Britain has “lost something” in the “degrading” of the status of its teachers in recent decades, TV journalist Robert Peston has said.
Turnover of headteachers in the state sector and constant “reinvention” of the education system by successive governments had damaged schools by preventing the accumulation of “institutional knowledge”, he said.
Mr Peston is the political editor of ITV News, former business editor of BBC News, and one of the most high-profile journalists in the country.
He is the founder of Speakers for Schools, a charity that aims to inspire state school students by organising free talks with “the leading figures of today”.
Appearing on a panel on Thursday to mark the graduation of the first cohort of teachers on the Now Teach programme, Mr Peston said he was disturbed by the deterioration in the status of the profession.
“One point that I’ve always been struck by...is the decline in the status of teachers within communities,” he said.
“One of the things which was again very striking when I was at school, was that my teachers, [were] quite important figures within [the community].”
Mr Peston said that when he was a pupil at Highgate Wood Secondary School in north London, his teachers could live near the school “despite the fact they were on state education salaries” - something he said was impossible for today’s teachers “because of the madness of property prices”.
He went on: ”[My teachers] were known not only just by parents and the students, but by lots of other people within where we lived in north London.
“I think we’ve sort of lost something in the degrading of the status of our educators.”
Mr Peston also bemoaned the failure of state schools to build up “institutional knowledge” - something that he said private schools were much better at.
“As many of you will know, I am something of a critic of the fee-paying sector, not a great fan of it,” he said.
“But one of the things that independent schools have is an identity, a sense of who they are, institutional continuity.
“One of the things that has worried me most about education in the last half century of this country is every time a head is replaced, quite often within a state school, the school is reinvented.
“As somebody who has done a lot of business journalism, a lot of valuation of what institutions succeed and which ones fail, institutional knowledge, a sense of identity, of history, matters enormously.
“One of the things that I’ve been slightly disappointed in, in successive governments, is they don’t seem to have understood this enough.
“Every time you get a new education secretary you get a reinvention of the system, and actually what you really want is a sense of pride within a school and a sense of where they’ve come from and where they’re going.”
