Teacher apprentices: Too much spin and not enough substance

Last weekend, Education Secretary Gillian Keegan announced a small pilot scheme to test out the idea of teacher degree apprenticeships – a scheme primarily aimed at providing teaching assistants, who may make great teachers but may not have a degree, with a route into the profession. 

The idea is that trainees will spend around 40% of their time studying with an accredited provider, gain qualified teacher status and have all their tuition fees paid.
 
The pilot scheme will fund up to 150 apprentices to work in secondary schools to teach maths who will be recruited from this autumn and start their training the following year.
 
Put like this, it is an initiative which sounds perfectly sensible – an idea with laudable intentions that is being road-tested to see how it works in practice and how it might be rolled out on a wider scale in the future.