Class not dismissed: Tough Young Teachers and Teach First

The BBC3 series Tough Young Teachers – which finishes on the 13th of February – tells us as much about the British class system as it does about the classroom.

According to Sarah Smart, the controversial ‘Teach First’ programme, which trains graduates to work in ‘challenging’ schools and whose recruits are followed in the television series, consistently reproduces unhelpful stereotypes about class.

Smart’s concern isn’t whether the programme – designed to provide graduates with skills for later employment and schools with good teachers – is successful, but rather “the way in which participants’ class status made it possible for them to combine this altruism with ambition, and how they were engaged in a process of middle-class reproduction.”

Writing in the Journal of Education and Work, Smart argues that the Teach First programme reproduces the middle-class advantages of its participants in three ways: by allowing them to accumulate more social and cultural capital through their experience teaching; by reproducing their own middle-class values and stereotypes about the working class; and by ‘obscuring’ middle-class advantage through discourses of ‘natural ability’.

While Smart does not dispute that many well-meaning trainees do indeed work hard to make a difference, their actions are ultimately ‘twisted by class forces’, which result in the reproduction of middle-class privileges.

This matters because the Teach First programme, featured in Tough Young Teachers, is often promoted as having significant potential to raise achievement in target schools. Smart disagrees: “The role of Teach First in reproducing middle-class privilege and values means that in the long term its impact on educational disadvantage will be limited, because it does not tackle the fundamental inequalities in social, cultural and economic capital between classes, the invisibility of middle-class privilege and the discourses of working class deficit.”

She does, however, concede that it may be possible to build on the Teach First model, “which successfully appeals to the desire to act ethically and ‘make a difference’” on the part of its participants.

To make Teach First more effective in the longer term, Smart calls for a greater recognition of the role of self-interest and the way the programme’s middle-class trainees benefit from their altruistic choices; she also recommends that Teach First minimise the reproduction of middle-class values and privileges by changing the way that ‘challenging’ schools and working-class pupils are conceptualised and described by their trainees and in Teach First literature.

But will Teach First take Smart’s comments on board in time for the next series of Tough Young Teachers? Tune in to find out.

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