Pisa results reignite debate of Michael Gove’s support for non-qualified teachers

Pisa results reignite debate of Michael Gove’s support for non-qualified teachers

The Pisa results published this week have added fuel to Labours fire that Michael Gove’s support of free schools and academies to hire non-qualified teachers is detrimental to students performance.

Top of the charts for mathematics, science and reading was Shanghai. In fact all the top 4 places went to the far east with Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong occupying the other slots.

Tristram Hunt, labour’s education spokesman stated that he believes one of the main reasons for this is that every single teacher in the city of Shanghai must be qualified and the standards of teacher training are very high. Mr Hunt went on to say that every single teacher in Shanghai underwent 240 hours of professional development during their first 5 years of teaching. He compared this to the recent job advert by an academy school in Leeds looking for ” a non-qualified Maths teacher with a minimum of 4 GCSE’s”.

Michael Gove hit back saying that the standard of teachers in the UK was the best it had ever been, reciting that in 2009 (under Labour) 61% of teachers had a 2:1 undergraduate degree compared to 74% now under the coalition government.

Comments are closed.