Life in Canada

Personality testing to screen out teachers who lack social skills or cannot cope under pressure. Will this ever happen in Canada? I hope so.

Trainee teachers face personality tests to weed out those who lack social skills or cannot cope under pressure.Students will be asked to fill in questionnaires before they can begin training courses in a drive to boost the caliber of staff.The tests are designed to gauge applicants’ abilities to manage their time, relate to pupils and handle pressure and criticism.

Toughening up: New tests being introduced this September will attempt to weed out trainee teachers who lack the necessary social skills or cannot cope under pressure

The new checks – introduced from September – are part of an overhaul of teacher training with the aim of raising standards in state education.An estimated £68million is spent each year by the Government on training teachers who quickly move on to other jobs.Officials said ‘easily measurable competencies’ are already assessed during recruitment to teacher training courses.

But the ‘more difficult competencies’ which are ‘also deemed essential to becoming a successful teacher’ are not covered.From September, training providers will be supplied with an approved list of ‘non-cognitive assessments’ to use during the recruitment process. The tests will be used to ‘complement’ existing procedures such as interviews and group exercises.

Taking a stand: Other measures announced by Education Secretary Michael Gove (above) include a toughening up of literacy and numeracy tests for trainee teachers
Tests used in trials assessed criteria such as interpersonal skills, time management and emotional resilience, including the ability to ‘perform when under pressure’, ‘keep emotions in check’ and ‘handle criticism and learn from it’.

Sample questions included ‘Which of the following best describes you?’, with candidates asked to tick one of six boxes on a spectrum between ‘methodical’ and ‘flexible’.

About 35,000 students are accepted on to teacher training courses each year, but around one-third drop out of teaching soon afterwards. While some quit for personal reasons, many are simply ill-suited to the job.Earlier this year, the Department for Education demanded ‘better testing of candidates’ interpersonal skills’ before teacher training.Following trials, the Government this week announced that screening tests will be available to all recruiters for training courses.

While the personality tests will not be compulsory, most course leaders are expected to insist their candidates take them.Ofsted will for the first time be inspecting teacher training providers for the quality of their selection processes.

Further measures already announced by Education Secretary Michael Gove include a toughening up of literacy and numeracy tests for trainee teachers.Ministers are concerned that existing tests are too easy and allow trainees with a poor mastery of English and maths to slip through.

A spokesman for the Government’s Teaching Agency said: ‘By screening applicants for a range of attributes and behavioural competencies that are considered essential to good teaching, we will reinforce what is already a rigorous selection process.’

He added that the testing would ‘help select and recruit the most suitable, high-quality trainee teachers’.

All the rhetoric of late regarding rewarding good teachers and penalizing poor ones, of shipping good teachers to underachieving schools and less able educators to schools with higher standards simplistically works to remediate symptoms and in my view does nothing to address the problem.

In my wife's three decades in the classroom, she has dealt with apathy, truancy, hunger, lack of sleep, behavioural issues, language and cultural barriers, limitations of ability, as well as emotional, physical and sexual abuse. These were often present in the same classroom in the same school year.

Whether she was 10 times more competent or only 1/10th as able, little she did or could have done to change things over which she had no control. Reducing the human equation in education to standardized numbers holds no weight of logic.

Washing a car will not fix a faulty motor any more than blowing one's nose will cure a cold. The problem lies in the hands of society in general parents in particular and efforts to download apathy onto the shoulders of educators, whether by reward or punishment, are ludicrous and irresponsible.

Michael Gove Michael Gove promised to "clarify and shrink" the guidance to teachers on school discipline

"No touch" rules discouraging teachers from restraining and comforting children are to be scrapped, Education Secretary Michael Gove has said.

Mr Gove said the move was part of a "new deal" for teachers.

They would also be given the right to anonymity when faced by allegations from pupils.

The National Union of Teachers (NUT) welcomed Mr Gove's comments, saying teachers needed clear rules on how to handle classroom indiscipline.

But the Children's Rights Alliance for England said giving school staff more powers could breach human rights and child protection laws.

Mr Gove said the current system was too complicated, and promised to change the rules on school discipline.
He said: "At the moment if you want to become au fait with what this department thinks on how to keep order in class you have to read the equivalent of War and Peace.

"There are about 500 pages of guidance on discipline and another 500 pages on bullying. We will clarify and shrink that."

Mr Gove added: "Teachers worry that if they assert a degree of discipline, one determined maverick pupil will say 'I know my rights' and so teachers become reticent about asserting themselves.

"There are a number of schools that have 'no touch' policies and we are going to make clear this rule does not apply."

The education secretary said he did not believe staff should be able to hit children.

Of course teachers, like any other group have the right to fair treatment and due process, but let's have a balanced debate and not one that starts off with children as the problem”

But he added: "I do believe that teachers need to know they can physically restrain children, they can interpose themselves between two children that may be causing trouble, and they can remove them from the classroom."

Teachers should be able to console all victims of bullying, he said.

They would also be given the right to search pupils for "anything that is banned by the school rules".

NUT General Secretary Christine Blowers said: "We welcome the fact that Michael Gove is explicit that this is not a return to corporal punishment.

"Clearing up any grey areas regarding physical intervention would be welcome as clearly there are times when teachers need to intervene between pupils to prevent harm to themselves or others."
'Dangerous move'

But Children's Rights Alliance spokeswoman Carolyne Willow warned: "Giving even more powers to school staff to restrain children is a dangerous move that could contaminate schools and risks breaching human rights and child protection laws."

She said the priority should be making lessons "more simulating and engaging for all" and added: "Many schools are finding that adopting human rights values, with an emphasis on listening to children and young people and responding to their ideas and interests, bring great change.

Mr Gove also vowed to reduce the time scale in which allegations against teachers have to be either investigated, as well as granting accused teachers anonymity while inquiries are ongoing.

The move is likely to find favour with teaching unions like the NAS/UWT who have complained in the past that teachers who are the subject of false allegations become the victims of a public "witch hunt" while they are investigated.

But Ms Willow said giving teachers anonymity fed "the myth that schools are being swamped with malicious allegations" from children and parents when that was not the case.

"Of course teachers like any other group have the right to fair treatment and due process, but let's have a balanced debate and not one that starts off with children as the problem," she said.

A school in Bedford has become the latest outpost of the public sector to turn to text messages as the answer to all its problems.

Newnham Middle School in Bedford is buying Truancycall, an automated system that will notify parents by text and email if their kids forget to turn up at school.

The system is pitched not just as a solution to truancy and the evils it begets – watching schools programmes, drinking cider, spitting on shoppers' heads down the Arndale Centre – but also as a child safety measure, alerting parents that their child might be missing.

Should a little angel not be in class when they should be, the Windows-based system sends a text to the parent’s mobile, and an email. Parents can respond directly to the automated phone call, either with their own text or with a verbal message. This way, the company says, the school is not deluged by a mass of calls saying, “Don’t you idiots know there’s an outbreak of norovirus/it’s lambing season/it’s the summer holidays.”

Should the parent not respond, the system will call again an hour later. In fact, it will continue to call until 8pm.

The firm says that, strangely, a third of parental responses come in between 6pm and 8pm. This of course is when they’re either getting home from work or getting tanked up at Happy Hour. So, perhaps it’s really only a child safety measure two-thirds of the time.

More importantly, though, the school then has a stack of responses it can view or listen to, so that it can update its own information management system.

So, the school secretary is happy because she’s not on the phone all morning, the school is happy because its records are up to date, and the kids are happy cos they’re eating chips down the high street.

The only people who might not be happy are parents who don’t have email or a mobile, or who have jobs where they’re unable to answer their mobile phones – such as say, teachers?