Bad UK Teachers Could be Fired Within Weeks

Michael Gove is to give schools new powers that could see badly performing teachers fired within a term to improve education standards.

Under new reforms proposed by Education Secretary Michael Gove, UK head teachers could soon have the power to fire underperforming staff in just a term – instead of having to wait a year.

Ministers claim the reforms – being introduced as a way to scrap controversial rules restricting the amount of time heads can observe teachers in the classroom – will create a “simpler and faster system to deal with teachers who are struggling”, writes Graeme Paton at the Telegraph.

Mr. Gove wants parents to help schools root out and sack failing teachers by going into classrooms to assess how well children were being taught, writes James Chapman at the Daily Mail.

“You wouldn’t tolerate an underperforming surgeon in an operating theatre, or an underperforming midwife at your child’s birth,” Gove said.

“Why is it that we tolerate underperforming teachers in the classroom? Teachers themselves know if there’s a colleague who can’t keep control or keep the interest of their class, it affects the whole school.

“Children themselves know they are being cheated. Ultimately we owe it to our children. They are in school for 190 days a year. Every moment they spend learning is precious. If a year goes by and they are not being stretched and excited, that blights their life. We have got to think of what’s in the children’s interests first.”

The Government is also set to announce an assessment strategy for new teachers as a way to ensure performance is being maintained and to prevent poor teachers from being “recycled” from school to school.

This comes as official figures are released that show in the last ten years, just 17 staff in England have been struck off for incompetence.

These reforms won’t come without opposition. The National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) has said members would “oppose these changes vigorously” and suggested that industrial action could be used to prevent them being implemented.

Christine Blower, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said:

“The changes to the appraisal and capability policies will rightly be seen by teachers as an attack on their professionalism and will anger and depress them in equal measure.

“What the Government proposes is potentially a bully’s charter.”

The reforms include:

Giving head teachers the power to remove poorly-performing teachers within in a term
Removing the three hour limit on teacher observation, giving heads complete freedom to assess staff throughout the year
Scrapping more than 50 pages of “unnecessary” guidance regulation

These standards will be implemented from the start of the school year in September 2012.

Comments

Joe

January 20, 2012 at 9:20 am

Halleluja!

Reply
Kevin

January 20, 2012 at 9:37 am

No argument. This is good news. There should be rules about what constitutes bad teachers so that principals don’t use these new powers to settle old scores, but the ability to remove a bad teacher swiftly is something every head teacher should have. As a matter of fact, I wish they’d bring that power over to the U.S.

Reply
Doug

January 20, 2012 at 9:55 am

They will soon see that this has no influence on results whatsoever. The UK system fails for one reason. The nation has one of the most rigid class systems found anywhere. Everything else flows from that.

Reply
Kevin

January 20, 2012 at 1:48 pm

If you realize this to be a problem, Doug, why do you keep insisting that education systems that work in relatively flat societies like Finland would work in the U.S. or do you not agree that the U.S. is pretty rigidly stratified as well?

Reply
MattW

January 20, 2012 at 2:59 pm

This will have very little effect because of the myth of “all the bad teachers” are bringing down education. There are bad teachers out there, but they will find that the TEACHERS are only a very small fraction of the problem.

Reply
Kevin

January 24, 2012 at 5:24 am

MattW, I agree with this absolutely! If only solving educational problems was as easy as firing “bad” teachers, or adding more money or subtracting more money from the school kitty. Success or failure of education depends on the society around it. You can deck a school in goldleaf and ipads, and import professors from Harvard, but if the kid has to go home to a single-family household that has three additional kids younger than him/her and a mother who has to work two jobs to feed them all, so he/she has to look after the siblings instead of doing homework, it’s very likely he/she is just not going to be able to succeed.

Reply
KevinTheToryCunt

March 21, 2012 at 9:43 am

They’re not bad teachers

They’re bad teachers if they’re subhuman tory apologists

like the cunt who runs this website and it’s commenters.

Reply