New Standards for Teachers

Michael Gove has announced he wants new standards for teachers. The press release says:

The new approach will set out rigorous standards teachers should meet in order to:

• provide excellent teaching
• crackdown on bad behaviour
• improve pupils’ skills in the basics of English and maths • provide better support to those pupils falling behind.

New standards will help raise the bar for performance and help identify those who need more support to improve. Under the current approach, teachers and headteachers say:

• it is hard to measure a teacher’s progress • there is a lack of clarity about when a teacher is meeting the standards • the standards do not fit easily with the procedures for tackling underperforming teachers.

The review will be led by Sally Coates, the outstanding Principal at Burlington Danes Academy in London. Other excellent headteachers, teachers and education experts will sit on the review.

They will recommend to Government a simple and clear set of key skills that teachers must meet.

'Simple and clear' - the profession may wish to decide if these 'simple' standards represent what good professional teaching should be or whether this is an attack on the professionalism of teaching.