Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Unqualified teachers haven’t ‘irreparably damaged’ the private sector: why do state schools deserve anything different?

The furore surrounding the news – which James broke on Coffee House this afternoon – that academies will now be able to employ teachers who are not qualified was so brilliantly predictable that we could have written the unions’ press releases for them. Christine Blower of the National Union of Teachers slammed it as a ‘clear dereliction of duty’ and a ‘cost-cutting measure that will cause irreparable damage to children’s education’.

Blower and her union colleagues are not clear why education will be so badly damaged by this, though. Top schools in the private sector regularly employ staff who have gone through no formal training at all. But parents have to pay for this privilege: it is not available to them in the state system.

The unions also seem to forget that in some of the grittiest state schools in our country, pupils are already being taught by graduates who have spent just six weeks in a summer school before being let loose in the classroom, without the prized qualified teacher status.

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