A major piece of research into how well Scottish universities are preparing teachers for the profession has found that the system “as a whole is generally healthy, and there is definitely no ‘crisis’”.
The project ran for six years - during which teaching graduates in Scotland were tracked from 2018 to 2022 - after concerns had been raised about how well teachers were being prepared for the profession.
One student teacher giving evidence to the Scottish Parliament’s education committee in 2017 said she did not believe everyone graduating from her course that year had “sufficient skill in numeracy to be able to teach it to 11-year-olds at a reasonable standard”.
Now - as the Measuring Quality in Initial Teacher Education (MQuITE) project draws to a close - the final report setting out its findings has been published.
One key finding is that, at the outset of their careers, teacher confidence in key areas of the curriculum - including literacy and numeracy - is high and that graduates report “no real areas of persistent weakness”.
The report says: “The overall headline message from the MQuITE study is that the ITE [Initial Teacher Education] system as a whole is generally healthy, and there is definitely no ‘crisis’.”
Now, individual higher education institutions (HEIs) will be able to audit their provision using the MQuITE data as a baseline.
Generally, data showed that rather than new primary teachers feeling ill-equipped to deliver maths or English lessons “by 2022 the only area with a mean score under 3/5 [for confidence] was languages, suggesting a need to focus on this across the system”.
When it came to early career secondary teachers, the research found that they felt less prepared to teach the more advanced qualifications, including Higher and Advanced Higher.
The report suggests that this is understandable given “reduced opportunities to experience such high-stakes classes” but suggests “team teaching” could “enhance preparedness”.
Overall, the report recommends that early career teachers be given a choice over their professional learning, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach.
It also identifies partnership working between schools, universities and councils as another “key area that should be further strengthened, or indeed perhaps rethought, and certainly properly resourced”.
And now the researchers behind the MQuITE project are calling for a teacher in every school to be given responsibility for supporting early career teachers - and the staff who mentor them - using the lead teacher role introduced in 2021.
A survey of school-based mentors carried out as part of the MQuITE study flagged “tensions” over the respective power of the university and schools when it came to assessing students, with some respondents “mentioning contradictory assessment decisions” and the perception that universities have “a desire to pass students who are struggling”.
There was “a common feeling”, according to the report, that the teacher’s or the school’s view was given “less weight”, with one respondent commenting that “the universities often overrule the schools”.
The research also found “a sense from some respondents that universities haven’t taught ‘the basics’ before students arrive in schools” - for example knowing how to write a lesson plan.
Some local authority probationer managers - who participated in focus groups as part of the study - also reported schools feeling “pressure from HEIs to pass students”.
And although the probationer managers said that, overall, “ITE prepares student teachers well for induction”, they raised concerns “about a possibly growing number of graduates who were deemed to be lacking the necessary “resilience” and put the proportion of probationers “presenting with difficulties” at around 10 per cent.
The report said: “This may seem low, but when put into the context that some local authorities have around 250 probationers to support and manage, this presents as a significant number of probationers who require significant help.”
The research also flags that, for their part, university staff are frustrated “that some school-based mentors appear not to adequately understand the need for high-quality support for student teachers, that some do not understand the level at which students will be at during placement, or that at times the expectations of the school are inappropriately set”.
Making it tougher to grow partnerships between schools and universities, the research reveals, is the fact that schools are often taking students from multiple different ITE courses. There are 11 universities delivering teacher education programmes in Scotland leaving schools having “to familiarise themselves with the requirements of sometimes multiple different HEI providers”.
Speaking to Tes Scotland ahead of the publication of the report Professor Aileen Kennedy - MQuITE co-principal investigator - said that one of the key messages to come out of the research was there is no shared understanding of the purpose of ITE, which “leads to differences of view in terms of assessment outcomes”.
She said: “The point here is not to identify someone to blame - it’s not that teachers are rubbish at mentoring and universities are rubbish at telling people what to do. It’s more about the fact that we rely so heavily on mentoring as a key aspect of teacher education, but actually, we don’t resource it properly.”
She said there should be “a school-based teacher educator” in every school - a teacher “with specific specialist expertise in supporting teacher learning” - who can support early career teachers, as well as the staff who mentor and support them.
She said the lead teacher role - the little-used promotion route introduced in 2021 - could provide the means to create such a position.
Dr Kennedy said: “They wouldn’t be the person that had to do all the mentoring but it would mean there was the time, space and expertise in every school to support school-based mentors to do that work and lead teacher looks like a perfect way of doing that.”
The MQuITE project involved close collaboration with the General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTC Scotland) and all Scottish universities offering ITE; it was funded by the Scottish government and received support from GTC Scotland and the Scottish Council of Deans of Education.
A Scottish government spokesperson said: “The Scottish government welcomes the publication of the MQuITE report from this important, unique, long-term study - a study which we have supported since 2017. Ministers look forward to working with our partners across the education sector to carefully consider the report’s conclusions and to determine the next steps to ensure newly qualified teachers receive the most effective support possible.”
Tes Scotland will explore the MQuITE project in more detail in a piece to be published on Friday 5 May.
