More than a quarter of school staff with experience of mentoring students believe new teachers are not well enough prepared for the job, with primary staff “much more likely” to report this than secondary, new research shows.

The research forms part of a major Scottish government-funded study aiming to uncover the essentials of high-quality initial teacher education (ITE). It found that the views of the school-based mentors stood in stark contrast to university staff and the graduates fresh out of ITE programmes. 

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A total of 27.5 per cent of school mentors said they thought new teachers were not well enough prepared, compared with just 2 per cent of university staff and 5.4 per cent of new graduates.

The researchers said: “This combined figure of 27.5 per cent masks sector differences though, with primary school staff much more likely to report that beginning teachers were not well prepared compared to their secondary sector colleagues.”

The news follows concerns voiced last year by Scottish headteachers about the quality of probationer teachers entering the system in recent years, particularly in the primary sector.

The research is based on a series of surveys that took place last year; the results were uncovered by Tes Scotland using freedom of information legislation.

The researchers, engaged in the Measuring Quality in Initial Teacher Education (MQuITE) project, surveyed 229 teacher mentors, 332 of last year’s ITE graduates and 150 university staff.

Overall, they found the majority of graduates felt “prepared, competent, and confident about entering the teaching profession”.

Higher anxiety

However, the research also found a large minority of secondary ITE graduates felt “not at all prepared” to deliver the Higher in their subject area.

The graduates reported that they felt ready to deliver classes in the first three years of secondary, but almost 13 per cent said they were “not at all prepared” to deliver the Higher - broadly equivalent to A level - and just 4.3 per cent felt “very prepared” to deliver the Higher.

The proportion who felt “not at all prepared” when it came to the Advanced Higher, which is a step up from Higher, rose to 51.7 per cent.

The new ITE graduates were more confident when it came to delivering the less demanding National 4 (N4) and National 5 (N5) qualifications, with 7.8 per cent and 2.6 per respectively reporting they felt “not at all prepared”.

The researchers said: “While nobody felt ‘not at all’ prepared for broad general education and many felt very prepared, the opposite was true for Advanced Highers where no teacher felt very prepared.”

That new teachers felt less prepared as the subject matter became more challenging “might typically be expected”, said the researchers. They added that it was also less likely that students would have taught certificated classes during teaching practice “due to the exams being so high-stakes” and fewer students taking Higher and Advanced Higher courses “so fewer classes being available for practice”.

They said the higher proportion of graduates who felt “not at all prepared” to deliver N4, as opposed to N5, could be because that qualification was internally assessed and added “an unfamiliar assessor role for new teachers”.

The researchers concluded that the “general trend that teachers feel less prepared as the level increases” warranted further exploration.

Overall - despite the fact that primary teacher mentors were more likely to question whether new teachers were ready for life in the classroom - the researchers found primary ITE graduates “reported higher levels of overall preparedness than did secondary”.

The students were asked to rate their preparedness on a scale of one to five, with one being “not at all prepared” and five being “very prepared”.

The mean rating primary students gave themselves was 3.3, while secondary students rated their overall preparedness as 3.1, but this dropped to 2.8 when it came to subject preparedness.

The area of the curriculum new primary ITE graduates felt least well-prepared to deliver was “languages”, which includes English and literacy, as well as modern languages.

In the survey, 15.5 per cent of primary ITE graduates reported they felt “not at all prepared” to deliver the languages area of the curriculum. Conversely the curricular area that primary teachers felt most ready to teach was maths and numeracy, with none reporting they felt “not at all” prepared.