Children are once again being put last by adults with a sinister agenda
Source - Daily Telegraph - 28/04/23
With so much money and attention lavished on the NHS over the past 13 years of Conservative rule, there is little doubt that education has been comparatively neglected – at least in terms of public spending. Health spending will have increased by 40 per cent since the Conservatives took office in 2010, while spending on education has risen by just 3 per cent, according to a tentative analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
As the think tank pointed out when it published the figures 18 months ago, spending so much on healthcare and relatively little on education is not entirely consistent with the Government’s “levelling up” agenda. Last year’s Autumn Statement did change the situation somewhat, allowing for an extra £4.6 billion spending on schools, but there has long been a sense that the Department for Education is the poor relation in Whitehall, as the Conservatives have thrown endless pots of taxpayers’ cash at their quest to become the “party of the NHS”.
Both my mother’s parents were teachers, my uncle was a headteacher, and I have two sisters-in-law and a brother-in-law who all teach. So I fully appreciate the value of a good teacher – not least as I also have three children in years 5, 8 and 9. Only last week I was poring over my old school reports with my eldest daughter, slightly welling up as I acknowledged that, if it hadn’t been for my English teacher, Mrs Reid, I would probably not be writing this column.
Some teachers are truly excellent and surely deserve to be much better rewarded. But if the pandemic taught parents anything, it is that there is a huge gulf between those teachers who really do have the power to transform lives, and those who used Covid as an excuse to do very little; we saw a division between those who provided the best online learning they could and those who largely left the work to parents, believing their own well-being trumped that of the children in their care.
Which brings us to the teaching unions and why the latest strike action is so outrageous. If it weren’t bad enough that organisations like the National Education Union (NEU) opposed the reopening of schools during lockdown, they are now damaging the life chances of another cohort of pupils with this series of disproportionate walkouts.
Having gone on strike on Thursday, NEU members will be absent from classrooms in England again next Tuesday – the fourth and fifth days of national strikes this year. As with the rail unions calling for action on the day of the FA Cup final, Epsom Derby and Eurovision, the timing couldn’t be more cynical.
Pupils about to sit their GCSE and A-level exams are missing crucial days of last-minute learning while their striking teachers attend rallies. Kevin Courtney, joint general secretary of the NEU, spent much of Thursday on the airwaves insisting that “revision provision” had been put in place – but a great many students appear to have simply been left to their own devices (both figuratively and literally).
While they profess to be protesting against low pay and staff retention, it sometimes looks as though they are more concerned with overthrowing capitalism. Indeed, as Jonathan Gullis wrote in these pages yesterday, the NEU’s assistant general secretary has co-authored a book, Lessons in Organising, in which issues of pay and workload are downgraded to “narrow questions”. The book lifts the lid on what some trade unionists really want: to “explicitly confront the corrosive nature of neoliberal ideology”.
It is eerily reminiscent of Corbynista comrade Susan Michie, who was part of “Independent Sage” during Covid. She was ostensibly a member of that pro-lockdown panel of self-appointed experts as a professor of health psychology, but used the pandemic to advocate the distribution of wealth “more equally”. She told a podcast in February 2021: “People talk about going back to normal. And I’m not the first to say it’s normal that got us into this situation.”
If the unions embrace such an attitude, will students ever get back to their “normal” education? Has there been proper scrutiny of the union leaders who claim to represent thousands of ordinary, caring teachers? And do teachers know that they might be pawns in a bigger ideological play? (Thirty mark questions, show your reasoning, you may want to cite examples from the text.)
Perhaps the only essay question should be whether teachers are really more important than their pupils. Given what children have gone through in recent years, they surely deserve better than industrial action led by a re-emerging professional class of ideological trade unionists. Some of the leading ones today are not really representatives of their members, but proud class warriors.
In teaching, far from putting pupils first, unions such as the NEU have often opposed reforms that would vastly improve schools. Take the backlash against what Michael Gove did as education secretary, which, despite what the militants would have you believe, helped to raise standards significantly in classrooms.
In 2012, Mary Bousted, the NEU’s other joint general secretary, then at the helm of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, railed against phonics checks, arguing they could “undermine rather than benefit children’s progress and development”. Five years later, the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study found that students aged nine and 10 had improved their reading scores.
In 2019, a report on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, known as TIMSS, found that “the trend in England’s year 5 mathematics score is one of improvement over time, from significantly below the TIMSS centrepoint in 1995 to significantly above in 2019”.
The unions also opposed academisation, presumably because it cuts out the local authority (and the national pay bargaining that goes with it) and gives heads and trustees more autonomy beyond their control.
We now have 8,311 academies, up from just 203 in 2010. And there is growing evidence that multi-academy trusts not only turn schools around more quickly (new leadership has been installed in nearly 1,000 failing schools) but are also more financially efficient.
More rigorous exams, with course work cut back, modules scrapped and end-of-course tests restored, have driven up standards along with a more robust curriculum, featuring times tables, more Shakespeare and Britain’s island story at the heart of history lessons. It may be that none of this is in the interests of unions, but it certainly benefits students.
We simply cannot allow this culture of excellence to be trashed by strike-addicted activists in dire need of a lesson in proportionality.
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