Offer Teachers More Training: Or Risk Kid's Education

Normal teachers in the UK spend years training, or in university, and schools often boast about the variety of highly trained staff with degrees: this is true, in most cases. Teachers are knowledgeable and I've had few experiences with untrained general teachers.

However, the problem lies with SUPPLY TEACHERS.

You may have had supply teachers in the past, and it's clear to see that they're untrained, unwise and sometimes careless. Some might say that these teachers come along rarely enough to ignore this fact, and once again, they're wrong.

Of course, I've had good experiences with supply teachers, but it's fair to say that at least 50% are terrible. AT LEAST. And this petition isn't made to train them in every individual topic: just train them in the basics a bit more thoroughly.

Last year, my class had a supply teacher at least once a week, and the majority didn't have a clue about anything. One subject even gave us supply teachers for a lesson a week for SIX MONTHS until their staffing issues were sorted. Below, I'm going to talk to you about some very real experiences I've had with supply teachers in Year 9 and Year 6.

Experience One: In year 6, our teacher wasn't in for a day: so they recruited a supply teacher for when she was away. We normally had 4-5 lessons a day, and with him we had 3, which weren't exactly on topic. The first was a kind of "talking session" which was rather fun, but not educational. In this, I learnt how to say "Go Mexico!" in a language I didn't understand... for an hour. The second was two hours of learning about roman numerals. Useful, yes. What the teacher set, no. The third session was sort of on topic. He told us the learning objective, something about scenery and imagination. Then the next hour was spent talking about what the learning objective meant, without any actual work.

Experience Two: This one was towards the start of Year 9, where we were told to watch a video about refugees and war. We had a sheet each to fill in too. The teacher came in, found the video, then played it. Weirdly, it had no sound. WE then had to sit talking for 30 minutes whilst she tried to figure out how to get sound. Finally, she gave up and we had to watch it without sound. Because it had no subtitles, we couldn't fill in our sheets and left, having learnt nothing. The next day, our real teacher told us she didn't turn the speakers on.

I would go through many more with you, but they're too long and tiring to explain here. I suppose you get the picture: if supply teachers were told what to do, or were given basic IT training, in my case, I'd have spent one less hour doing nothing and one more hour being productive.

If you sign this petition, you could be supporting millions of UK schoolchildren who are constantly faced with this issue. Thanks for taking the time to read this.