Teachers should be renamed “learning designers”, an education academic has said.

Guy Claxton, emeritus professor at the University of Winchester, said that the rise of technology and the importance of “21st-century skills” called for a new term for the profession. 

According to the Australian newspaper, The Age, Professor Claxton made the comments at the EduTech conference in Sydney on Thursday.

“I am almost tempted to abandon the word teacher,” he is reported as saying. “I think we are not teachers. Teacher still carries that strong sense of telling. ‘I taught them something.’

“I think we are learning designers now because the kinds of things that develop those characteristics...those non-cognitive skills, 21st-century skills...people are looking for ways in regular schools, with regular kids, that we can design that medium.”

Renaming teaching is not the first controversial suggestion Professor Claxton has made.

In 2015, he said that rubbers were “an instrument of the devil” that discouraged children from making mistakes and created a “culture of shame about error”.