Schools

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

Gove moves against teaching unions

In December, the government announced proposals for changing teachers’ pay arrangements. The plan is to tear up national pay scales and move to a system of individualised pay. The current system includes national pay scales, though no right to collectively bargain on pay rates or conditions. The national rates must apply to all state schools, except academies and free schools which can adopt their own models. This latest attack is partially a response to the fact that the vast majority of academies have agreed to follow the national system and showed no appetite for developing their own scales...

School cuts

Struggling schools face a new cut of £1 billion, as the Tories attempt to claw back an overspend in its budget for expanding the Academies programme. Academy conversions have accelerated dramatically since the Coalition came to power, with an increase of over 1,000%. A special fund was set up to encourage schools to sever their ties to local authorities and convert to Academies, but due to the overspend, local authority schools are effectively being punished for not converting by having their budgets raided to plug the gap. Education Secretary Michael Gove is a belligerent proponent of the...

Teachers' rank-and-file conference

This Saturday December 8th the network of NUT branches (known as divisions or associations) which was established in response to the retreat in the pensions struggle earlier in the year will hold its second national conference in Leicester. Local Associations for National Action (LANAC) emerged in March last year after the NUT National Executive voted to call off a planned national strike due to take place on March 28th despite 73% of members voting for the strike in a union survey. As feared by the activists and branches that launched the network, that was the end of pensions action for the...

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...

Joint action fights union busting in schools

The joint action by the two biggest teacher unions is creating some sharp battles between classroom teachers and their immediate bosses across the country. For the most part, it seems that workers are winning back some control over their own workplaces and challenging the endless expansion of their workload demands. Probably the most common success is that limits are being put on the number of formal observations of lessons to which teachers are subjected. Union groups have also drawn a line under excessive planning, meetings and reports. Schools in several areas have cancelled mock...

Threat of school strikes forces climbdown

As reported in Solidarity 260 (10 October 2012), teachers at Bishop Challoner school in East London voted to strike in opposition to a threat from the headteacher to impose a “mock” Ofsted inspection. Bishop Challoner teachers had previously voted not to cooperate with or participate in any such inspection or observation, as part of the ongoing industrial action by the NUT and NASUWT teaching unions. Following the strike vote, a series of one-sided “negotiations” followed, consisting of the head sending out a series of increasingly embarrassed emails in which what had initially been presented...

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...

Abolish school exams!

My experience with a school system which has no (or almost no) public exams — in Queensland, Australia — encourages me in the view that Patrick Yarker ( Solidarity 257) is right to oppose school exams. In Queensland you can leave school in year 10, with a statement from the school, based on continuous assessment, of what you’ve learned, or you can continue to year 12. At the end of year 12 students are graded for admission to universities on the basis of continuous assessment within schools. The one public exam, the Queensland Core Skills test, is used not to grade individuals, but to...

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