The Tory government have inherited their new Labour predecessors' obsession with Teach First, the programme that drops "high-flying" graduates from top universities into schools with minimal teacher training and expects them to shine.

It plays to ministers' hostility to traditional Postgraduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) teacher training and to their snobbery.

But when Teach First participants were shown struggling on BBC3's programme Tough Young Teachers, the idea behind it seemed so obviously daft to anyone outside the rarified Oxbridge-y world of the Education Ministry that at least one newspaper thought Teach First was some kind of game show - not a well respected part of the government's education strategy.

Reviewing Tough Young Teachers, The Metro said: "The idea of this show, in collaboration with an education charity, is to let passionate young teachers loose on state schools in low-income areas."

Except that isn't "the idea of the show."

This is an actual, long-running, often praised scheme, turning out around 5 per cent of the 30,000 or so teachers trained very year.

The Metro's confusion is understandable. Teach First does look like a reality TV programme, like Faking It, Undercover Boss or Secret Millionaire, where the toffs play at being proles for the camera.

Some of the Teach First graduates on the programme are trying their best and may succeed. Some will obviously fail.

But it is blindingly obvious that a "top student" from a "top university" parachuted into class will not be as good a teacher as one with an ordinary degree who has been properly trained for a year on a PGCE course in a university teacher training department, with school placements alternating with a chance to reflect on their practice at college.

Good teachers become good by learning how to teach. The professional skill lies in the ability to educate, rather than innate "cleverness."

But education ministers hate the teaching profession having any kind of independence.

It makes teachers too opinionated, too expensive and too "uppity."

So they want to devalue the profession. In their view, the upper end of teaching should be Teach First graduates, who get to the top because they come from smart educational backgrounds, not by actually learning how to teach.

Ministers think the fundamental superiority of graduates from top universities is more important than learning professional educational skills. Watch the Teach First-ers struggle on Tough Young Teachers and remember the scheme says it is not just training teachers, it's actually "developing leaders" for schools.

At the bottom end the current government is trying to kill off university-based PGCE schemes by replacing them with a de-professionalised, school-based, amateurish scheme called School Direct, which is a kind of Teach First for teachers from less posh universities.

Like Teach First, School Direct doesn't give trainee teachers a chance to develop in university-based teaching courses.

School Direct is showing signs of failure - the scheme has trouble recruiting and hanging on to trainees, who are floundering without enough support.

Teach First meanwhile continues under ministerial patronage. As John Howson of Education Data Surveys has shown, Teach First is actually a great deal more expensive than the traditional PGCE, even though Tough Young Teachers suggests its trainees are certainly no better than regular PGCE students.

The current moves away from the PGCE are likely to create a teacher shortage. But it looks like Gove thinks this is a price worth paying for devaluing the profession.