People can apply for qualified teacher status from the QTS service. This formal professional status allows them to work in schools in England. In some situations, they may not be awarded this status even though they think they deserve it. For example, they may have qualified abroad and their qualifications are not recognised by the UK QTS service.
The QTS team told us that they wanted to send rejected candidates to the Get Into Teaching site in order to advise them on a route to get QTS.
What we did
We proposed some changes to the question asking users - Have you worked as an unqualified teacher? The reason we did this was if a user had qualified and worked as a teacher already, for example in another country, they would answer no to this question. They feel they've worked as a qualified teacher already.
We changed this question to read 'Have you any teaching experience?'. The possible answers they could give were:
- No
- Yes, but I don't have any teaching qualifications
- Yes, I've worked a qualified teacher
If the user answered 'Yes, I've worked a qualified teacher', they would be asked an additional question 'Tell us about your qualification to teach'. They could then tell us that they qualified outside the UK.