There are lots of questions there. Your first question was about research. You asked what evidence there is that higher English is sufficient to be the marker that a student teacher has the required level of literacy and whether things are better or worse now. I do not know of any such research that shows that higher English is the marker of a person’s capability to teach literacy. That is a question in its own right. Although I do not know of any such research, that does not mean that none exists. It is quite an important question, because higher English is being used as the signal: a student needs higher English in order to have the level of competency required for teacher education. I certainly want to dig a bit more into that fundamental question after the meeting.
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Your second point was about where the balance lies between training and education. It is not about that robotic training. I noticed that some people said that the training is not sufficient to support children with autism—that was another issue that came up at the committee last week. Within the given timeframe, it is really important that we get student teachers to think about developing a disposition whereby the starting point is not that they see the child as having a deficit. There is a values-based approach that still exists—people still talk about a child who has English as an additional language or whatever as “that problem child”. That is a frame of mind. We have to set a framework of values and approaches.
After that, we have to give student teachers some fundamentals on how to engage with classroom management. We have to get them to think about relationship management instead of behaviour management, and to think differently about situations.
We can give them those building blocks, but the question is how we populate those and how the students use them. Only they can do it. Someone can be taught how to react to a child with autism, but the issue might not be the autism; it might be the fact that the child has English as an additional language alongside their autism. If someone is taught in a one-track way, they will not see the situation in an intersectional way, which is a potential problem, because they could be misrecognising or misdiagnosing. We need to do much more on that.
It is a bit like that Automobile Association advert: “I don’t know how to solve the issue, but I know someone who does”. The students need to know what the support structures are, what the frameworks are, and who to go to and when to ask for support and assistance. That is predicated on the existence of a support and assistance.
It is very difficult. When I was thinking about the autism question, I could immediately see other communities asking, “What about us?” We cannot possibly consider all the combinations, but we have to give the students a framework, so at least they have a top 10 of ideas about the tools that they can pull out of the toolbox. It will not be a complete toolkit, however.