Radical change in teacher training needed

It is in all our interests that teachers in our schools are properly trained.

That being the obvious case, the concerns raised by the General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS) in its submission today to the review of teacher training make for worrying reading. There is clearly a problem with the way our teachers are being taught.

The GTCS says many teachers come out of training under prepared because they are taught by lecturers whose methods are out of date.

This issue - who teaches the teachers and how they do it - must be the central problem addressed by the inquiry being led by Scotland's former chief inspector of schools, Graham Donaldson.

He could do a lot worse than to heed the advice of Lindsay Paterson, professor of educational policy at Edinburgh University, who argues there is an urgent need for proper means by which secondary teachers can regularly update their specialist knowledge. He says there must be a transfer of the practical training of teachers to schools, in a model akin to that of apprenticeship, which would mean a transfer of resources from universities to schools.

Such a move would be radical and controversial but there is mounting evidence the status quo in teacher training is not delivering for the trainees themselves and, importantly, for the pupils they teach. It is time for change.