My most favourite of royals – I have a thing for people with big ears, bygones – Prince Charles has waded into the education fray again to say that constant reforms and new initiatives are failing teachers, who as a result don’t have time to train. Thank god someone has finally had the (Ed) Balls to say this.

Training for teachers is woefully inadequate, and while I don’t hugely want to spend my precious holidays and weekends ‘improving my craft’ I wouldn’t mind the opportunity to spend a few days every term away from the classroom with other teachers, sharing ideas. But there simply isn’t the time. Our non-contact time during the day usually involves detentions, speaking to parents or internal meetings and the entire rest of my life, it seems, is spent marking. So when are you supposed to improve?

That said, I doubt Prince Charles’ comments will make much difference, we’ll still have to spend most of the day chasing our tails and filling in reports about one agenda or other, but at least someone’s noticed.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 at 4:03 am and is filed under Government, Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.