Teacher training gets a poor end of term report

By Cathy Reay

Teacher training is failing to adequately prepare new teachers for working with pupils with learning difficulties and  other impairments, a new report has revealed.

The heavy reliance on schools to provide the bulk of teacher training often means that trainees are experienced only in areas of specific concern to the schools they are working in, Ofsted found.
This leaves them ill-prepared for meeting the needs of pupils with a wide spectrum of learning difficulties and/or disabilities.

“Schools are responsible for teacher induction and under the Disability Discrimination Act they must make sure that their staff are adequately trained. They’re simply not complying with their disability equality duty,” said Richard Rieser from Disability Equality in Education.

“Only in the last year has teacher training included disability, and some courses still only have a mandatory hour of disability training. It’s not enough.”

The report also found major gaps in monitoring trainee teaching, which some of the trainees, it claimed, were unaware of. It recommended that local authorities should place greater emphasis on observing and supporting teachers’ progress.

“Our key finding was that the only person that has a clear view of everything that happened in their training was the trainee themselves,” Janet Thompson, Ofsted inspector and author of the report said.

“Schools should be equipped with the necessities to train their staff well and monitor their progress, and local authorities should have more input to ensure a rigorous process is adhered to. Processes and communications need to get better.” 

The full report is available to download from the Ofsted website: http://www.ofsted.gov.uk