Those teachers without 2 A levels

Alan Smithers and his team at the University of Buckingham do a fairly good analysis of our trainee and newly trained teachers each year. Their league tables are a must for potential students. This year, they note, for example that 80 per cent of teachers trained in schools are teaching a year later, but the figure is rather lower among those trained at universities, though a snapshot six months after graduation may not tell the whole story. This is another argument for extending employment-based training, which has already grown substantially under Labour to a fifth of all training.

But they are being a bit disingenuous in the claim that has hit the headlines: two thirds of science teachers don't have 2 A levels. Of course, this refers only to those on four year undergraduate courses, a route mainly chosen by primary teachers. Buckingham's own data shows that only 6 per cent of secondary teachers are now trained on such courses. In fact, there were only 953 people accepted onto all four year secondary teaching courses in 2008, of which only a fraction will have been to science, compared with 5147 onto postgraduate PGCE science courses alone. And as the Buckingham team acknowledge, 78% of them had good degrees.

There is a good case for scrapping undergraduate secondary specialist teaching, and shifting more places to school-based training. But it isn't helped by playing to the August 'everything in education stinks' gallery.

Are specialist science colleges boosting physics?

Professor Alan Smithers has produced an odd piece of research designed to show that specialist schools are useless; and if they are any good, it's only because they get more dosh and posher kids. The basis for this claim is a study of science colleges and other schools and the status of physics within them. According to Prof Smithers, a greater proportion of students who take physics get A grades in language colleges than science colleges, therefore the whole thing is a sham.

Yet in his report, Prof Smithers tells us that science colleges are five times more likely to offer physics at GCSE than other schools. They are even more likely than grammar schools to do so. And he says that the best predictor of whether students do physics at A level is their GCSE results. Separate data shows that the number of physics and chemistry entries at GCSE and A level has been growing nationally, partly as a result of this trend. So science colleges are boosting physics, even if they don't get quite so many A grades.

So, if a larger group of students across science colleges has the chance to take the subject at GCSE, whereas many cannot take it in other schools, is it not possible that the science colleges are making a rather greater contribution to the subject than a long-term opponent of specialist schools is prepared to allow for? I only ask because the researchers apparently didn't think to do so.