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1、Education Snooty or what? Oct 14th 2004 From The Economist print edition Inverted snobbery prevents good teachers going where theyre needed A clever man wants to do a good thing, but the wicked government stops him. That is the scandalous-sounding story of the difficulties encountered by Tristram Jones-Parry, head of fee-paying Westminster School, one of the best in the country. He retires next year and wants to help teach maths in a state school. Was he welcomed with open arms? No. He was told, he complains, that he would need retraining for the state system. It was a similar story for David Wolfe, a retired American physics professor who teaches in a British state school. He said this week that the authorities told him to sit the GCSEmaths exam normally taken by 16-year-olds if he wanted to continue. The system is not quite as insane as this might suggest. The rules that require state-school teachers to be formally qualified do have exceptions. The Teacher Training Agency insists that Mr Jones-Parry could gain his ticket in just a day, by having an assessor from the state system observe his work at Westminster . Mr Wolfes American PhD would count as an equivalent to the GCSE maths pass normally required. So he would scrape by as well. The General Teaching Council, another quango, has now apologised to Mr Jones-Parry for giving him the wrong information at first, and then leaving his follow-up letter unanswered for six weeks. | 
