In brief: Better guarantees of competence
Good teachers are crucial for good education. The government has a duty under the Dutch Constitution to guarantee the competence of teachers in training, in collaboration with teacher training colleges and education professionals. That guarantee is currently not being met fully.
The Education Council advises the Minister of Education to ensure the adequacy of the legal frameworks intended to provide this guarantee. The statutory competence requirements must be sufficiently broad and must define the core elements of being a teacher in unambiguous terms. The Council also recommends that the way in which teacher competences are tested in the final phase of teacher training programmes be made more specific. As the recommended frameworks have a statutory basis, they apply for all teacher training programmes.
Implementing these recommendations will offer the assurance that, whichever training route students follow into teaching, by the time they graduate they will be competent to take their place in the classroom. The frameworks within which teacher training programmes must operate will be clear, as will the degree of freedom training providers have to deliver education that is flexible and adaptable enough to suit diverse groups of students. It is important that the legal frameworks offer this freedom, given the continuing teacher shortages. Flexible training routes will potentially attract more students into the teaching profession
Background: Many routes into teaching demand rigorous embedding of competences
There are many possible routes to becoming a teacher. Some programmes train students to be primary school teachers, while others prepare them for work in general or vocational secondary education. Some training programmes are provided by universities of applied sciences, some by universities and some by a combination of the two. There are also abridged and fast-track routes, such as those for students transferring in from other disciplines. Given its constitutional responsibility, the government is required to guarantee the competence of teacher training graduates, regardless of which training route they have followed. At the request of the Minister of Education, the Education Council examines how guaranteeing the competence of trainee teachers can be reconciled with the freedom afforded to training providers to configure their programmes so that they are flexible and adaptable enough to accommodate diverse groups of students and the different educational settings in which they will be working after graduating.
Advice: Ensure the legal frameworks are adequate
The Council sees a need for better guarantees of the competence of trainee teachers. The system designed to provide these guarantees currently falls short in three areas. The existing legal competence standards are too general; there are no specific national testing standards, and transfer programmes are not accredited. Teacher training colleges moreover have to deal with a complexity of different rules and agreements regarding the qualities that trainee teachers must possess, for example the statutory competence requirements which apply for all teacher training programmes and the national knowledge bases which apply only for universities of applied sciences. This plethora of different frameworks means it is not clear what is mandatory or permissible; this lack of clarity in turn restricts the freedom of teacher training providers.
The Council advises the government to develop adequate frameworks to provide greater assurance regarding the competences of trainee teachers, whereby the competence requirements are sufficiently specific and properly tested.
Recommendation 1: Formulate more specific statutory competence requirements
The statutory competence requirements stipulate the knowledge and proficiency standards that teachers must meet. The Council regards the present competence requirements as too general. Key qualities that new teachers need to possess, such as knowledge and skills in relation to subject content, subject-specific teaching and pedagogics, are not defined specifically enough. To provide greater assurance of new teachers’ competences, the Council recommends making the requirements more specific so that they provide a more comprehensive and realistic description of the essence of being a teaching professional.
This can be achieved by building on the existing statutory competence requirements and the national knowledge bases which apply for teacher training programmes offered at universities of applied sciences and which describe in more specific terms the knowledge and skills that teachers must possess. The Council does however stress the need to critically assess these frameworks and to take proper account of input from stakeholders such as teacher trainers, teachers, school heads, school boards and parents. This should ensure that the competence requirements are focused on the qualities that are genuinely needed for teachers to function competently and adequately.
Both the statutory competence requirements and the knowledge bases are currently being revamped. The Council believes this should continue, rather than stopping and restarting the process. The Council recommends that the parties involved in this process should begin preparing adequate legal frameworks for future recalibrations, for example by judiciously incorporating input from the various stakeholders when reviewing the statutory competence requirements and national knowledge bases.
Recommendation 2: Test competence using national theory tests and assess classroom practice in a more comparable way
It is crucial to assess during the latter stages of teacher training whether students meet the statutory competence requirements. This assessment is insufficiently embedded at present; different teacher training programmes test different aspects of competence in different ways and at different moments. The Council calls on the Minister to formulate a statutory framework requiring (representatives of) education professionals to develop national theory tests and process guidelines for practical assessments. This framework would apply for all teacher training programmes, including those for transfer students and other flexible programmes. This will improve the comparability of competence testing in the latter stages of teacher training programmes.
Students graduating from teacher training programmes must possess theoretical knowledge in relation to subject content, didactics and pedagogics. The Council recommends that national written assessments be used to test this theoretical knowledge. The government should commission the development of theoretical tests to this end which are appropriate to the different competences. Where possible the test questions should be the same, for example those about pedagogical and general didactic theories.
To assess practical performance, the Council advocates observations and interviews in which trainee teachers explain and justify the observed performance The Council recommends that these requirements be incorporated in legally embedded process guidelines.
Recommendation 3: Refrain from involvement in teacher training programmes
The recommended statutory competence requirements, national theory tests and guidelines for teaching practice will mean that teacher training programmes are more strongly focused on these legal requirements. The Council argues that the government should refrain from involving itself in the training programmes through legal measures or administrative agreements. This is unnecessary and is not the government’s role. It also reduces the freedom that teacher training providers need to develop adaptable and flexible training and testing.