HR and Staff Wellbeing

A Profession Is Built On Expertise. So Why Does Education Under-Value It So Much?

Alone amongst the professions, prestige and status is given to those who are furthest away from their clients. If we are to avoid a creeping and deadening managerialism taking over the profession Professors Tim Brighouse and Mick Waters argue, in the first of a series of articles on improving schools, that a new role of Teacher Consultant must be created.
We need a new role in education ...that of Consultant teacher

It is a strange thing about teaching that the better and more experienced we get, the less of it we are expected to do. Teaching has always had the concept of ‘time off’ from teaching children to do work which is presumably reckoned more important. This means that professional status lies with doing less of the essential work of the profession.

In other professions, those with the highest stature take on the most challenging cases. In law, the head of chambers takes on the biggest trial (for the biggest fee, of course) and the rest of the team coalesce around the effort to support.

In health, the consultant surgeon takes on the most complex operation and many less experienced colleagues might ask to watch and learn. It is why we still say operations are ‘performed’ in a ‘theatre’: as surgery began in the early 19th century, doctors clamoured to watch those with knowledge and expertise so that they might learn from the best.

Yet in schooling, we traditionally follow a different tradition. An A level group comprising students who are well versed in their subject discipline and supposedly able to manage their own learning is typically assumed to need to be small in size. At the same time, a key stage one class of children with a range of capabilities, needs and experiences sees thirty as the normal number.

For a child with special needs or disability it is often seen as success if they can be allocated a teaching assistant for some of the time.

<--- The article continues for users subscribed and signed in. --->

Enjoy unlimited digital access to Teaching Times.
Subscribe for £7 per month to read this and any other article
  • Single user
  • Access to all topics
  • Access to all knowledge banks
  • Access to all articles and blogs
Subscribe for the year for £70 and get 2 months free
  • Single user
  • Access to all topics
  • Access to all knowledge banks
  • Access to all articles and blogs