SOCIETY

TODAY

Education

The worst teachers money can buy?

Rhodes Boyson, MP

The Hqughton Committee recommends a £432,000,000 a year increase in salary for our 460,000 teachers on top of recent increases of £372 per teacher. Those who teach in Inner London's 'social Priority' schools have also been given an extra £200 a year in addition to a further £240 on the London allowance. One could be forgiven for believing that we were still living in Harold Macmillan's golden age of "You've never had it SO good" and not Wilson's "Let's all, except the militant trade unionists, be miserable together." This huge award is given at a time when there is the usual government double-talk of restraining government expenditure and at a time when the educational service is expanding more slowly and a falling birthrate requires a drastic cut in the number of teachers being trained. Indeed, the Houghton Committee makes the Point that, apart from special urban cases, like London and Clydeside, there is no shortage of teachers. Thus it weights the reward to give over £2,000 to some heads instead of giving much more to recruits.

What the teaching profession suffers from is low morale. In the l930s teaching was considered a well-paid, secure and respected profession. Relative pay levels have fallen, security is now the rule rather than the exception in other Jobs and the teachers' advantages in long holidays and short hours have been eroded by concessions Made to industrial workers. Neither IS teacher recruitment now selective nor are most of the profession so well qualified that they earn the respect

The of their fellows,

report will do little to improve the falling standards of schools unless it is linked to a more careful recruitment of staff, better training and a movement away from the clamour for smaller and smaller classes and more and more incompetent teachers. The calibre of recruits into the teaching profession is really abysmally low and this is one reason why the comprehensive ,schools have often been such a rtZilure. In 1971 only 79 per cent of vve Men and 61 per cent of the .ortien recruited into colleges of . e_ciucation had passed '0' level tnglish and mathematics. In 1972 (1)7 40'5 per cent of those recruited

hese colleges had two or more

nelevels and only 68 per cent had o 'A' level. The National Foun dation for Education Research's report, After 'A' Level, showed that the intake to colleges of education had the lowest level of academic aptitude of any group in higher education. Compare the standards of teacher recruitment with those of medicine.

The failure rate at colleges of education is almost minimal and much of their training is unrelated to the problems of school teaching. An NUT report of 1969 showed that 77.9 per cent of young teachers considered that their professional training was inadequate and a report of ILEA to the James Committee on Teacher Training concluded that 82 per cent of the young teachers in London considered that their training gave too little attention to teaching methods.

There also seems evidence that colleges of education and university departments of education give advice and training which is not only irrelevant but even harmful. In 1973 one mature student at a London art training college, a branch of the Middlesex Polytechnic, complained of lectures on drug-taking and witchcraft and a booklist which seemed to consist of all the latest left-wing if not Marxist, Penguins, The Teachings of Don Juan and The Little Red School Book. This student called the colfege a 'training for anarchy'.

Nor is there any point of training at a cost of £3,000 hordes of women, 80 per cent of whom leave teaching within six years, four fifths for reasons other than childbirth. Even in the age of Women's Lib the taxpayer deserves .better value for his money. It is doubtful if there are 460,000 people who would be gifted teachers in the whole country. Pressure for smaller classes only arises because teachers are paid the same whether the class is of five or forty children. Anyone who can teach twenty children can teach forty and those who can't teach ten would have a riot with a dead rabbit.

All the evidence indicates that it is the calibre of teacher and not the

size of class which matters. A survey by the National Children's Bureau in 1966 showed that infant children in classes over forty did consistently better in arithmetic and reading that those in classes below thirty and similar conclusions against small classes have been reached by the European Organisation for Economic Reco very and Development, by Dr Alan Little, by Dr Joyce Morris and by others.

The fall in the pupil:teacher ratio in schools has been followed by declining standards of schooling. Between 1914 and 1971 the number of teachers trebled. From 1966 to 1974 the pupil:teacher ratio in state primary schools fell from 28:1 to 25:5 and in secondary schools from 18:4 to 17:2. It is of interest that ILEA with the worst disciplinary problems in the country has a pupil:teacher ratio as low as 21:8 in primary schools and 14:6 in secondary schools! It certainly needs an authority with a genius for failure like ILEA to create disciplinary problems in secondary schools when pupil:teacher ratios are so low even before high truancy is considered.

Extra money will not solve these problems. Some twenty-five ILEA head teachers resigned in 1974 and Colin Wilcocks, who resigned as the successful head of Clissold Park Comprehensive School at the age of fifty-eight, declared that being a London head was "simply not worth the candle." Unless the authorities support the schools in creating an ordered framework for learning and remove the malcontents from the classroom and the staffroom, the new award will be money down the drain. In Russia a newly-trained teacher only earns 80 roubles a month and it takes many years to approach the average wage of 130 roubles, but teachers there have the satisfaction of a respected job in an ordered framework.

The award will have one further effect: it will increase the salaries and fees in independent schools although many women would prefer teaching in such ordered schools at half the salary they would receive in the jungle gyms of city comprehensives. This will again increase the pressure on the middle classes, the bête noire of the socialists. More middle-class wives will come back to state teaching to pay the independent school fees for their children. This. could increase the calibre and responsibility of teachers in a way Houghton did not expect. It is a funny old world.

Dr Rhodes Boyson, formerly headmaster of Highbury Grove, is Conservative MPV for Brent North