Of course teachers need to be competent before they start teaching

As Professor Brent Davies said at the National College Seizing Success conference a couple of years ago, teaching is more difficult than surgery. Without doubt, he was trying to wake us all up...I think it was a breakfast seminar after a late night of networking. 

But he has a point.  These days, surgeons perform hundreds of similar operations and become expert on a very precise area of the human body.  Much of their skill is honed through narrowly-focused repetition. Teachers, on the other hand, have to advance 28 individuals from quite different starting points to much higher levels of competence; individuals who are very different from each other and are motivated and learn in a great variety of different ways.  The variables are enormous.  And you can't sit down and write a blueprint for how all this will be done; you have to cope with what each individual brings to class - in terms of attitude and preparation - and adapt accordingly.  Brilliant teachers are amongst the most highly skilled professionals in the country.

You can't just teach this in a one year training programme.  The art and science of teaching is learnt over the full stretch of a career and, as Anthony Seldon says in today's Guardian blogs, the best teachers are also compulsive learners, constantly refining their art.

But you can make sure that teachers have an established foundation for a successful professional career - and we should insist that they have this basic grounding before they take charge of children's learning.  Not to do so would be to play cavalier with the very children for whom we are responsible.

However, I would rather insist that new entrants to the profession can satisfy basic competences than that they have undertaken X amount of training.  If (unlikely) an individual can satisfy these competences without having done a year of training, then let them in.  I intensely dislike the monopolies that training providers develop when the law insists that certain bits of paper are required.  Whenever organisations start lobbying for training to be made mandatory, I can't help suspecting that they have something to gain from this.  Call me cynical.

The main question in our minds should be how we can guarantee that the standard of teaching we provide for our children is the highest we can possibly achieve.  And if we keep pushing that standard upwards, we will keep ennobling the profession of teaching.  Whether or not that aim is best achieved through insistence on qualifications is a secondary issue.