This week, the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak promised to make Maths compulsory to the age of 18, which would need a lot of extra Maths teachers…
The rejection of all appeals submitted by 12 universities in respect of their applications to be accredited as teacher education providers from 2024 may come as a surprise to some. However, others who have followed this agenda for a decade, may see the outcome as the culmination of a ten-year strategy to reduce the involvement of universities in the training of teachers.
As Education Secretary, Michael Gove MP described teacher educators in universities as ‘the blob’. Recently reappointed as Schools Minister, Nick Gibb has made little secret of his dissatisfaction with the role of universities in training teachers. In 2012 and for several years thereafter, the Department for Education used the allocation of trainee numbers to ‘fix’ what was seen as the over-dominance of universities in teacher education. The expansion of ‘training on the job’ via a new Schools Direct programme and the removal of regulations requiring teachers in state-maintained schools to be qualified, increased anxieties about the potential for teaching to be ‘deprofessionalised’.
