Schools reform should start with teacher training

One of this Government's many big ambitions for its second term is, as the Queen put it in her speech, to "reform education" and to "promote diversity and higher standards; particularly in secondary schools". That is a laudable objective: the devil is in the delivery.

Estelle Morris, the Secretary of State for Education, made a start yesterday, with her announcement of 400 new specialist schools. This is one of those initiatives which seems to be more about presentation than substance, but on this occasion the presentation is the substance. So far, specialist schools have not been a form of backdoor selection: although such schools are permitted to select up to 10 per cent of their intake by what is coyly called "aptitude" in languages, sport, arts, music or technology, hardly any of them do so. Yet the mere act of declaring an institution as a specialist school seems to raise morale and standards. It is not just the relatively small amounts of extra money; it seems to be a further proof of the law that productivity increases in response to any cosmetic change in the work environment.

The creation of more specialist schools should therefore be welcomed, but it is not the kind of radical reform that is capable of producing the sort of step change which the electorate might notice by the time of the next election.

For that, Ms Morris should listen to the wisdom of Kevin Satchwell, the headteacher of Thomas Telford School in Shropshire, who was knighted by her Government in the recent honours list. He suggests that the role of teacher training colleges should be downgraded in favour of training teachers in schools. It would be going too far – although it is tempting – to advocate the abolition of teacher training colleges. But the Government should, in effect, reconstruct from scratch the way we teach our teachers, with schools being seen as the main location in which it takes place. This fits with its plans for some of the best specialist schools to become "training schools" and to be given extra money to pay people with a mission to teach the training that matters – in the classroom.

Ms Morris must not shirk from extending that experiment throughout the system, ensuring that at least some of the extra resources being poured into the education system over the next few years goes into more effective ways of teaching teachers how to teach.