Readers of the Daily Telegraph have their say..

Here are some comments from The Daily Telgraph forum page on their web site after reports in the paper that Michael Gove will be 'reforming' teacher training. It followed a piece which accused the teaching profession of being lefties


"Gove draining the leftie swamp ? good man."

"High time, Mr Grove, to get rid of the so called educational experts with a degree in sociology at teacher training colleges...Sociologists' and educationalists' ideas of facilitation, group work , 'teaching is a conversation' and 'knowledge is not the primary need' have been a major contribution to to our falling educational standards"

"I suggest you have a look at some of the teacher training forums on the net and see the "quality" of those in training - 3 times to take basic literacy and numeracy tests, they witter; appalling spelling and punctuation, total inability to express themselves - and you will quickly see that sarahlucy's experience is far from an isolated case. Deeply depressing"

"At this very moment a young lady from my village is training to be an English teacher at one of the Manchester university colleges.

She has 5 bad GCSE's, 2 poor quality A levels, a degree in education (2.1) from an ex-poly during which time she was never required to write a single essay or take any examinations or prepare a project. She had a half hour interview and bingo - a 2.1 degree. She then worked as a teaching assistant for 12 months in an infant school.

Last week, she showed me her first essay on Jane Austen. It is dreadful, it is unstructured with no introduction or conclusion, no paragraphs, no sentances and the punctuation is non existant. It is a list of comments drawn from Jane Austen films. When I suggested that she use quotations and discussion etc she admitted that she has never read any Jane Austen - or any other classical book, or any plays and she doesn't like poetry.

She is totally ignorant.

What on earth has teacher training come to?"