QTS to be replaced by ‘stronger’ accreditation

Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) will be replaced by a ‘stronger, more challenging accreditation’, according to a new Department for Education (DfE) white paper.

The ‘Educational Excellence Everywhere’ paper outlines that this stronger accreditation will be based on a teacher’s effectiveness in the classroom and judged by ‘great schools’, claiming that it will help to raise the quality and status of the teaching profession.

While full details of this new system have not been made clear, the decisions on whether to accredit a new teacher will be made by head teachers themselves, which the DfE says will ‘put the power in the hands of those who know best what makes a great teacher’.

The plans come alongside a renewed drive to increase school led initial teacher training (ITT) in response to ongoing recruitment issues.

The government has failed to meet teacher recruitment targets for four years in a row, and the paper promises that the DfE will ‘ensure that enough talented teachers are recruited, wherever they’re needed’.

It claims that an increasingly school led system will help to recruit enough great teachers in every part of the country, and also outlines plans to introduce a new quality control for ITT providers. The new criteria aims to give ‘greater certainty’ to the best providers, both school and university led, by allocating training places according to performance and giving allocations over several years.

Additionally, the paper also includes plans to create a new standard for teachers’ continuous professional development and will examine the feasibility of incentivising teaching schools to publish their research and CPD materials on an ‘open-source’ basis.