Hansard

I draw members’ attention to my entry in the register of members’ interests, which intimates that I am a member of the General Teaching Council for Scotland.

Last Wednesday, the members of the Education and Skills Committee heard evidence from five trainee teachers and seven fully qualified teachers including one head of department and one headteacher. At the start of that committee session, it was refreshing to hear those individuals’ passionate belief that teaching is a vocation that can make the biggest impact on young people and bring rich rewards, including when measured against the other professions.

The wealth of talent of those teachers and trainee teachers was plain for all to see, and I am sure that they are exactly the kind of people into whose capable hands parents would like to deliver their children at the start of each morning. They were caring, courteous, articulate, determined and ambitious for their profession, and we should acknowledge that they all had some very positive things to say about teaching and about their coursework and placements.

However, the rest of their message could hardly have been more blunt and, in delivering it, they echoed the views of many of the 700 respondents to the committee’s call for evidence. Indeed, some aspects of that message were shocking. They said that there is a complete inadequacy within some teacher training programmes for teachers to learn how to teach literacy and numeracy effectively—something that was confirmed by the report that the Scottish Government published only this morning.

They said that there is very limited support for teachers to learn about additional support needs—which about 25 per cent of the school population now have—and how to help children to stay safe with the growing problems on the internet.

They said that the organisation of some aspects of school placements is chaotic and that trainees have a huge range of experiences, with some trainees describing them as outstanding and others describing them as demoralising or a complete waste of time. They said that, in some schools, trainees are asked to do little more than cover classes or do the photocopying, that a growing number of departments are not taking trainees at all because staff are too busy, and that no one ever sits down with some trainees to go over the feedback. It is little wonder that so many trainees have been asking questions of the teacher training establishments and the Scottish Government.

If last week laid bare the problems in teacher training, it also gave us yet another set of stark statistics that tell us just how badly many of Scotland’s pupils are doing when it comes to basic literacy. If teachers are not being given the necessary professional training, how can we expect our pupils to come out with good results?

Even worse, those problems were identified several years ago. Research that was done six years ago by Sangster, Anderson and O’Hara from the University of Edinburgh’s institute of education identified that there were issues with the knowledge of language of people who were training to be teachers in Scotland. I will give just one example. They found that only 41 per cent of the trainees could correctly define the term “adverb”. In other research, Henderson and Rodriguez uncovered the fact that two thirds of first-year BEd students failed to reach 80 per cent competence at the numeracy level expected of primary 7 pupils.

Likewise, Graham Donaldson’s 2011 report on teacher training was clear that teacher selection should be much more rigorous with reference to literacy and numeracy and that much more work needed to be done to provide an effective continuum between universities and schools. He said that teachers needed to be skilled in their own subject knowledge as well as being successful imparters of that knowledge to their pupils, and he recommended that there should be a more effective mechanism of teacher mentoring, which is something that the Scottish Government acknowledged when it published its interim report on Donaldson last year.

The important point here is that many trainee teachers have not been getting formal knowledge-based training in mathematics and language and learning how to deliver that, as distinct from having to study abstract theories about how mathematics and language could be taught. Our witnesses backed up that point, with one saying that she did not feel that trainees had

“sufficient skills in numeracy to be able to teach it to 11-year-olds at a reasonable standard.”

On the practical support that helps modern-day classroom management, one panel member said:

“very little of what we work on at university seems to have any relevance to what happens in the classroom.”—[Official Report, Education and Skills Committee, 10 May 2017; c 8, 5.]

He said that “next to nothing” was being taught about classroom management. Parents will be horrified by those aspects of the evidence.

Those problems are bad enough, but there are others relating to the organisation of school placements which, although they might not impact on every trainee, impact on a great many. For those of us who have been through the teacher training programme—several members who are in the chamber have done so, albeit many years ago—the school placements were not only the best part of the course but the part that defined whether one could cut the mustard and be a teacher. Therefore, it is deeply worrying to be told that quite a large number of placements are not working out well. That is yet another way in which we are not giving trainee teachers a fair chance. We cannot have a student telling us that he found out only very late on a Friday evening where his Monday morning placement was to be, or hear that someone was told that they would be used only as a cover teacher. How on earth can we motivate and encourage teachers if their introduction to the classroom is the chaotic mismanagement of their placement? Surely that can easily be sorted.

Being a teacher is the best job in the world—even better than being in politics at times—or it should be. However, that is not the case at the moment. The evidence that we heard—just like that which we have heard on literacy and numeracy, the mismanagement of the curriculum for excellence, teacher shortages and problems with subject choice—is deeply worrying. Not only are our trainees encountering major problems with their professional instruction but, in watching some of the more experienced people in the profession that they want to enter, they are seeing frustration, poor morale, stress, exhaustion and anger.

The Scottish Government published a report on the issue this morning. Although I have not been able to read its full detail, it clearly flags up many of the issues that we have heard in the committee and makes plain that there is not nearly enough effective communication between the teacher training institutions, the GTCS, local authorities and the Scottish Government. On top of the huge issues with teacher shortages, the situation is putting significant stress on the profession. I therefore call on the Scottish Government to bring forward with the most urgent priority the necessary changes that will make all aspects of teacher training fit for purpose. I repeat: if we cannot train our teachers properly, what hope have we got for our young people?

I move,

That the Parliament is concerned by the recent evidence presented to the Education and Skills Committee by trainee teachers, which revealed some serious concerns about the teacher training programme in Scotland, specifically about the organisation of teacher trainee placements and some perceived gaps in the programme regarding supporting trainees in learning key skills for the classroom; believes that these problems are, in some key areas, having a detrimental impact on the preparedness of trainees to meet the challenges of the curriculum for excellence and their ability to deliver better teaching in literacy and numeracy, and calls on the Scottish Government to work with the teacher training institutions and the General Teaching Council for Scotland to take urgent action to implement the necessary improvements to the teacher training programme in Scotland.