9: On Your Marks, Get Set … Teach!

The Teachers’ Standards (Department for Education (DfE), 2011) make explicit the key skills to be demonstrated by all teachers, including those not yet qualified. In the same way, that Government policy and subsequent Ofsted inspections have had a significant impact on what teaching in English schools looks like (Jones & Tymms, 2014), so has the power of policy and inspection moved to impact upon widespread practice in initial teacher training (ITT) (Noble-Rogers, 2018). In particular, it has influenced the understanding of what key skills a newly qualified teacher (NQT) should possess and what, if any, are the acceptable gaps.

The Teachers’ Standards (DfE, 2011) shape the expectations placed upon all those training or entering the profession. However, simply using these standards to identify what skills an NQT is required to possess only tells half the story. The assumption underpinning the standards is that it is possible to make judgements on whether someone is achieving them or not and that meeting the criteria identified within Part 1 is a mechanism through which effective teaching is measured. It is important to dig a bit deeper into this idea of an effective teacher and try to unpick what it means. As everyone training to teach already knows, no two schools or classrooms are the same. It goes without saying that teachers work within a context of considerable variation both between and within schools. These range from school level differences, and include leadership’s approach to behaviour, parents, curriculum, as well as many more individual variants such as levels of pupil deprivation, individual pupil family circumstances and previous experiences of school and learning. But within Part 1 of the Teachers’ Standards, there lie assumptions around parity of the lived experience of teaching. The Teachers’ Standards not only require teachers to be aware of such contextual influences on learning, but they also expect the teacher to address them, stating that teachers should ‘have a secure understanding of how a range of factors can inhibit pupils’ ability to learn, and how best to overcome these’ (DfE, 2011). This confirms the assumptions that there is ‘individual (teacher)responsibility for student success’ (Buchanan, 2015). Goepel (2012) sees the Teachers’ Standards as being ‘heavily weighted towards the skills and knowledge required for good classroom practice’, with ‘little mention of the attitudes, values and characteristics which are deemed to separate the outstanding from the good teacher’. But surely, classroom skills are more important than any other aspect and, as a consequence, must be the skills valued most by employers?