Teacher agency strikes wrong note

I AM MORE sympathetic to the Teacher Training Agency's general strategy for teacher training than many of Anthea Millett's critics (Letters, THES, November 22), but her defence of the agency's record should not go unchallenged.

There are three important issues which she obscures. The first is the TTA's "single-mindedness on quality". There is no reason in principle why the agency should not publish statistics on initial teacher training providers, but the proposed methodology is riddled with errors. The agency proposes to use student intake quality as a measure. But secondary ITT providers have markedly different intake profiles. An institution with a preponderance of shortage subjects will always look different from one with arts/humanities in terms of intake quality measured on academic results. The agency proposes to use job success rates, but the sample sizes in most providers (subject groups of 15-30) are so small as to make year-on-year variation statistically meaningless.

Finally, it proposes to publish Ofsted quality indicators, but such indicators available to the TTA in July 1997 will relate to 1995/96 inspection findings. The first applicants able to use these findings will not enter ITT until September 1998 when the information is three years out of date. By 1998 institutions will have had to revise their programmes twice: one for the full implementation of 14/93 and once for the (new) national curriculum for ITT.

The second difficulty relates to the inconsistent way in which the TTA describes its relationship with teacher education institutions, at times using the language of partnership and at other times the language of the purchaser in a marketplace. The strong suspicion is that the TTA talks in terms of partnership when dealing with relatively straightforward issues (distributing money) and in terms of purchase-provider splits when dealing with more difficult ones (recruiting science teachers).

The inconsistency arises from the agency's quango status, unable to articulate public criticism of government and extricate its own "strategy" from the implementation of Government policy.

A third, more prosaic difficulty arises from the TTA's simple failures to meet deadlines. For example, in July 1995, ITT institutions were given notice of the decision to abolish what Ms Millett calls the "dead weight of centrally determined bursaries".

Invitations to tender for the new scheme were not sent until late November, with the intention to make decisions by mid-January; institutions were not notified of decisions until late February. ITT institutions were unable to develop a recruitment strategy until almost two thirds of the way through the recruitment period for the current year.

It might be rather politic in this situation to avoid references to "dead hands".

The argument in favour of placing the oversight of teacher education and development under the purview of a single, dedicated body far outweigh those against, and it is encouraging to note Anthea Millett's commitment to "encourage, rather that stifle, debate". But her own defence of the TTA needs to be rather more self-critical and to accept that even if "much has been done in the agency's short history", too much reliance is being placed on the rhetoric of "quality" and too little on the evidence of the way in which quality can be developed and disseminated.

CHRIS HUSBANDS Reader in education, University of Warwick.