A lesson in annoying the unions

Dear Mike Baker,

Thank you for your article on the BBC News website about pupils rating their teachers.  I am very interested in education and was educated in schools and universities from the age of 4 to 24, so like most people I’ve seen many teachers and sat in many lessons ranging from sheer brilliance to absolutely dire.

It was fascinating to read your accounts of trying to judge the quality of teachers, seeing as you will be helping to judge the national teaching awards being held soon.  Your mention of the www.ratemyteachers.com website, which had proved very controversial in the teaching profession, reminded me of how differently people perceive teaching as a career.  The unions have always and probably will always resist any attempt to put extra pressure on teachers.  I would agree that teachers do have to put up with a hell of a lot in terms of bureaucracy, stress, etc but at the same time I’ve always felt strongly about the lack of controls over the quality of teaching in our schools.

To cut a long story short, you basically can’t fire a teacher for being rubbish or incompetent.  You can only get rid of a teacher if they engage in gross misconduct or something along those lines, which is usually difficult to prove.  It horrifies me that once a teacher has been given a job at a school, they have that job for life regardless of whether they are any good at it.  I’m sure everyone at some point experienced some diabolical teaching, but to think that a teacher could get away with it can’t be right.  Getting students to rate teachers may sound ridiculous, but it can offer an insight into a classroom that a formal observation (where a senior teacher sits at the back of the class and watches a lesson, in full view of all the other students) never will.  We often forget how many teachers the pupils meet in just a few years at secondary school - and I would be willing to bet a lot of money that they can easily tell the difference between the good ones and the bad ones.

Teaching as a profession needs reform for all kinds of reasons, and schools being unable to get rid of sub-standard teachers is certainly something that needs to be looked at.

Yours sincerely,

A.Tory