Menu
Fri, 29 March 2024

Newsletter sign-up

Subscribe now
The House Live All
Defence
Policy solutions for tackling prostate cancer – a disease of inequality Partner content
Health
Health
Communities
Press releases
By BAE Systems Plc

Gove must start listening to teachers

NASUWT | NASUWT

6 min read Partner content

Chris Keates, General Secretary of the NASUWT, says her members will stand up for the public education system despite “constant denigration” by Michael Gove.

Members of the NASUWT, the largest teachers' union, will be gathering in Bournemouth over the Easter weekend for their Annual Conference.

Conference provides the opportunity for the representatives of teachers from across the country to reflect on the previous year in education, to share the successes and challenges and to set the Union's policy direction for the year ahead.

NASUWTmembers will be meeting this year amid unprecedented attacks by the Coalition Government on the public education system and on teachers and their professionalism.

They will of course be debating the issues affecting their working lives but at the heart of their concerns will be the impact of Coalition policies on the children and young people they teach.

The important values and ethos of social justice, equality, democratic accountability and access for all, which have distinguished our public education system are being swept aside and with them are going fundamental rights and entitlements for our children and young people.

The entitlement to be taught by a qualified teacher has been removed. Parents can no longer send their children to school confident that they will be taught by a qualified teacher.

The entitlement to a national broad and balanced curriculum has been stripped away and, as schools are forced to focus on a narrow range of subjects to satisfy performance league tables rather than meet the needs of children, creative subjects such as music, art, drama and many other popular choices for pupils are being dropped.

Vocational subjects, at which many young people excel, have been downgraded. Funding to enable young people to stay on into further education has ceased, financial barriers to access to higher education have been raised and, at a time of record levels of youth unemployment, employers have been relieved of any statutory duty to provide high quality training and apprenticeships.

Even the principle of public education being free at the point of use is being compromised as many parents struggle or are unable to meet the ever increasing costs of school uniform, educational trips and visits, school meals, provision of basic equipment, books and materials and contributions to school funds.

The attacks on teachers’ pay and conditions of service also remove an important universal entitlement for children and young people, the right to be taught by those who are recognised and rewarded as highly skilled professionals and who have working conditions which enable them to focus on teaching and learning.

As a result of Coalition education policy, recruitment of trainee teachers is down and the number of teachers leaving the profession has risen rapidly, with the consequent loss to children and young people of experienced and specialist teachers. Recent surveys show that over half of teachers are considering leaving the profession altogether.

Despite the constant denigration by the Secretary of State Michael Gove of our schools, our qualifications system and our teachers to justify his ideological education reforms, our public education system is neither broken nor failing.

Only recently a report by Pearson showed that this country ranked sixth in the highest performing nations in education in the world. Michael Gove, however, declined to attend the international summit held this month at which this fantastic achievement of our dedicated teachers and our hardworking pupils would have been recognised. Attendance would of course have exposed his false claims that our schools are plunging down the international league tables. Equally he would have had to acknowledge that his place at the table had been earned not through his policies but on the basis of results achieved under the last government.

Teachers and schools are used to meeting the challenge of change but they want to know that the changes are for the better, will add value and make a positive difference to the quality of education and raising standards. All they have witnessed in the last three years has been an obsessive focus on structural change to create academies and free schools, with no evidence this will raise standards. Democratically elected local authorities have had their links with schools severed to make way for chains of private providers to take over schools and profit from taxpayers’ money.

At the NASUWTConference this weekend, NASUWTmembers will commit to continuing to celebrate and defend all that is good about our world class, public education system and to resist the drive to turn over our children’s future to privateers and marketeers.

They will continue to stand up for standards through the pupil, parent and public friendly industrial action they have been taking since 2011 which has enabled them to focus on teaching and learning and defend their terms and conditions of service without disrupting the education of a single pupil.

They will continue to press for genuine dialogue with the Secretary of State to seek to address their deep concerns but if he fails to listen then there will be no choice but to move to an escalation of action to include strike action. Michael Gove holds the key to preventing this.

If he commits to genuinely engaging with the NASUWTand our colleagues in the NUT to address the issues under dispute, suspending the implementation of changes to the teachers’ pay framework which have been widely condemned, not just by teachers, and publishes a valuation of the teachers’ pension scheme to demonstrate the scale of the problem with the scheme the Coalition claims it has been seeking to address, then escalation to strike action can be avoided.

Teachers do not take strike action lightly and will deeply regret any disruption caused to pupils and parents, but the daily disruption being inflicted on children and young people and the education service by this Coalition’s education policies far exceeds the impact of any action teachers may take.

Members from across the UK are gathering in Bournemouth and their concerns about the adverse impact of the government’s reforms on children with special needs, the exploitation of supply teachers and the attacks on conditions of service feature high on the agenda.

They will be willingly giving up their Easter weekend to debate these critical issues and to seek to play their part in ensuring that there is no return to the time when the last Tory Government left office and teaching was at the bottom of the list as a career choice for graduates, teacher morale was at an all time low, pay levels had plummeted, workload was excessive and as a result, educational standards were falling.

Teachers are parents, taxpayers and members of the public. Their concerns are the concerns of ordinary working people and families. All parents and members of the public need, for the sake of our children and young people, to make this Coalition listen.

Chris Keates is General Secretary of the NASUWT, the largest teachers’ union.

PoliticsHome Newsletters

Get the inside track on what MPs and Peers are talking about. Sign up to The House's morning email for the latest insight and reaction from Parliamentarians, policy-makers and organisations.

Podcast
Engineering a Better World

The Engineering a Better World podcast series from The House magazine and the IET is back for series two! New host Jonn Elledge discusses with parliamentarians and industry experts how technology and engineering can provide policy solutions to our changing world.

NEW SERIES - Listen now

Partner content
Connecting Communities

Connecting Communities is an initiative aimed at empowering and strengthening community ties across the UK. Launched in partnership with The National Lottery, it aims to promote dialogue and support Parliamentarians working to nurture a more connected society.

Find out more