Incentives for graduates – what impact on low English and maths skills?
Some good news this week came from the announcement – from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills – of funding of £20,000 grants for Maths graduates to train to teach in Further Education. There will also be grants of £9,000 for graduates training to teach English or teach students with Special Educational Needs.
As NIACE’s national Inquiries into Adult Literacy and Adult Numeracy both found, one of the major problems with the current system is the lack of trained and qualified post-16 teachers of these subjects.
But of course the devil will be in the detail of this announcement. For instance, it is not yet clear if the funding will support those who want to teach different levels of English and maths, from what could be called ‘basic’, which includes Functional Skills, or up to GCSE.
While the support for those wanting to teach students with Special Educational Needs is good to see – and of course the extra investment of £1 million to ‘fund high-level specialist training for those already working with students with SEN’, which shows a strong commitment to Continuous Professional Development – it’s important to remember that the majority of the millions of adults with poor numeracy (around 1 in 4 adults) and literacy (around one in six) don’t have Special Educational Needs, and neither are they likely to begin their learning on a GCSE-level course.
The literacy and numeracy problems of this country do need a range of actions as we have pointed out on many occasions. A qualified, experienced and committed workforce is one of the major components and will go some way to addressing the shocking statistics of 8 million adults lacking the English and/or maths skills they need to function effectively in everyday life.
But what’s also needed is more use of peer support and innovative first steps interventions such as the family learning and community-based schemes which have helped to change adults’ attitudes to learning in several places across the country. But there needs to be more of these schemes, on people’s doorsteps, in a place, at times and in a way that will help them take those first tentative steps back into learning, for their sake, for their families and for the communities they live in.
