Maybe this government should consider giving currently serving military personnel, who have instructional skills, proper accreditation and maybe some financial incentives to entice them into the teaching profession?
Actually, although the result of personal choice rather than a Government initiative, teaching is awash with ex-servicemen...it's something a lot of us seem to decide to do to supplement the pension. From personal observation we tend to go into the 'hard/black and white' subjects. I don't mean to offend anyone, Maths, Technical, Sciences - things you can do with a screwdriver, you might call them, rather than 'Comparative religion', 'Sportd Management', 'Media Studies' and the like.
The only problem removing MOD careers visits will have, is that the teachers will now have to supervise their charges instead of dumping a whole yeargroup into the assembly hall and disappearing for a crafty smoke, whilst expecting some poor sob recruiter to try and keep order with 100+ kids. (Biggles111)
I guess this varies school to school - I like assemblies, somebody else provides the material and I get to hear stuff I don't normally, perhaps. I'm there though, standing at the end of a row (kids sit, I stand) helping keep order. Interesting to do this when a local clergyman is 'recruiting' - he and I went different ways, but 10 years back we sat 3 feet apart on the aircraft.
Wyler has made good points, so has Charlie Golf - the NUT are radical nutters (I'm in Scotland, thank God, them there loons don't affect me), they do not represent schoolteachers as a whole. In any staffroom you'll find Genghis Khan and Mahatma Ghandi...even in the Highlands, where there's only one teacher in the school.
I bet Ross Kemp has done more for recruiting, however, than any official organ of the forces...teenagers love to do Taceval stuff - my retirement plan is to charge servicemen a fiver to supply a stand-in 5th year pupil for them when exercises are called. I'm charging the pupils a tenner - they're usually better off, frankly.
Too much 'tarring with the same brush' is occurring here - it's silly to complain that some sectors of the populace regard all servicemen as steely eyed killers, only to then rant about "all teachers do X" in the next sentence. You can't complain about being stereotyped on the one hand, only to stereotype another profession in the next breath.
As for the standard hoary old chestnuts - teachers actually teach what those in authority say we should teach. Course content is, in the main, set in blocks of stone.
Discipline in schools is not something I, or any other teacher, has any say in - I have to operate within narrow guidelines, set by the local authority, under the overall authority of parliament... I can't sort problem pupils out in any sensible way (I'm allowed to tell pupils off, provided I don't use demeaning terminology - woe betide the teacher who calls somebody an idiot just because they set fire to the pupil next to them for fun). I have suggested to management that we should therefore bluff the kids, pretend to have the power we need
We have the teachers that the politicians, over the past 30 years, decided we should have - and it's the airy fairy lot who exit the classroom sharpish (theory being preferable to practise) who rise up the pyramind to determine policy for the next decade or two - assisted by soundbyte based policy decisions.