Teachers joining the profession through a popular on-the-job training route are “highly suitable” - but the value added by their training is “highly variable”, according to inspectors who would like to see good practice spread more widely.
The criticisms from the Office for Standards in Education are spelled out for the first time by a working group reviewing the Graduate Teacher Programme. The inspection agency’s full report is not expected until later this term.
GTP candidates train in class on a salary of up to pound;13,000, with their schools receiving a pound;4,000 training grant. The group suggests that the rapidly expanding scheme should resist “training grant only” places introduced this month in response to demand from schools desperate for staff and willing to pay trainees’ salaries. It warns that they “may be perceived as a retrograde step”.
Some schools able to pay a salary have been claiming the pound;13,000, the group says. And primaries could miss out on salaried places, with proposals to concentrate these mostly on trainees in secondary shortage subjects.
The GTP working party, chaired by Ralph Tabberer, chief executive of the Teacher Training Agency, meets on January 21 to finalise its report to ministers.
The TES has received many letters from apparently well-qualified candidates rejected by the GTP. Applications this month were up threefold on the same time last year, to 1,600. Salaried places numbered 466, with 552 on a training grant only, leaving nearly 600 disappointed candidates.
A TTA spokesman said: “More applications meant only the very best applicants could be awarded places.” But Bob Twells, head of Furzefield primary school in Merstham, Surrey, has complained to the agency about delays in getting feedback after a potential recruit was twice turned down.
“We know what we are doing and what a good teacher looks like,” said Mr Twells. “The education authority has been to the United States to try to recruit for primary. If we are desperate for teachers, why are we trawling everywhere when there’s potentially a windfall here that all these schools are willing to train in classes?” Stephen Glover, a qualified post-16 teacher from Leeds who wants to retrain to teach ICT and business studies to secondary pupils, was turned down because his first and masters degrees were not in ICT. He would have to pay to do a secondary PGCE.
“It seems an injustice when I have taught and co-ordinated this subject in both FE and secondary sectors, and there is a shortage in this area,” he said. “This is my fifth year teaching ICT.”
And Martin Dove is relying on financial support from his wife to get through his GTP training, after his sponsor school was awarded only the pound;4,000 training grant.
“I feel a bit robbed,” said Mr Dove, a science graduate from Nottingham made redundant from the pharmaceutical industry.
