View

Abstract

One of the more successful of the NUT's campaigns in recent years has been that to eliminate untrained teachers and establish the real prospect of a Teachers' Council, which would for the first time give teachers something of the control over entry standards that other professions have. Perhaps it is all in a good cause. By controlling entry standards (and therefore entry numbers) they will be able to behave like the classical mediaeval guild or twentieth century trade union, and ensure that the slice of the national cake allocated to education is divided up amongst a strictly limited number of people: which is one way of raising salaries. The main object, however, of a Teachers' Council (and certainly that of Ted Short, the Secretary of State for Education and Science) is to bestow upon teachers a greater sense of professionalism, to make them look doctors and lawyers in the face and feel on some sort of equality. As a matter of fact, a hundred Teachers' Councils will not achieve this object unless the salary comes more into line with that of the real professionals. So it will all be a rather slow process: it would be absurd to think that teachers will become different sorts of beings over night.

Citation

Price, C. (1969), "View", Education + Training, Vol. 11 No. 8, pp. 333-334. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb016183