A ‘good university’
The Tories’ latest pronouncements on teaching and teacher training are so daftly reactionary that you’d be forgiven for thinking it might be some kind of spoof.
The most obvious nonsenses are already being dealt with. Chris Dillow deals with the bizarre idea that simply being a highly qualified person is likely automatically to make someone a better teacher. Unity points to the fact that the Tories’ choosing Finland as a model is ironic, to say the least, given the Finns’ absolute commitment to comprehensive education and their absolute willingness to let teachers get on with the job they’re trained to do. Left Foot Forward focuses on the fact that very few teachers have 3rd class degrees anyway, and less as a percentage than when the Tories were in power, thus making a mockery of a key plank of the Tories’ claims.
Meanwhile, the Tories’ new scheme involves ‘Teach Now’, where people who have ‘made it’ before they are through their 20s (what the fuck is that supposed to mean?) will be posted into classrooms with no teacher training and – even more bizarrely in the context of their stated commitment to devolving power to schools – without those high-flyer professionals having to go through the ‘rigmarole’ of actually contacting individual schools about working there, as though this is beyond them.
But the absolute pièce de résistance in the pile of horse doo-daa they’ve put together in the name of short-term electoral gain is the notion that only graduates with degrees from ‘good universities’ will be able to train as teachers.
By a ‘good university’, we are led to understand, is meant a ‘number in the low dozens’ made up of the self-selected Russell Group (20) and a few others. This will exclude from teacher training graduates from around two thirds of the UK’s universities (113 of them listed in this league table).
It’s not clear exactly how a ‘good university’ will be defined. A quango will be set up to decide that, surprise, surprise, but what we can be pretty sure of is that most or all of those universities established in 1992 from polytechnics or those, like my nearest university Edge Hill (given the status in 2006) will be excluded. Little matter that Edge Hill happens to be the second biggest provider of teacher training in the UK - its own graduates will be ineligible in this brave new Tory world of brazen elitism.
This, to put it mildly, would be an extraordinarily shortsighted step on the part of the Tories, based more on simple prejudice about which universities are ‘proper universities’ than anything as inconvenient as facts.
They ignore the fact, for example, that while the Times and Guardian league tables of universities put the Russell Group at the top and the post-1992 generation at the bottom in time-worn fashion because they are largely based on existing resources, putting together your own league table based on student satisfaction (a rough measure of an institution’s capacity to meet students’ actual needs) produces very different results; Imperial College London slips from 3rd overall to 101st in terms of meeting student needs, while my own Edge Hill suddenly climbs from 109th to 44th.
Put another way, the ‘good universities’ are the ones that are given more resources, however good the non-good universities are at what they do. Funny that.
Even more saliently in the context of the Tories own mantra of competition, this arbitrary definition will lead directly to a two tier system more obvious even than the one we have at present, and one which quickly becomes immutable.
Warwick University, now in the Russell Group and with its business school seen as a leading international institution, received its Royal Charter in 1965, just forty-five years ago.
Why, if Warwick could move that quickly, should Edge Hill, a university in its fourth year but a centre of teaching excellence since 1885, be denied that opportunity.
Why should the ex-polys, now with twenty years as universities behind them and many of them with really good reputations in specialist areas (Brighton University, for example, vies with the ‘top’ universities for the reputation as THE place to study fine art), be excluded because they happen to have been a poly at one time?
Ultimately, there’s no rationale for the Tories’ ‘good university’ definition. It’s based on the cheap populism which decries ‘mickey mouse degrees’ and the newer universities with which they are associated, and behind that a desire to maintain class distinctions in higher education, and ensure that those teachers who come through the system reinforce those class distinctions in the classroom.
Bang on Mr Semple.
There’s another aspect to this; Labour has vastly increased the amount of teachers we have in schools since 97, something that was sparked when the big debate in the 1990s was about class sizes. Maybe this is Cameron’s way of cutting back teachers? Perhaps he reckons the public will be idiotic enough to accept bigger class sizes under the false auspices of improved quality?
I’m afraid this one isn’t down to me Tom – this one is all Paul.
Before I engage with this, I am a graduate of a red-brick university and I trained as a teacher at one of the universities that is not red-brick, and whose own graduates may become ineligible for teacher training as a result of Cameron’s move. I think it’s important to state this in the interest of full disclosure.
I think you are bang-on, Paul, as is Tom, in assuming that the overtly stated motives of Cameron are different than the real agenda, particularly his structural agenda in elevating some universities above others (particularly the Russell Group, which are key advocates of exploding the cap on tuition fees – the British Ivy League in waiting, as it were), and perhaps decreasing the number of teachers in secondary schools.
I also think the idea that one has to have a high-quality degree in order to be able to teach a given subject from 11-18 is quite the assumption. I admit, it can be the case that the skills and qualities needed to pass a degree often translate well to teaching. Commitment, patience, originality, intelligence and study skills, for example. But a) these are not the only skills one needs and b) a high-quality degree is not the only place these skills can be acquired.
There is certainly nothing in the standard BA, even from a red-brick university, that has application to teaching a subject from 11-18 that can’t be learned simply by having a keen mind and an interest in that particular subject. How I know this is simple: I didn’t take a Modern History degree, but I can teach Modern History and I haven’t had a boss yet who would dare question my subject knowledge.
Not to say that subject knowledge is not important; at A-Level particularly, it is important. But how you answer something at A-level and how you answer something at degree level are completely different. It’s relatively easy to master the former if you’ve had to master the latter – but again a) that’s not the only way to master the former and b) there’s nothing about graduating with a degree from a non-elite university that suggests you can’t master exam schemes.
Indeed c) there is nothing that proves that if you graduate with a degree from a red-brick university you can master them.
Measuring who may be, and who may not be, a good teacher is a subjective skill. You have university lecturers who are good at it and university teachers who are bad at it. The class I graduated with, particularly the history part, were (I’m generalizing) goons in terms of subject knowledge. Many of them have made excellent teachers. But since then, the university has tightened the process by where it accepts people.
That’s the key. It doesn’t require a new Quango. It doesn’t require favouring particular universities.
It occurs to me that I should also declare my own interest here. Until 2007, when I stepped down on becoming a councillor so as to avoid any real or imagined conflict of interest, I sat on the board of Edge Hill, through the period of its application for Taught Degree Awarding Powers and then university status. I have a good deal of respect for the insitution as a whole, and from the (admittedly) relatively little I’ve seen to make comparisons by, it outstrips many other universities in terms of its overall student ‘offer’.
I find pretty abhorrent the notion that, simply because it’s new as a university, it can’t be ‘good’.
Speaking as a student of Cardiff University (a member of the Russell Group), the very concept of poo-pooing those with degrees from newer institutions seems nothing more than Tory elitism and, as some have mentioned, another attempt to portray such universities as in a league of their own in order to validate charging higher tuition fees in the near future.
I know plenty of students who study in the less prestigious Glamorgan University (who nevertheless specialise in several fields, as most newer unis do), and overall I feel the engagement their lecturers have with the course and the standard of teaching are actually better than at Cardiff University, where the main goal of most, if not all, employees is to attract research funding and to write plenty of academic papers, not to teach. The example set by staff is not one that any aspiring teacher would wish to emulate.
Dave is spot-on when he points out that suitability to a teaching role is not based on where you study, but a set of individual qualities that in many cases are not even learned in an academic setting. At secondary school, I had an utterly useless chemistry teacher who had studied at Oxford. I also had an excellent maths teacher who studied at Swansea University in its old guise as a University of Wales college. Standing of institution does not guarantee standards of graduates, especially in a career like teaching, where scholarly knowledge is only part of the skill-set required.
Rather than this drivel from the ‘dark side’, I’d like to see an honest evaluation of the education system.
We talk frequently about widening access to HE and FE courses, despite introducing Caps on places for the forthcoming year. It seems easier to target school leavers, investing time and money at this stage. Instead, I’d suggest efforts should be focused on the very early years. Once an attitude is set that education is not for you, then this is near impossible to break.
However, back to teacher training. My biggest complaint is that all parties talk of the number of teachers trained. However, this masks the reality that there is not enough funding to employ them all. This is very much the case in Scotland, where every party over recent years make such claims. Yet a newly qualified teacher is only guaranteed one year of employment after graduation. Local authorities rely on these part funded places, but cannot afford to retain them one year on. They are then replaced by yet another NQT.
@Paul…
I think it is very hard if not impossible to rank universities by the standards of their teaching. I know my undergrad course was nowhere near as rigorous as it could have been, but that I got more out of it because I put more effort into it than most others. Equally, however, I am aware that my own style of learning fits well to being lectured at and to competitive essay writing. This is not true of many others, and adaptations in teaching methods have yet to filter through to most Humanities departments that I’m acquainted with.
So how well a university does can fluctuate year to year not on the basis of how good the teaching is, but how receptive each year’s intake of students are to that teaching.