Schools

Academies, religion & schools, class sizes, remodelling, testing and tables, ...

24 November: school students lead the way

School, college, and university students took to the streets on 24 November, in a show of protest to make it clear that students are not going to accept this government's attacks. The response to the call for the day of action by National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts has shocked politicians, police and student leaders even more than the size and anger of the National Demonstration on 10 November. Students have made sure that the Royal Wedding didn't force the cuts off the front pages! It is will be hard to find a school, college or workplace not talking about this action in the next days...

Teachers jobs at risk

David Cameron and Nick Clegg insist that frontline services are being protected from spending cuts. No teachers and nurses will lose their jobs. Not so! As reported in the last issue of Solidarity , thousands of teachers and other education workers who are employed by local authorities and who teach or provide support to children with special needs are facing the threat of compulsory redundancy. These jobs are linked to money held centrally by local authorities and to specific grants and funding streams. Many of these grants are ending and as local authorities are under pressure to make cuts...

School support staff: action stops cuts

Up to 2000 school support staff protested in central Nottingham on Monday 18 October in opposition to the local authority’s plans to slash their pay and conditions. Nottingham’s Labour controlled city council — a clique of un-reconstructed Blairites — attempted to change the contracts of this overwhelming women-dominated, low paid and previously poorly organised section of the workforce to term-time only contracts, resulting in pay cuts of between £3000 and £7000. The council claimed that this blatant attack was forced upon them by “legal advice” that they were breaking the Equal Pay Act —...

Schools are not safe from the cuts

If you were to take media reports at face value you would think that schools were protected from the cuts being imposed by the Coalition government. The reality is very different. While the money allocated to local authorities for distribution to school budgets seems likely to be protected from cuts, there is a whole ranges of services which are in real and imminent danger. Local councils hold some money centrally which they use to maintain support services which could not be afforded by individual schools and are not needed in equal measure by all schools. The level of need in each school is...

My life at work: "Schools are going into blind panic mode. They'll take it out on us."

Frances Streeting works as a teaching assistant in a secondary school. Tell us a bit about the work you do. I work with students who find it difficult to keep up with their learning. My role is to ensure that they can be included in mainstream class, helping them get their work done or at least achieve something. Teachers always say “if that teaching assistant wasn’t in my classroom, I wouldn’t be able to teach”, so we’re pretty central to the needs of students in school, in terms of their learning and their care. Some of the children we work with have got problems in their lives that I as an...

Tony Benn: the time to organise resistance to this government of millionaires is now!

We reject these cuts as simply malicious ideological vandalism, hitting the most vulnerable the hardest. Join us in the fight It is time to organise a broad movement of active resistance to the Con-Dem government's budget intentions. They plan the most savage spending cuts since the 1930s, which will wreck the lives of millions by devastating our jobs, pay, pensions, NHS, education, transport, postal and other services. The government claims the cuts are unavoidable because the welfare state has been too generous. This is nonsense. Ordinary people are being forced to pay for the bankers'...

Fighting the Tories' plans for schools

The opening session of Ideas for Freedom 2010 was “How do we fight the Tories’ plans for schools?”. The session was chaired by Gemma Short, a first year teacher and AWL member from Sheffield. The keynote contributions are below. Jean Lane, teaching assistant and UNISON activist in Tower Hamlets Turning schools judged as “outstanding” by Ofsted into Academies is going to take money out of the central Local Education Authorities that fund all schools in their area, put that into Academies, leaving the rest of the schools in that area impoverished. It’s going to mean a massive class divide in...

Schools: more attacks to come

There's more. As well as cutting the school rebuilding programme almost to zero, and pushing for all schools rated "outstanding" by the official inspectors, Ofsted, to become Academies (i.e. quasi-privatised), the government's moves include other threats to schools. School budgets will be cut 10%, 20%, or 25% - the government has not yet decided which - over coming years. A large part of school budgets is rigid, so this is not like cutting your household spending by 10% or so. It is much more drastic. The cuts in 1995 which sparked a mass parents' revolt - the "Fight Against Cuts in Education"...

My life at work: "schools are going into blind panic mode. They'll take it out on us"

Frances Burrows works as a teaching assistant in a comprehensive school. Tell us a bit about the work you do. My work involves working with students who find it difficult to keep up with their learning. My role is to ensure that they can be included in mainstream class, helping them get their work done or at least achieve something. Teachers always say “if that teaching assistant wasn't in my classroom, I wouldn't be able to teach”, so we're pretty central to the needs of students in school, both in terms of their learning and their care. Some of the children we work with have got problems in...

Government scraps school rebuilding

All new school building schemes have been scrapped by Tory education secretary Michael Gove in a move to save billions of pounds. New Labour’s “Building School for the Future” (BSF) initiative promised a total of £55 billion over twenty years to replace a disintegrating building stock. Now, only around half of the 1421 schools in line for new investment will receive necessary funding. These schools had already secured or received the money before the general election. Gove’s decision to scrap new building schemes can only mean one thing: that a large bulk of future generations of children will...

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