The quality of teaching has a profound effect on how successful children are at school and on their earnings in later life.
The Coalition Government has been making significant changes to the rules surrounding the teaching profession: academies will be allowed to recruit specialists who do not have Qualified Teacher Status and only high-achieving graduates who enter the teaching profession will be given bursaries for initial teacher training.
But will these approaches work? What can policy do to raise teaching quality? And what does the academic evidence suggest?
Professor Chris Husbands, Director of the Institute for Education, will explore these questions at the eighth SMF Chalk + Talk events, kindly supported by the Economic and Social Research Council.