So says The Sun today:
More than 11,000 starting at schools this year flunked a basic test.
The shocking statistic was revealed after a whopping 20,000 last year were found to be duffers in arithmetic.
Student teachers take the tests online but can do so as many times as they want — until they finally pass.
The number who botched their spellings at the first try was 16 per cent higher than seven years ago — sparking claims that standards have been lowered.
Lib Dem schools spokesman David Laws said: “Spelling is a key basic skill. We need a renewed focus on getting the basics right.
“As the number of applicants being accepted on to teaching courses rises, we need to be sure this isn’t coupled with a decline in standards.” The Schools Department insisted: “The vast majority pass first time.”
You can try out five of the test questions on The Sun’s website.
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13 Comments
When we still have such a crippling national shortage of teachers, don’t expect this situation to change. They’ll employ anyone who passes a teacher training course because there are no quality controls in place due to supply not meeting demand.
http://lettersfromatory.wordpress.com
They don’t read enough.
That is the problem.
My dad was a teacher. It takes a very rare and special person to be a GOOD teacher, but given the rate of remuneration to the level of shit one has to put up with, you’ve got to be pretty dumb to want to do it for a career (as opposed to a vocation).
Me personally? I can spell (better than a Sun journalist, I suspect) but having seen what my dad went through for 35 years, I’d rather lick toilets clean for a living than be a teacher.
There is a real discontinuity between the record GCSE pass rates and the levels of basic numeracy and literacy that employers report among applicants.
Wrong, wrong, wrong! The problem is a lot simpler. I trained as a teacher, doing my PGCE at the London University Institute of Education, 2006-2007. I would estimate that at LEAST 60% of the student teachers were nationals of other EU states and therefore not native English speakers. I spent an inordinate amount of my time helping fellow students to get through the English Test and an even more surprising amount of my time helping them with the Maths test. There are already far to many non-British teachers in our schools, especially in London. This is another reason for the failure of standards to improve.
I know this. A persistent misspelling went unchecked in my work until the age of 14 at secondary school where I was then admonished as if it was my own fault. I remember being so shocked and angry that I had used it for so many years and none of my teachers had bothered to place a cross by it.
Hopefully with the sharp upturn in recruitment we’ll see an improvement. Persistent poor scores are now picked up on due to national curriculum levels, so poor performance on the teacher’s part should be exposed sooner. And rightly so.
Sorry – should that be ‘as if it WERE my own fault’?
:@)
I think the exact opposite of what Martin Land said.
Liberalise the education system so this stops being a political issue and becomes a matter of judgement for parents and their children.
Personally I suspect that foreign teachers, generally, have a better grasp of grammar than their (typically monoglot) British counterparts; but as I say, this shouldn’t be something debated by politicians nor activists on a blog. Let the users decide.
I’m a linguist Julian and I’ve never come across any reasons to believe that apeakers of other languages are better at grammer than we are. They are often more aware of the terminology, but I find more grammatical errors in Le Monde or El Pais than in the Times…
The problem I’m seeking to identify is the same we have seen in so many fields, like nursing in the NHS, where the government takes advantage of poor graduate propects elsewhere in the EU to keep wages down here.
Martin,
I thought this was about spelling rather than grammar?
I learnt English as a second language, but I’m always the one who picks up the (numerous) errors in reports served up by local government officers.
And don’t get me started on the BBC!
The English test for trainee teachers goes far beyond basic spelling (at least when I dabbled with it) asking many, many questions on rarely used linguistic terminology. I think this article could be being a little mischievous in alluding that the 11,000 first time failures are failing on their spelling!
Reform spelling!
Look at the website of the Spelling Society for more information.
http://www.spellingsociety.org
Teaching is such a horrible job because it is actually two jobs: (1) teaching, (2) running a jail. Many teachers wish to do the former, and they have my deepest sympathy. The Wilson government’s decision to extend educational conscription to the age of 16 was disastrous.