ALMOST a quarter of new primary school teachers in Scotland say they are not “confident” in their ability to teach numeracy, a new report has shown.
The Scottish government report was aimed at gathering views on probationer teachers’ readiness to teach, with 23% saying they were unable to feel confident teaching maths.
While almost a fifth of primary probation teachers weren’t confident teaching literacy, and only 12% were strongly confident.
The figures have led to calls from opposition parties for more to be done to improve teaching standards.
The report, published in December, was compiled as part of the government’s efforts to monitor how the education system is performing via the National Improvement Framework.
The respondents were asked whether they agreed with the statements ‘I am confident in my knowledge of numeracy/literacy’ and ‘I am confident in my ability to teach numeracy/literacy.’
Addressing the numeracy questions, a total of 23% were unable to say that they agreed that they had confidence in their ability to teach. While only 17% chose strongly agree.
19% of those surveyed were not confident in their ability to when it came to literacy, and only 12% picked the strongly agree option.
The Gathering Views on Probabtioner Teachers’ Readiness to Teach report surveyed a 10% of Scotland’s 2,386 probationers from 2015-2016.
Reacting to the findings, Scottish Conservative education spokeswoman Liz Smith said that minimum entry requirements should be tougher so that student teachers must have a Higher in Maths.
She added: “Many teacher trainees are clear in their own mind that insufficient attention is being paid in teacher training courses to instruction in how how to teach literacy and numeracy.
“That is surely a matter of grave concern. If teachers lack confidence how can we expect young people to be confident?”
Iain Gray, Labour’s spokesman for education, called for the government to do more to lift teaching standards.
He said: “If one in five probationer teachers are not confident in teaching the most basic foundation skills, we have to worry about their confidence in other critical areas such as teaching science and technology.
“Clearly there is responsibility here with the universities delivering initial teacher education, but the education secretary (John Swinney) should be ensuring action is being taken to improve things.”
However, it was reported in an educational supplement that literacy expert Profesor Sue Ellis from the University of Strathclyde’s school of education cast doubt on the usefulness of the figures in judging competence.
She said: “You can be confident about something simply because you don’t recognise how complicated it is.
“What we need is a direct measure of impact – what progress do children in the classes of probationer teachers make?”
A Scottish Government spokeswoman said: “Through our new education reforms, we will take steps to ensure initial teacher education prepares students to enter the profession with consistently well-developed skills to teach key areas such as literacy, numeracy and health and wellbeing.
“The Scottish government continues to provide £37 million to support the Teacher Induction Scheme, which includes funding for mentoring and support for all probationer teachers on the scheme.”
The findings come after the Scottish Parliament’s Education and Skills Committee last year heard from young teachers that some of them lack the numeracy skills to teach 11-year-olds at a “reasonable standard.”
MSPS also heard that there were wide variations in the time dedicated to literacy and numeracy teaching between different teacher-education institutions.
For undergraduate primary teaching courses anything from 48 hours to 173 hours was dedicated to literacy. For numeracy the range was 44-89 hours.
