Are universities recruiting the best trainee teachers for the job?

In the race to fill teacher training places, some more deserving applicants may be getting lost in the rush, says Michael Tidd...

Were you a ‘born teacher’? Are you reading this marvellous journel because you fulfilled your destiny? Or were you one of those feral strays wandering around the university campus after everyone else had gone off and got ‘proper jobs’?

However you got into teaching, it seems things might have been very different. This year the government and the National College have decided to change how postgraduate teacher training applications are handled…and it’s a bit of a free-for-all. It’s clearly a political move rather than an educational one, but it’s already throwing up a few surprises.

Things used to be so simple. Somebody in an office somewhere worked out how many new teachers needed to be trained, universities would indicate how many students they could train, and a little bit of negotiation would lead to a plan. Everyone knew where they stood, and universities set about the work of finding the best possible candidates to fill the allocation they’d been set.

For 2016 applications, that planned system has been replaced by an open market. Any provider can recruit as many trainees as it likes – up to a point. Now, given the constant concerns about teacher recruitment this might initially sound like a good idea. But there’s a catch. There’s still an overall cap for universities as a whole, and as soon as that limit is reached, all PGCE recruitment must stop. Any applicants after that only have the choice of a school-based route, whether they like it or not.

The likely result is a shift in emphasis for university routes: rather than striving simply to recruit the best possible candidates, universities must now consider the risk that some other establishment will fill all the spaces before they’ve even had an open day! The pressure is on to recruit fast. It’s like a human game of Hungry Hungry Hippos.

Next question: did you hand your application in early? I can confess to having speculatively applied as late as May in the summer before starting my training. If I did that now, and had I been applying for a more popular course (after all, maths trainees are rarely easy to come by), it’s possible I’d have been too late either way. But thankfully, in my case, my university hadn’t filled all of its spaces with sufficiently good candidates. And I know I wasn’t alone.

I’ve seen people whom I’ve known would make excellent teachers deliberate and prevaricate before finally making a decision. That’s not to say that they apply at the last minute like me, but simply that they weren’t first in the queue. Those most likely to be first in the queue are the ones already at university. And as much as we need those applicants, I think there’s a lot to be said for encouraging recruitment among people with other experience.

What chance for those people now? If their application isn’t in early, there’s every possibility that the opportunity will vanish. By the end of November, university applications for secondary PE and history courses were already closed to new applicants. The threshold was met, and the door closed without warning. It seems likely that primary courses will follow shortly – quite possibly even before this article reaches your door.

Perhaps this year there was a huge volume of excellent candidates who applied early. Perhaps the cream of the crop were well-organised and punctual. Surely no university would want to prioritise early applicants over excellent candidates, but it’s possible that some will have been tempted to lower the bar in order to fill their spaces.

Which brings me back to my first point. If excellent teachers were simply produced by good training, then none of this would really matter. Getting people onto the courses would be enough to fill the teaching vacancies we have with candidates who have undertaken good training. But it’s not quite like that, is it?

I don’t know that I hold with the view on ‘born teachers’, but there are a few things of which I’m sure. There are certainly some people who should never become teachers. There are some people who really should – and they might not apply in the first week of September each year. And perhaps most importantly, if we’re going to raise the status of our profession, offering posts to the first person to turn up at the door may not be the best way to do it.

About the author

Michael Tidd is deputy headteacher at Edgewood Primary School in Hucknall, Nottingham.