I FIND the Department for Education and Employment’s campaign on training teachers to teach literacy and numeracy somewhat puzzling.
I had always imagined that this was what primary teachers learned at university, and most of them seemed quite good at it.
So the whole programme of training courses for teachers and the issuing of precise instructions about what every child should know and how to teach it appears somewhat superfluous, not to say patronising. My bewilderment ws increased by the two full-page advertisements in The TES (January 21) on teaching the literacy and numeracy hours. If the whole process can be summarised in large print on one side of A3, what has all the fuss been about?
Presumably similar advertisements will be placed in The Lancet for the benefit of doctors. “Invite the patient to sit down. Ask what seems to be the trouble. Say there is a lot of it about and prescribe antibiotics.”
Easy. Anyone could do it.
