Get ready for a rant

I hear there's a crisis in staffing Scottish schools. There aren't enough teachers, it seems.

Now would that be the crisis caused by the councils who have cut back the number of teachers in schools?

Or the crisis caused by Westminster which, in the name of austerity, has cut back the amount of money going to local authorities so they can't employ teachers?

Or the the crisis caused by the Scottish Government which agreed to remove the ring-fencing around education that used to ensure we had enough money to staff our schools?

Whatever the case, the suggestion now is that, in order to staff our schools, we should reduce the qualifications needed to become a teacher.

It's hard to believe we're back where we were 50 years ago. Then we had schools staffed by people with no qualifications at all but who had maybe been in the army during the second world war and therefore came from the 'university of life.' Excuse me while I spit. Me too, I have been through the university of life. The only difference is I didn't think that was enough of a qualification to let me loose on the young people of this country, so I went on to study. Two degrees and a teaching diploma later, I was in a classroom and still finding the job pretty tough.

Thatcher started all this. She couldn't understand why primary teachers needed a degree for doing what women did naturally when raising children. Not that Maggie did any of that stuff - she had a nanny.

It's awful how qualifications are now denigrated. Four years at art school gets you an invitation to 'showcase' your talents (for nothing) in an exhibition. The same time gets you a degree in business admin and the chance of an 'internship' - which you will have to pay for, of course. You can spend years studying languages and end up being offered laughable sums of money for translation work. You can pursue a career in biochemistry, get a good degree and find yourself doing drone work in a lab. For the rest of your life.

Now the message seems to be that you don't really need a university qualification. I see a publisher is now taking people straight from school. Fair enough. But please, can we hold on to the idea that we need properly educated teachers?