A new award of ‘Qualified Teacher Learning and Skills’ for teacher training in the learning and skills sector is set to be introduced.
The plan is part of a number of reforms for the post-16 education sector announced by Kim Howells, Minister for Lifelong Learning, Further and Higher Education, at Showcase 2004, the Department of Education and Skills’ annual Teaching and Learning Conference.
Dr Howells said that the new qualification would give those in post-16 education “a new professional status”.
The reforms will be developed over the next two years and introduced in full from September 2007. They will include:
- Initial teacher training leading to ‘Qualified Teacher Learning and Skills’
- The development of Centres of Excellence in Teacher Training (CETTs)
- New standards, quality assurance and planning arrangements for initial teacher training
The proposals have been welcomed by a number of professional bodies including Lifelong Learning UK, the lifelong learning sector skills council in development, the Learning and Skills Council, NAFTHE and the Association of Colleges.
Monica Deasy, Chair of the Institute for Learning, said: “It is encouraging to see a strategy that will both raise standards within the profession and the esteem in which it is held. It is particularly gratifying that representatives of those who actually provide learning in the sector will exercise a high level of influence in the roll-out of the strategy.”
One Response
Learning and Skills Sector
I think a new 'qualified teacher status' for this sector is to be applauded, both as an Employer and as a Management Developer – and a father of four highly employable children. (See later!) I won't begin to claim to know what the relevant gap analysis between 'now and then' with this initiative may be, but some thoughts?
My personal hopes are that:
– this profession may be much better regarded and motivated. Those I know personally in this sector seem so demoralised, like no other sector I work with (though I fear this may be as much about their management and reward as their qualification or real skills?);
– their students will obtain the full benefit of this. (I fear I meet far too many who don't, with an understandable drive for 'a qualification' yet without the real skills and foundation understanding that employers may reasonably seek and value in practice, even if many such may not be able to articulate these needs as coherently as Educationalists may reasonably wish!);
– underpinning this, their profession will become even more skilled and widely valued in their vital task, and attract even more highly skilled and aware new entrants;
– most especially, the Curriculum might embrace the vast body of ethical and current knowledge on how adults may allowably learn differently, which all 'commercial' professional trainers ignore at their peril, and which I have personally found the Education Establishment strangely resistant to;
– and, as I believe is happening?, that State-funded Education in this area recognises what it must achieve, may achieve – and what others in the Private Sector may better achieve, to add further value, without wasteful or distorted competition but in joint collaboration, to help drive up quality standards and student (and employer) choice.
Those are my thoughts, not totally informed I acknowledge but with enormous goodwill. Not the least, I have four children newly in, or just entering, the employment market, ranging from a young, dedicated Maths Teacher about to make her third job move in less than 4 years in the search for a school which values (as I interpret her) professional 'educational and knowledege' management; a recent First Class Honours Oxbridge Graduate who may admit to being beautifully educated but otherwise unqualified and now, in work, impoverishably developed and aching to be so; and two slightly younger ones who, if I may speak for them, appear to me to be equally gifted but have almost given up on formal education and learning in their late teens, unlike their siblings, as being irrelevant to their lives.
'Nuff said? We can do better than this, can't we?
Jeremy