Schools urged to monitor teachers

Teachers should be made to undergo business-style performance reviews to drive out incompetent staff, a leading industrialist said yesterday.

Former Confederation of British Industry president Sir Bryan Nicholson, chancellor of Sheffield Hallam University, urged the education world to adopt tough business disciplines to improve Britain's flagging performance compared with global competitors.

Addressing the North of England Education Conference in Sheffield, Sir Bryan laid out a 10-point plan for the next government to achieve by the millen- nium, including expanding nursery and higher education.

Lessons from industry could include more rigorous appraisal of teachers' competence, he said. "The rest of society generally operates in an environment where performance standards are known and regularly assessed. It would help restore respect for teachers if they accepted the same disciplines."

However, Sir Bryan acknowledged the weight of expectation and blame placed on teachers, who had "somehow become scapegoats for many of society's ills". He said: "We need to stop expecting teachers to do the impossible. They can't cure all the ills of our society - and they can't do it on their own."

Schools were not helped by an inspection system which saw a brief visit by inspectors who found fault and then withdrew. The approach did not raise standards, uncover real problems or find solutions, he said.

Greater influence should be restored to local education authorities which needed a bigger role in monitoring and helping schools deliver high standards.

Another change needed, he said, was the extension of nursery education to all three- and four-year-olds. Though the step already has cross-party support, the timetable needed to be "sooner rather than later".

And half the school population should progress to at least four more years of education after 16, Sir Bryan said.

Britain's approach, which has seen higher education expand to include a third of school-leavers, was still inadequate to enable the UK to compete, and left a "long tail of underachievement".

The sciences are becoming increasingly middle-class subjects as more private school pupils choose them at A-level and more comprehensive school students give them up, a leading academic warned yesterday.

The trend was leading to a "gentrification" of the sciences, reversing their 1960s role as an academic avenue to success for bright working-class pupils, Professor Alan Smithers, of Brunel University, told the annual meeting of the Association for Science Education.