Geoff Barton, General Secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders comments on the government press release on a renewed focus on teacher training.
“While we welcome the government’s action to provide free training programmes and associated support for schools, we remain gravely concerned about the fact that there are not enough teachers in the first place. Many schools experience significant difficulties as a result of teacher shortages, and this particularly affects those schools which face the greatest challenges. This is because the government frequently misses its own initial teacher training targets and too many teachers leave the profession early in their careers. The government must significantly improve salaries across the board after a decade of pay erosion in real terms, improve funding to schools and ratchet down the pressures of an excessively harsh accountability regime.
