Further education teachers lead the way

Wednesday 24 November 2010

The Institute for Learning (IfL) applauds teachers in further education for their commitment and success with learners who are disadvantaged. According to the Chief Inspector’s Annual Report, Ofsted found 71 per cent of colleges serving the most disadvantaged learners to be good or outstanding, and IfL celebrates the achievements of those colleges and their teachers and trainers.

Toni Fazaeli, chief executive of IfL, said, “A perennial problem for any public service is ensuring that individuals from poor backgrounds have as good a service as those who are more privileged, but further education is exceptional. To provide some context, Ofsted found that maintained schools serving the most deprived pupils performed less well than other schools, with 46 per cent being assessed as good or outstanding in 2009/10.

“A test of any profession is the quality of new entrants. IfL celebrates the many strong partnerships between universities, schools and colleges that have high expectations of trainee teachers’ achievement and good communications. It is very good to see that Ofsted now considers subject knowledge to be a relative strength in initial teacher training, and this supports IfL’s concept of further education teachers and trainers as dual professionals – experts in both their subject or vocational area, and in teaching methods. Mentoring of trainee teachers remains a mixed picture, but there is effective practice and IfL can help to share this. IfL will work with UCET [the Universities Council for the Education of Teachers] to help ensure that more training for teaching in further education becomes outstanding. Trainee teachers and learners deserve this.

“IfL has called for an independent inquiry into teaching and training for further education and skills. We think that the Chief Inspector’s Annual Report confirms the need for this, as it points to features of outstanding practice for an inquiry to draw on, as well as challenges to be addressed. IfL wants an inquiry to make sure that we can consign to history some of the terms used in Ofsted’s annual report, such as ‘mundane’, ‘limited’, ‘routine’, and ‘students not sufficiently challenged’. The teachers and trainers who lead the way for the nation demonstrate practice described in Ofsted’s annual report as ‘lively and varied’, ‘exciting’, ‘well thought through’ and using a ‘mixture of individual, paired and group work to engage learners’, as well as the trainers in work-based settings whose teaching is praised as ‘well planned … and enthuses learners’ and as using ‘a wide range of teaching methods … including the effective use of e-learning’. As the professional body for teachers and trainers, IfL supports our 180,000 or so members to aspire to what we describe as ‘brilliant’ teaching and training, and whatever their starting points, always ‘to be the very best that they can’.

“The hallmark of a profession is the strong commitment to continuing professional development. IfL members say they know the kinds of CPD that work and make a difference to their practice, that they want more CPD and that they look to IfL as their professional body to help. Not surprisingly, the Chief Inspector’s Annual Report highlights the importance of professional development; reflective practice; and identifying and recording areas for improvement in teaching and linking to plans for professional development. IfL, backed by our research evidence, agrees.”