Member

The other thing I urge the Government to look at is what people are being taught when getting qualified teacher status. It ought to be a prestigious, useful qualification—the sort of thing you get early in your career because it teaches you so much that you can use in all sorts of other aspects of life. But its whole structure seems to be turned inwards; it just teaches you the things that are useful in teaching and does not help you expand that into something that is a broad skill for the rest of your life. Qualified teacher status should be something where people say, “Why should I do a master’s, it is just a boring year doing a pointless exercise? If I can do QTS, I will have a whole range of skills that any employer looking at me will appreciate and I will find a deep use for in my life”. I do not see why it cannot be like that; the skills that the noble Lord, Lord Knight, described are exactly the sort of things that you want to have going through life, but that is not the way QTS is taught. There is a real opportunity to change that.