Can a teacher really understand a subject and, as importantly, inspire their students to want to study that subject at university, if they didn’t choose to study it themselves?

Figures for 2002/3 (the latest available) from the Department for Education and Skills show that, among fulltime teachers in secondary schools:

- Only 42 percent of maths teachers have a degree in maths;

- Just over half (51 percent) of English teachers do;

- Only 26 percent of design technology teachers and just 13 percent of ICT teachers studied any type of technology subject at university;

- Science teachers were most likely to have a degree in their subject (Biology 71%, Chemistry 72%, Physics 63%).

There’s no breakdown produced by the DfES of what level teachers with degrees in a subject are teaching it to within schools and colleges, but a report by the Department ('Mathematics and Science in Secondary Schools: The Deployment of Teachers and Support Staff to Deliver the Curriculum': Jan 2006) showed that even at this level, only 66 percent of teaching time in Maths is delivered by a teacher with a degree in Maths (73 percent if tiem in Further Maths) and just 53 percent of A-Level physics teaching is delivered by a teacher with a Physics degree.

Overall, the figures show that two-thirds of teachers don’t have a degree in the subject they teach.

It all rather squashes the DfES’s whizzo recruitment campaign idea that “those who can, teach”. Seems those who can are doing anything but teaching.

(Source: Hansard, 4 Sept 2006)