Religion and schools

Religion and schools

GCSEs: a pointless misery

Every year, the media report on GCSE and A-level results and how they compare to previous years. Then they forget about until the next August. For students and school workers, however, GCSEs are a constant source of bewildering misery. This year, GCSE results have dropped by 2.1%: the biggest fall since the qualifications were introduced. One reason may be changes in exam format and the overloading of content that have happened in some subjects. Another could be the pressure put on school workers and pupils by the amount of funding per pupil dropping, teacher shortages, and accountability...

Education, not exam factories!

Between 16 May and 29 June, students in Britain’s schools will write around 16 million exam papers. A scurry of marking will then, in August, produce a stream of gradings, which will be used to exert market-type discipline on students, teachers, and schools. Notionally exams are a way to test knowledge and skills. Exams which really do that, and certify people as competent to be surgeons or surveyors, make sense. But the school exams are only the basis for a vast sorting exercise. Some students will get good enough grades in GCSE to study A level subjects which will get them into “good”...

A failed attempt to silence

On Wednesday 4 May the government sacked Natasha Devon from her unpaid post as mental health champion for schools. Evidently it concluded that the parents protest the day before against excessive testing, when thousands kept Year 2 children off school, showed that Devon was having too much effect. Devon describes herself as a bleeding heart liberal leftie, but the government appointed her in August 2015 to show it was doing something about mental health. Devon continued to speak out. This government and the coalition before them have engineered a social climate where it's really difficult for...

Parents protest at imposed testing

On Tuesday 3 May, thousands of parents, organised by the Let Kids be Kids campaign, kept their seven year old children from school to protest at the government-imposed SATS tests. Preparation for those tests, they say, squeezes out creative learning and makes children anxious. “What if I fail?” A box-ticking, hurdle-jumping structure to education is common to capitalist education systems. England’s obsession with testing, and testing, and testing again is extreme. It indoctrinates young children into thinking “I’m a level 3” or “my brother is a level 4”. Even conservatives are being forced to...

Capitalism vs human life

Capitalism has created life-enhancing possibilities. It has even realised some of them. My older daughter has epilepsy. In pre-capitalist times, if she’d had medication at all, it would have had no, or harmful, effects, and the seizures would probably have become more severe until they disabled and killed her. Today, she has been able to end the seizures with just a few pills, without side-effects. Not only in Britain, but in many poorer countries too, almost everyone learns to read and write, almost everyone has easy access to music and visual arts, a sizeable proportion can study at...

Workers' Liberty Teachers bulletin and fringe meetings at NUT conference 2014

You can download the PDF here . Contents include: Members remain solid for action but need a strategy than can win Madness from Planet Gove! GS and DGS elections: there is an alternative! School wars on the side of a bus In support of Ukrainian self-determination Whistleblowers should be protected, not hounded! Bob Crow - a fighter for our class! Swing to the LANAC left in the NUT executive elections George Orwell and Leon Trotsky - working class heroes standing up for truth Introducing the Nottingham Free School: Why not take a closer look inside? NEC election campaigning to win! Expelled...

CBI calls for end to “exam factories”

The CBI has attacked the current regime of testing children, calling some secondary schools “exam factories”. This, coming from the high table of the British bourgeoisie, highlights the absurdity of over-examining school pupils. Naturally, the reasons given by the CBI were terrible: “Qualifications are important, but we also need people who have self-discipline and serve customers well”, said the CBI director general, adding that measuring attainment by criteria beyond test scores might boost economic growth! As socialists we measure the quality of education not by its effect on profits or by...

Teachers' action escalates to strike

Teachers at Bishop Challoner school in East London have voted to strike against increasing inspections and observations after their headteacher threatened to hold a mock OFSTED inspection. NUT and NASUWT members already voted unanimously not to cooperate with any mock inspection, as part of their unions’ industrial action against excessive workload. The headteacher performed a limited climbdown, saying that although extra lesson observations would take place, they would not constitute a full mock inspection. Workers were not satisfied by this guarantee, however, and voted by 50-4 to escalate...

Educational achievement

One recent Wednesday, a planned lesson in which my year 9 class would have been spotting the persuasive techniques in a past editorial of Solidarity had to be postponed when I was told at very short notice that I had to attend a meeting of a group called PiXL. PiXL is a so-called not-for-profit educational consultancy organisation based around its guru-type leader, Sir John Rowling, a former headteacher with links to the Emmanuel Schools Foundation, whose academies got into trouble a few years ago for teaching creationism in science lessons. PiXL is dedicated to helping the schools in its...

NUT votes to boycott SATs

This year’s National Union of Teachers conference, held over the Easter weekend, voted unanimously to boycott SATs in the next academic year if the government fails to recognise the damage the tests are doing to our primary pupils. Conference called for the tests to be scrapped. The tests have little educational importance — they have been exposed as a form of government control. Published league tables are used as sticks to beat teachers with, and students are left with a barren curriculum that focuses heavily on numeracy and literacy rather than a wide spectrum of topics. Students are left...

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