Sunday 12 January 2014

How that teacher licensing might work out. A lesson from road transport...

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Dick Puddlecote usually writes about personal choice and the curse of nannying fussbucketry but every now and then he drops one in about his day job running a transport business.

Here he writes about the impact of requiring re-licensing every few years for HGV and PSV drivers:

Our experience - and we offered to pay for the courses - was that our best drivers said "enough of this shit" and quit the game. Not just any old drivers either, it was mostly the most experienced older drivers who decided that it was a ridiculous idea, and that there was no way they were letting some snotty-nosed professional training adviser tell them how to do a job they'd performed brilliantly for decades.

Dick goes on to confirm that, right across the industry, the impact of the new rules was:

...a loss of around 20% of drivers across the board.

Is there any reason to suppose that the impact of a "teacher's license" would be any different? That, far from it being the worst teachers who are weeded out, the effect will be for good teachers who can either retire or do something else (work in a private school or go to Australia to think of two examples) to leave? As Dick concludes:

Do we want kids to be trained by experienced older professionals with decades of knowledge and skills to be passed on to colleagues, or should Labour be allowed to drive them out of the job by way of death by a thousand insults to their intelligence?

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