Ofsted claim bad teachers are not an “absolute disaster”

Chairman of Ofsted, Zenna Atkins has claimed that if children are able to cope with one bad teacher that’ll be a good learning lesson for them in life and it is not necessarily an absolute disaster.

With BBC Panorama revealing that in the past 40 years 18 teachers in the United Kingdom have been struck off for incompetence, Atkins did emphasise that although a bad teacher could be a good learning experience, “poor teaching can be very damaging.”

Ms Atkins claimed that what was an absolute disaster was if poor leadership wasn’t spotted:

“What is an absolute disaster is if the leadership doesn’t know that there is a bad teacher and leadership is not doing anything about it.”

According to Atkins pupils play an important part in rooting out poor teachers and claimed never to underestimate the ability of an eight year old to identify an inadequate teacher.

"I do think we have a culture of accepting poor and inadequate teachers, and they're not challenged and managed out in the same way as you would do in industry where you know that your staff who are poorly performing are actually costing you money and eating into your profits."