Training teachers - Telegraph The teacher training system is broken. This is not exactly news: critics have long blamed it for fostering an educational culture in which selection, competition and rigour are almost dirty words. But the charge has extra force coming from Sir Michael Wilshaw, the head of Ofsted. He points out that, despite enormous public investment in their careers, roughly two fifths of teachers drop out within five years, defeated by a lack of training and support and by classrooms in which discipline is a foreign concept. Sir Michael is promising reform, and rightly so. But there are also larger questions here - not only about the need to restore order and discipline in schools, but about the basic purpose and function of teacher training. There are strong arguments, for example, that teaching skills are essentially innate - indeed, the success of the Teach First programme shows that it is rather more effective to put bright young graduates in classrooms, with the right support, than to force them through lengthy training that will be of scant use. Michael Gove's extension to academies of private schools" traditional freedom to bring in teachers from outside was, therefore, a welcome step - just as Tristram Hunt's insistence on compulsory licensing and qualifications is a retrograde one. Mr Hunt does have it right, however, in suggesting that such tests should be applied throughout a teacher's career: the other great scandal in education, alongside the number of good teachers who drop out, is the number of appalling ones who stay in. Indeed, it has long been virtually impossible for a teacher to be fired for incompetence. By introducing a system of continuing evaluation with real bite, and making it as easy as possible to recruit great teachers and fast-track them into the classroom, we would go a long way towards making an education system to be proud of.