:59pm Report this commentOf course incompetent teachers should be dismissed.
One of the problems is that, because everyone has been to school, everyone thinks they can teach.
Lessons should be observed and evaluated; that's fine.
Pilots are observed and evaluated and this practice should be extended.
MPs should be observed and evaluated, and breathalysed when working, otherwise how do we know their judgements are sober?
Police officers and the CPS should be observed and evaluated.
There are many more jobs that are done badly, don't just focus on teachers.
Ian Walker
January 13th, 2012 1:16pm Report this commentTiberius is spot on - for the NUT to accuse anyone else of bullying would be hilarious were it not so depressingly serious.
The problem will be that at soon as the measurements of 'good' or 'bad' teaching are released, the union's lawyers will have advice booklets within weeks telling their workshy members how not to get caught.
The solution is actually quite simple - video recording of every lesson in every classroom, subject to random spot-checks by the headteacher/Ofsted/peer review.
Anything else will just get fudged around.
Wily Trout
January 13th, 2012 1:17pm Report this commentI listened to Ms Blower on R4 this morning. She is desperate that Performance Management should not be linked to performance. Teachers find the very concept that they should be managed at all to be an attack on their civil liberties for some reason. But they want their pay rises every year.
Mike and Walter
January 13th, 2012 1:27pm Report this commenthaving gone to a comprehensive with more than it's fair share of bad teachers I have to agree with Gove. We had five excellent teachers - the kids knew the good and the bad within ten minutes - and it remains a mystery to me why they were paid the same as the ones who obviously did not know what to do with their lives when they finished their degrees and got into teaching. The effects of the bad teachers were forever and appalling. The ones that were hauled up were always protected and again it made us wonder why ther representatives seemed to feel it their duty to protect the incompetent but not the innocent - we had no union.
Give them fixed contracts and renew or not on ability.
Pettros
January 13th, 2012 1:50pm Report this commentWell done Gove. One of the better Scottish politicians around.
I do think Teachers should be paid a little bit more though. Sounds a bloody awful job.
Heartless C.
January 13th, 2012 2:31pm Report this commentGood!
Could he make that a 'transferable skill' - and in time get rid of useless apparatchiks in the NHS, Civil Service, Military, and Local Government?
DavidDP
January 13th, 2012 2:52pm Report this comment"There are many more jobs that are done badly, don't just focus on teachers."
Yes, why is the Education Secretary focusing on teachers and not, say the police? A mystery.
Fergus Pickering
January 13th, 2012 3:12pm Report this commentIt is, in some ways, a bloody awful job because the teachers have no sanctions against the pupils who know they hold the whip hand. I'd go back to hitting them, the boys anyway. It's something they both understand and practice. Fear needs to be instilled. If you think otherwise then you don't understand boys and should read 'Lord of the Flies' again.
The pay isn't the problem; it is sufficient. The conditions are the problem, and they will never get better until the power of the pupils is drastically reduced, little agents of Satan that they are.
TomTom
January 13th, 2012 3:43pm Report this commentWill he also remove incompetent Head Teachers ? How often have we seen dysfunctional schools because good teachers flee an incompetent head leaving dross behind. Good Teachers can walk rather than suffer highly political but incompetent heads
disenfranchised
January 13th, 2012 4:45pm Report this commenti read somewhere that half the labour party's membership is made up of teachers.
if that's true it would fully explain the appalling low standard to which state education has been allowed to fall.
therefore sacking at least half of them would seem be the order of the day for gove.
go to it, my man.....
James Strong
January 13th, 2012 6:35pm Report this comment@DavidDP.
The Education Secretary is one member of the Cabinet.
I think this policy was discussed in Cabinet committee, the Cabinet, and informally among Ministers and backbenchers.
What do you think?
So what do you think about not just putting the focus on teachers?
Do you think other Ministers, members of the same government as Gove, should be preparing similar initiatives in their areas?
Or not?
starfish
January 13th, 2012 8:41pm Report this comment"Yes, why is the Education Secretary focusing on teachers and not, say the police? A mystery."
Er, because he is the Education Secretary? Just a thought
La Blowers defending the rights of incompetent teachers to evade sanctions - who'd have thought it?
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