Newly-qualified teachers remain largely pleased with their training, but ratings for most subject areas and some professional skills have fallen since last year.
The Teacher Training Agency’s annual survey shows a big improvement in how trainees rated preparation for teaching the national literacy and numeracy strategies. Now 84 per cent say preparation was good or better, while last year 71 per cent rated literacy training as at least good and 54 per cent gave this rating to numeracy training.
Training on managing pupil behaviour and discipline was marked down from around 68 to 58 per cent.
Nigel de Gruchy, general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers, said the figure was “probably just as much a reflection of the increasing difficulty of the job in the classroom”.
Other professional training which was rated less highly this year was understanding the national curriculum, planning for progression, differentiation, teaching minority ethnic pupils, and monitoring, assessing, recording and reporting.
Overall, the quality of training was rated good or better by 82 per cent of the 7,000 respondents compared with last year’s 85 per cent. Only 2 per cent said training was poor. The TTA says the differences could be due to trainees having higher expectations.
New teacher section, JOBS 1
