Councils spend £2m training teachers to sing with hippos
September 30, 2009
SCOTTISH councils are spending millions of pounds on “touchy-feely” training courses for teachers which frontline staff have condemned as a waste of taxpayers’ money in a profession facing swingeing budget cuts.
The courses involve “bonding exercises”, poster-making and singalongs with animated hippos.Between them, around a dozen councils spent more than £2 million in the 2008-09 school year on sending more than 1200 teachers on six-day courses run by Critical Skills Programme Ltd. The company claims it will “revolutionise” Scottish education.
However, teaching bodies, the Scottish Parent Teacher Council and the Taxpayers’ Alliance, as well as teachers and politicians have poured scorn on the initiative. It has been calculated that 90 extra teachers could have been employed in the last 12 months using the money spent on the courses.
Over recent years, the company has trained more than 3000 Scottish teachers, at a cost of more than £5m. In the next academic year, it anticipates a record number of inductees.
Colin Weatherley, a retired head teacher, founded the company in 2000 after encountering the Critical Skills teaching model in the US.
He said: “During the intensive and highly experiential training, teachers learn how to create collaborative learning communities and design challenges which build essential subject content into complex, open-ended problems that pupils have to tackle collaboratively, in teams. This programme, we are in no doubt, can revolutionise Scottish education.”
The Scottish local authorities using its services are: East and North Ayrshire, Aberdeen, East and West Lothian, Midlothian, Falkirk, Moray, Orkney and Stirling. Trinity Academy in Edinburgh has sent teachers of its own accord, while some further education colleges have also sent staff.
But many teachers who have been on the course are scathing. One said: “I resented being told I had no choice to whether or not I attended. I’ve been a teacher for 25 years and it’s the worst training course I’ve been on. It was very childish stuff. We made poster after poster, we were asked to stand in a line according to the age of our washing machines, and in another activity we had a singalong with a hippopotamus.
“When I asked what the purpose of some of this stuff was, they wouldn’t give me an answer. All they said was we had to come out of our comfort zone. It was a kind of bullying attitude.”
The minimum cost per teacher per six-day course is £1715. The company charges £695 per person; the cost of classroom cover is £1020 per teacher.
Carol Kirk, North Ayrshire Council’s corporate director of education, said: “We have been running the six-day Critical Skills Course for three years and so far have trained 400 teachers, about a quarter of our staff. It is a very long-term aspiration to train all our staff and much will depend on future budgets.”
A recent EIS survey showed most local authorities planned to employ fewer teachers in the next academic year – in the case of North Ayrshire, 65 fewer.
A government spokesman said: “The best continuing professional development reflects local priorities … The Scottish government is currently providing local government with record levels of funding – £23bn for the period 2008-10 – to deliver our shared commitments.”
Liz Smith, the Scottish Conservatives’ education spokeswoman, said: “The focus of teacher training should be on traditional classroom teaching and learning and not about flavour-of-the-month jargon and pseudo-science.”