Short-selling our most precious assets

Anastasia De Waal, 16 March 2009

Over the last decade the government has made a number of attempts to revolutionise the teaching profession, some less successful than others. The most recent proposition is particularly questionable. The plan is to implement a ‘fast track’ teacher training course, in which candidates are fully trained and working in the classroom within six months. As if this was not controversial enough, it is said to be geared towards ex-City workers.
Whilst it might be argued that recent financial events have revealed bankers to not in fact be endowed with superhuman powers as we (and they) were perhaps led to believe, the government has yet to catch on.  The implication that these former high-fliers are somehow superior to the average PGCE student is as insulting as it is misguided. The wisdom of the plan aside, it smacks a little too much of ‘now that you have failed at banking, why not try teaching’.
Teaching is, as they say, no picnic. Among some of the most important qualities teachers need in order to provide a constructive learning experience are intuition, communication and empathy; in short the human factor. Despite the number of talented mathematicians and economists around today only a few predicted the current financial crisis. It could well be argued that this is strongly related to precisely a lack of regard for the human factor. To date the world of finance has yet to successfully integrate human nature and mathematical equations – rendering this government training scheme a problem as this is exactly what many teachers are required to do every day.
There is another question which also has to be asked: whether the ethics of the financial world are those we particularly wish to impart on future generations. Maximising short-term profits and ‘succeeding’ at the expense of others, to name a couple. This is surely the antithesis of what we want to transmit in our classrooms. There are, no doubt, other more positive transferrable skills, and it is of course possible that many ex-City workers would make excellent teachers.
Reservations about the target candidates aside, sixth months is an inadequate training period; the year-long PGCE is considered by many educationalists to be too short. If there is significant interest in teaching coming from the financial sector then these professionals should be expected to commit to the one year PGCE course like everybody else. If this is enough to put them off, then rather than offering them an easier route, perhaps teaching is simply not for them.

By Emily Dew