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It is hard to fault David Cameron’s comment that, when a child steps through the school gates for the first time, the most important thing is who the teacher is. To have a teacher who understands the child’s emotional and intellectual needs, and appreciates the journey that the child is embarking upon, is what every parent hopes for as they nervously wave goodbye.
What makes a good teacher is not so easily defined. Nor for that matter is there as much clarity as is needed about how a balanced education depends upon the child’s quality experience in home, community and school. Children need good parents, good neighbours, as well as good teachers.
In his recent speech Cameron unpacked his proposals for education. He promised to create teachers as good as the Finns, by ending the current system whereby people in England with third-class degrees can get taxpayers’ money to enter post-graduate teacher training. I’m just not sure how Cameron (more specifically Michael Gove the Shadow Secretary for Education) can make such a cast-iron linkage between the nature of good teaching, and a first-class Honours Degree, and between bad teaching with a third-class degree. As a former headteacher I have seen some appalling lessons delivered by people with first-class degrees who can’t communicate, and brilliant lectures delivered by people with pass-degrees but the ability to understand how children’s minds work.
Quality education is everything to do with teachers, not much to do with structures, and very little to do with buildings. Teachers do what they believe in extraordinarily well, but what they are told to do merely to a mediocre standard. Productive pupil/teacher relationships are based on explanation, on talking things through, and seeing issues in their entirety. Which is why teachers not only need to know a lot, but be wise enough to draw upon only that which is necessary for the learner to know at that stage. To achieve that teachers need both technical subject knowledge and considerable expertise in both pedagogy and child development, combined with the old-fashioned avuncular skill of a brilliant storyteller. In my albeit limited experience of being a headmaster of a major secondary school I found that too many high-flying academics lacked the ability to speak at an appropriate level to young people to capture their imagination.
If David Cameron is to quote Finland in the future he must tell the whole story. It starts with an explanation that Finnish society is more strongly bonded within itself than is the case in England. Part of that is economic; the income of the richest fifth to the poorest fifth in Finland is only 1-3.7 while in the United Kingdom it is 1-7.2. The Finns explain their success by quoting the Czech philosopher Commenius whose book The Great Didactic said “Following in the footsteps of nature (learning) will be easy if it begins before the mind is corrupted, if it proceeds from the general to the particular; from what is easy to that which is more difficult; and if a pupil is not overwhelmed by too many subjects, and if its intellect is forced to nothing to which its natural bent does not incline it.”
In terms of their pedagogy the Finns believe that emotional development precedes intellectual growth, and so insist that every teacher hold both an Honours Degree in an academic discipline (which is what Cameron understands) as well as having completed a three-year Pedagogic Degree, also at Honours level (which Cameron either doesn’t understand or doesn’t think he has the political clout to achieve). In practice, Finnish teachers have to combine what the English see as the separate expertise of primary and secondary practice, and apply such insights when teaching pupils of any age. The English have to do the same, or nothing in the classroom will change.
See Action 6 of Briefing Paper and Chapters 8 and 9 of Overschooled but Undereducated
