NOBODY forgets a good teacher - but the Teacher Training Agency seems to have forgotten some good teachers are black. Its latest glossy brochure features pages of happy school staff but no Asians and just one black - and she’s a classroom assistant. The sole picture of a black student teacher falls on a page with a line about UK residency. The TTA incidentally is trying to boost ethnic-minority recruitment.
Chief executive Anthea Millett was ambushed at this week’s Fabian conference on teacher supply by one Birmingham head who told her that the booklet was useless.
“Ninety-seven per cent of my pupils are Muslim and we’re trying to encourage talented ones into teaching,” Thelma Probert of Golden Hillock Comprehensive told her. “I can’t put this in my careers library.”
Thelma was less than impressed with Anthea’s reply - that it underlined the “woeful shortage” of ethnic-minority teachers. A TTA spokesman admitted it was “probably a bit silly” not to have put any teachers from minorities in the brochure - though they have appeared in posters.
A new booklet comes out in July and can be expected to be more representative.
