I don’t know anything about PGCE so could you enlighten me as to what it cost to qualify and what costs the previously obtainable bursary was intended to cover? If you are a qualified librarian why are you expecting the state to finance a change in career so you can be a primary school teacher as worthy a profession as that may be? Don’t suppose there are many city slickers looking for places on these courses!
I don’t know how the Big Society vision will work out in practice but it’s got to be better than the mess the last lot left behind. Oh and what’s wrong with privatisation the public services have not and do not always served us particularly well. According to various articles I have read public sector employment increased by c800000 during Labours term in office, what do they all do and what services are we getting today that we didn’t get before they all arrived?
Wednesday, 23 February 2011
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Essentially, if you want to become a teacher you simply have to have a recognised teacher qualification. No if's, no but's, no exceptions. You have to have a qualification and that's it. You can have worked in a school as a teaching assistant all your working life, but will not be allowed to do the job that a fresh faced 22 year old with a teaching qualification can do.
ReplyDeleteThere are other routes to doing a teacher qualification, and that's what I'm looking at now. Maybe I came across as bitter and resentful, but I assure you that I'm not just going to sit and moan about it...apart from on this blog of course. For the sake of relative brevity (you'll have noticed I'm sure that brevity is not one of my strengths) I'm not going to discuss said other routes here; what I will say is that PGCE is the most direct and by far the most common route to get the necessary qualification one needs to be a teacher. The PGCE costs close to £4000 to do, and the bursary essentially covers that with a few hundred left over. So all you're asking for is for the state to pay for the qualification that the state says you MUST have for the privelige of being a teacher. Remember, it's not the only route, but it is the most direct and the one most people would want to do. Including city slickers...yes, believe it or not those in the private sector worried about the recession are thinking of switching to the comparitively secure career of teaching.
As far as the big society goes, none of us are going to know for sure what will happen next. In such tough times anything the government does is bound to attract criticism. But in the same way that, as you rightly say, the public sector shouldn't be viewed as a sacred cow, it's important that privatisation shouldn't be above suspicion either. I can't see how privatisation of the national rail service was such a wonderful thing, for example.
An interesting answer: I guess you are in the same position as anyone trying to enter a profession which requires formal qualifications, for example accountancy. The lucky ones find an organisation to sponsor them whilst the rest have to dig into their own pocket, tough but that life.
ReplyDeleteIn practice the entry qualification system does not guarantee a flow of good quality people into the profession it just (hopefully) weeds out the worst candidates. It must seem very unfair if you have been working the classroom for 20 years and you know you are good at what you do to see green new entrants coming in with no classroom experience but holding PGCE. In an ideal world there would be management discretion such that unqualified candidates could be received into the profession based on a good history of experience and achievement. However in real life management (or anyone else come to that) cannot always be trusted to make good and impartial judgements thus risking arbitrary or unfair decision. So we are stuck with an imperfect system.
Did you ever travel by train when it was in public ownership?