Justine Greening, the education secretary, last week announced plans to offer a “degree apprenticeship” teacher training course. This will involve four days a week working in a school and one at university, leading to a university-accredited teaching degree. For graduates, it will take 18 months. A longer course for people without a degree is also brewing.

There are already 16 separate routes into teaching. The National Audit Office last year lambasted the government for the complexity of the pathways and warned that this was putting off people who wanted to become teachers. So adding two more new ways to become a teacher, then, seems ridiculous. What is the point?

Greening’s reasoning is that she wants to create a new “skills revolution”. In reality, though, this is simply part of an existing policy, the apprenticeship levy, trying to force more employers to train staff. All large employers, including most schools, must pay this additional tax based on their wage bill. Tesco pays it. Manchester United pays it. The money is reclaimable as funds towards apprenticeships. All publicly funded bodies with more than 250 employees must hire a specific number of new apprentices every year.

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Already, for every 130 employees in a school it must hire three new apprentices every year. They can be at master’s level, or for janitors studying ground maintenance and receptionists learning administration. Greening’s plan simply allows wannabe teachers to join in.

Politicians are claiming this will help a purported army of non-graduate, under-valued teaching assistants desperate to become teachers who can’t afford a first degree. “A lot of them are single mums and priced out of the university market,” one Conservative MP solemnly told me, apparently forgetting it was his party that whacked tuition fees up to £9,000, decimating mature student numbers.

But hey! No matter that single mums can’t do degrees any more. They can do degree apprenticeships! These are almost exactly the same as other degrees, except you’re tied to an employer for the entire time and you only go to university once a week. Although you get paid for your work days, now that our single mum is an apprentice, the school can pay her just £3.50 an hour for the first year of her course. Yes, £3.50. Even for the over-25s. That’s about £7,000 a year, around half the minimum wage.

If anyone can afford to take up the option, what will apprentices do during their four working days? There’s nothing to stop a school employing them as teachers from day one. At the end of the programme, there’s nothing to stop the school shooing away the (now qualified) teacher and replacing him or her with a new £3.50-an-hour trainee. There is no guarantee of a job, as many apprentices have found to their dismay.

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Fifteen years ago when Teach First began, the training programme that carefully selected graduates to train on the job, the teaching unions went ballistic because children were to be taught by teachers who had degrees but had not yet completed their teacher training. Now parents in England could find their child’s teacher is a first-year undergraduate on terrifyingly low wages.

Optimists will chirp that schools always want the best staff so they will pay well and recruit responsibly. But we already know that since the introduction of level 3 apprenticeships for teaching assistants (equivalent to A-levels) their hourly wages have dropped. Analysis by the GMB union of job adverts for the programme found more than half offered the £3.50 minimum. With squeezed budgets and annual trainee targets to hit, schools may not be able to wait to find “the best”, nor can they afford them.

If Greening wants to have a real revolution, these apprentices need better pay and a guaranteed job on completion, and there needs to be a reassurance for parents that apprentices are employed as teachers only once they have graduated. If done well, Greening’s plan will develop a new paid route into teaching for people who can’t afford a first degree or master’s. Done poorly, along current lines, it will mean a cycle of low-paid non-graduates teaching children full time.

• This article was amended on 19 October 2017. An earlier version said analysis of job adverts was carried out by Unison. This has been corrected to the GMB union.

