YOUR VIEWS

We must teach the HE teachers

Frank Furedi ("Far more skills...", 11 September) confuses two things: the recommendation to train university lecturers with a move to vocationalise the content of the HE curriculum. He shouldn't throw the teaching baby out with the subject bathwater.

Furedi admits many university lecturers are poor communicators, but says "standardisation of teacher training will do little to improve matters". Does he think secondary teacher-training is a waste of time? "Research- based knowledge cannot be standardised," he says. Isn't it odd that a sociologist should believe that years of psychological and social research into human learning have no practical application?

The inability to distinguish between the content and the process of teaching is common among HE teachers who are highly trained subject specialists. However as a university-based trainer of the teachers of adults, I've taught my own new university colleagues on a PGCE. They were keen to develop an informed and critical view of their own teaching, and I've not found the relationship that Mr Furedi implies between the quality of the lecturer- as-researcher and that of the lecturer-as-communicator. And, as a soon- to-be fee-paying parent of an undergraduate myself, I want my daughter to be taught by people who know how to teach.

Christine Butterworth

If politicians' children suffered ...

I often wonder what would happen if we were to require all MPs and civil servants to send their children to the school for the appropriate age group in the LEA where their main home is which scores lowest in the league tables. My bet is the improvement of education would immediately become "a matter of the highest national importance".

Obviously it is not going to happen and MPs and civil servants are unlikely to change their views about the ethics of taking their children out of the system they provide for the rest of us. But one can dream.

Christopher West, Yorkshire

Reading lessons of the Sixties

We ignore at our peril recent research from Manchester University (13 September) which confirms that reading standards among 11 year olds are falling. This is high -quality evidence of a trend of which secondary school teachers are already all too aware.

Raising reading standards among this critical group is not difficult and requires neither increased financial investment nor substantial changes in the national curriculum. It requires only the banning of trendy teaching strategies left over from the Sixties.

Edward Carron, Shrewsbury

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