Teachers to face five year tests to ensure fitness for job

Jul 2 2009 by Nicola Juncar, The Journal

The Government announced this week it is to introduce a licence to teach to weed out poor teachers from the profession. A former North East headteacher backs the plan, but teaching unions have mixed views. Nicola Juncar reports

Every school will be ranked on a number of measures and given a final overall grade. Half of the measures will be based on pupil attainment - the others include pupil and parent perceptions and pupil wellbeing, which includes discipline, attendance, sport and healthy eating.

A two-year pilot will be run to test how the system will work.

Dr Dunford said: “The school report card signals an important move away from inappropriately narrow measures of school performance.

“We know that schools are not just about exam results and, in so far as the report card seeks to give credit to schools for fulfilling their wider aims, it is a welcome development.

“But there are many potential pitfalls in a reform as wide-reaching as the report card and many issues need to be addressed.

“It will take at least the two years of the pilot project to develop a system that makes sense.”

In addition, the reforms say pupils who are falling behind in English and maths at age 11 will receive one-to-one tuition.

They will also face a progress check at the end of their first year of secondary school to ensure they are catching up.

This will be done by teacher assessment, with a national sample externally assessed to measure pupils’ overall progress.