John McAteer once spent his summer holidays learning enough German to teach it at GCSE in September.

He is head of modern foreign languages at Finchley Catholic High School in London and is trained to teach French with Spanish, but found it was easier for him to learn German than to recruit someone suitable for the vacancy amid teacher shortages. 

He remembers one of the early lessons, where students were preparing work on an ideal future job.

“One wanted to be a police officer, and another wanted to be a physio,” he says.

“I knew ‘politzei’ for the police as an institution, but ‘politizeibeamter’ isn’t obvious.”

And the future physio? “I asked them to use the online dictionary. I played up the ‘I’m really indignant about your lack of independence’ angle, and it was OK, but I could do that as I’d been teaching 10 years at that stage and could bluff more convincingly.”

Short-changing students?

It seems that more and more staff may be finding themselves in a similar position. In 2022, research by the National Foundation for Education Research (NFER) found that nearly half of secondary schools were using non-specialist maths teachers.

In June of this year, seven subject associations published a joint statement voicing their concern over the “endemic” use of non-specialist teachers in secondary education, highlighting worries that students are being short-changed.

The likely lack of deep subject knowledge is a key factor here. Schools often try to mitigate any negative impacts by only using non-specialists for lower years, but, as McAteer explains, the issue is “cumulative”.

“We don’t want our Year 11s being taught by someone who’s not an expert, but obviously the more non-specialists you have down the school, the more you’re storing up problems.” 

And that lack of familiarity can mean a challenging experience for staff, says Dr Joe Barber, a senior lecturer in English education at Manchester Metropolitan University and a member of the English Association’s Secondary and Further Education Committee.

He gives the example of English literature, in which having multiple answers is regarded as a good thing, and students are encouraged to challenge accepted interpretations.

“But that isn’t the same in every subject,” he says. “Those without an English Literature degree could be terrified of that.”

There’s also the question of non-specialist staff’s enthusiasm for the topic at hand, he continues.

“Schools have got good at training teachers to deliver a curriculum, but if you don’t have that passion, I don’t see how you can be happy,” he continues. “And that’s got to impact the kids as well. I struggle to see how the children in front of them could be inspired to study English further, to become a writer and so on.”

A welcome change 

A 2023 study of trainee teachers in Australia found that 64 per cent thought the impact of teaching out of subject would be entirely negative for them, with 19 per cent feeling that it would be mixed, and only 2 per cent feeling positive.

But for some, teaching another subject can be a welcome change of pace.

Caroline Phoenix is an assistant principal at Attleborough Academy in Norfolk and a trained English teacher, but enjoys her forays beyond the subject.

“I’m not a drama teacher, but I love teaching drama,” she says. “It’s the best fun and the best teaching I’ve done this year. And when I had to teach media at A level, I was absolutely terrified, but by the end I did enjoy it.

“It’s not that you can’t [teach another subject], but it has to be in line with your own personal preferences.”

The effects on workload are a major concern, however, with already-stretched staff having to learn a new subject while planning lessons in it. McAteer says planning his German classes took “easily twice as long for each lesson”.

“I had the benefit of having done similar things in French, but as the two languages work quite differently, even a direct translation of materials I had used before for French wasn’t always easy or possible.”

There are CPD opportunities to help, but this, too, is a demand on precious time. Clare Harvey is chief executive of the Ogden Trust, which supports the teaching and learning of physics by providing free CPD, and says that some schools report struggling to release staff to attend courses.

“If you don’t invest in your teachers and find a way to let them out, you’re going to have bigger teacher retention issues in the long run, and your student outcomes aren’t going to be what they could be.”

Out-of-subject teaching is, fundamentally, a time-consuming endeavour to do well, says Phoenix.

“If you’re going to do it properly, you need lots of meetings, support, observations, feedback, the whole thing, to get someone up to level - as though they were a trainee teacher. But is there capacity to do that? Probably not.”

Jack Worth, education economist for the NFER, highlights a new development as a possible solution: training in multiple subjects at once. A PGCE in secondary physical education with EBacc - which gives PE teachers a grounding in the EBacc subjects - was launched by the Department for Education in 2018, and is now taught at universities across the country, including the University of East Anglia and Kingston University in London. Could such courses be a creative way out of the problem? 

“It could be,” Worth says. “But it might not be the best way to do it through teacher training, which is already short enough. And the sell to teachers would need to be compelling in terms of what they get out at the end of it.”

Ultimately, out-of-subject teaching doesn’t always have to be a negative experience: teachers may enjoy upskilling themselves or doing something new. 

But there’s no getting around the fact that having to teach out of subject increases already high workloads, and can make a stressful job even more so. And for students, it is difficult to know the exact impact of being taught by someone who does not know the subject inside and out - and who does not love it. 

But it seems that, while shortages persist, teaching out of subject will remain a fact of the profession.

Jacqui Burgoyne is a freelance journalist and former ESL teacher

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