The University of Durham’s initial teaching training provision has not been reaccredited by the Department of Education. I know nothing about the quality of this course or about the quality of their application. And yet, I want to persuade you that this is probably *a bad thing* for education.

This is why.

Joining the profession on a whim…

One-third of respondents to a Teacher Tapp question over the weekend said they became a teacher, partly because they couldn’t work out what else to do. This isn’t a convenient part of the teacher narrative, where teaching is supposed to be a vocation, a mission, etc… But it is what it is. “Falling into teaching” is more common among secondary teachers, men and science teachers – all shortage groups within our profession.

Maybe we’d prefer it that every teacher felt it was a vocation, but it seems that joining on a whim is fine because these whimsical teachers stay. 29% of those with over 20 years of experience in the profession said they joined because they couldn’t work out what to do with their life!!!

Stumbling across the PGCE poster

You are just about to take your finals. You aren’t sure what career you want to do. You have friends staying at university for another year. And then, as you leave a lecture, you look up and see a poster saying “Have you considered applying for a PGCE?” Falling into doing a PGCE is a safe way to defer having to worry about what to do after leaving university.

In the Teacher Tapp panel, 27% of teachers who took a post-graduate route did so in their university town. I suspect that universities are great recruiters for teaching, not necessarily because their courses are the best or because they are marketing experts, but rather because they give undergraduates what they want: A safe and simple way to make a decision to stay put in a place they enjoy and try out a new career.

Keeping the academic elite within the tent

I’ve chosen to mention the University of Durham’s loss of ITT accreditation at the top of this post, rather than any of the other ten universities that lost accreditation for a more controversial reason. I believe the teaching profession gains if academic high achievers join the profession. This isn’t because there is good evidence that personal academic success/IQ is correlated with teaching quality. There isn’t a study that shows this in England and in the US the suggestive studies don’t map in relevance to our context particularly well. (In any case, correlates of IQ and teaching quality within the profession tell us little about the prospective effectiveness of those who do not join.)

Teaching requires a relatively unusual set of skills and personal attributes, so perhaps the profession will be fine if graduates from places like the University of Durham no longer stumble upon posters suggesting they apply for a PGCE. However, teachers who were academically successful themselves, even if not great teachers, seem to have a habit of finding their way into the corridors of power. We may not like the dominance of Oxbridge/Russell Group in the Whitehall policy sphere, but if they are sitting at the table, I’d much rather they had themselves once taken a PGCE and experienced the challenging and complex nature of teaching. 

Should ALL universities have a PGCE?

So far I’ve argued that each time a university PGCE course closes, we could be losing an easy recruitment route into the profession. And I’ve gone further than this and suggested that we should be particularly worried for policy reasons where elite universities close their routes. 

So, should all universities be encouraged by the government to operate a PGCE a smooth transition for their graduates into teaching?

You can see how this gets controversial. Imagine a town with two teacher training provisions. One is a school-based training provider that Ofsted and others agree is outstanding in the quality of its provision. The other is a university PGCE of unknown quality* where many 22-year-old former undergraduates find themselves. Which is going to deliver better social outcomes for the system? The answer is that we don’t really know. The university PGCE has a lot going for it on the selection side: it is helping to suck into the profession some 22-year-olds who wouldn’t otherwise join (and we know young teachers have much better retention than career changers). The school-based route might well provide a higher quality experience (whatever that means), but we have no idea how valuable the quality of ITT provision is to either long-term teacher proficiency or even retention.

It feels uncomfortable suggesting that the quality of the proposed provision shouldn’t be the primary consideration in deciding who should run initial teacher training courses, but given catastrophically low recruitment into the profession at present, the government is either very brave or very silly in severing an easy way to fall into teaching.

* Note that this is just a hypothetical situation. In reality, nearly all university-based ITT provision has been judged to be of high quality by Ofsted.