Every School Should Have a Useless Teacher

“Every school should have a useless teacher,” Zenna Atkins, Chairman of the UK’s Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) told the BBC. She pointed out that dealing with a difficult authority figure is an important life skill. “If kids can manage to cope with one bad teacher that’ll be a good learning lesson for them in life – it is not necessarily an absolute disaster.”
Stressing that her comment is a personal opinion, and not an official position of Ofsted, she added that schools should not tolerate bad teachers. A report published in BBC’s Panorama estimated that as many as 17,000 teachers in the UK are not competent teachers.
“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.” She feels it’s the responsibility of each school to have the highest quality of teaching possible, and added that students should not be underestimated in their ability to identify bad teachers. “They can be a huge ally for schools in helping improve teachers’ performance.”