Conference Season

I really don't like Easter. It's not the holidays because after all, that is one of the few benefits of being a teacher. It's because the three major teaching unions (NUT, NASUWT and ATL) have their conferences.

Now I like unions, and I think that they have an important part to play in the life if any teacher (those who aren't members of a union are fools I'm afraid). They provide support for any teacher who finds themselves in a bit of a jam whilst at work. They will, if the case warrants it, provide legal support whose cost would be prohibitive otherwise.

So if I actually like unions, why do I dislike their conferences?

The problem is that anyone who is a member can make a speech in theory. Now I might sound undemocratic at this stage, but some people need to be prevented from talking in public. All unions have militant members, many of whom probably have a reasonable point, but the fact is that they just sound a bit pathetic and ranting.

Currently teaching has a few issues of which these are the main two:

1. Ofsted - the fear of senior management in schools is almost unbearable and the Chief Inspector, Sir Michael Wilshaw comes across as a bully and an idealist living in a fantasy world. The workload his rhetoric has produced is unsustainable and is driving people out of the profession.
2. Michael Gove - Secretary of State for Education. He is in the process (presumably because he knows that his party won't get voted back in at the next election) of radically changing the way schools work and teach the youth of the country at a frightening pace. Some of it is sensible and needs doing but much of it is lamentable, and this has been stated to him repeatedly by "experts". He ploughs on regardless.

There are others: pensions, pay freezes, attitude to learning and pupil/parental behaviour being among them.

The problem is that rather than focusing on pointing out the flaws in Wilshaw and Gove's policies, members if the various unions have cried "strike" at every given opportunity. There's a reason that this is a stupid and frankly annoying way to go from those speaking at the various conferences. The votes of no confidence are fair enough however - Gove and Wilshaw need to know just how unpopular and unwanted they are.

In the public's eyes teachers are doing a job that few would choose; on a par with the police if truth be told. Teachers do get 13 weeks of holiday each year (something the police don't get), and it's an accusation regularly levelled at teachers. So when the NUT are reported to have asked for teaching time to be limited to 20 hours per week this doesn't go down well with Joe Public as our Joe doesn't realise that classroom time is the least of a teacher's worries. The general public have no idea what goes into a lesson, and why would they? They just assume that teachers turn up and whitter on about stuff then mark a few books - end of.

What teaching currently needs is public support before a series of strikes over pay and pensions from the NUT and NASUWT who represent around 90% of teachers. By asking for what the public will perceive as less work is frankly idiotic. The fact that most teachers have little more than 20 hours per week of teaching time makes the request even more idiotic.

Teaching unions must get their act together. Most of the country find politicians abomnible, but by making silly requests they are playing into these people's hands. I have no idea if the unions have a PR department, but if they do they need replacing. It's inviting the press and public to label teachers as lazy, whinging freeloaders with too much holiday.

That's why I hate Easter.

Playing Them At Their Own Game

So all the teaching unions conferences have finished and surprisingly its been the NASUWT rather the NUT who have been making all the headlines. There has been a lot of whinging that won't win much public support, despite the fact that many of the points raised have been legitimate, the public will generally just wish that teachers would stop moaning. Hot classrooms are not going to extract much sympathy I'm afraid.

Arguably the best bit of conference season was Chris Keates' (General Secretary of NASUWT) closing speech. Having taken a leaf out of Gove's book she used the gimmick of having a cadboard cut out of the Secretary of State for Education to symbolise the fact that not a single Minister has attended any part of any conference. Keates described Gove as a teaching union's poster boy as his reign in office has led to a huge increase in membership for all three teaching unions. This is worrying for two reasons: government policy has made more teachers feel threatened but also because there are a lot of teachers who aren't union members, which is naive at best.

Keates used the opportunity to accuse Gove and his cronies (yes Wilshaw, you are one of those) of "eroding the professional status of teachers", and she is absolutely correct. Gove seems hell-bent on demoralising the profession in what he claims is a bid to raise standards. An army general doesn't instil courage and fight in their troops by telling them repeatedly that they are sub-standard and should be worked into the ground. All the Department for Education ever say is that teachers have been given more power to rid classrooms of disruptive influences and that academies offer schools and staff greater freedom to teach children without government interference.

Anyone who has had any recent experience of schools will tell you that it is still nigh-on impossible to exclude pupils, and is arguably even more difficult now since the excluding school has to pay for the excluded student's future provision from an increasingly shrinking budget. Academies, it is claimed by unions, are a step towards privatisation of education and an invitation to privateers to make a profit from schools. I think that it may be a little dramatic to suggest that private companies want to take over schools to gain profit but there is very little evidence that academy status raises standards at all, especially considering that the new academy has the same under-achieving students wandering through the doors, probably late. Academies offer most teachers worse money, worse benefits regarding sick, maternity and paternity pay as well as longer hours. Are the government really surprised that teachers are opposed to the move? Turkeys don't queue up to vote for Christmas.

The fact that no-one from the Department for Education has attended any conference shows the contempt for the unions who represent the profession, and in my view, the cowardice of politiians. Ministers are happy to sit in press conferences or typing up press releases in their comfy, air-conditioned offices that slate teachers, but are extremely reluctant to actually face them.

Strikes seem imminent - bring on the revolution!

"Segregated Schools"

It's union conference season at the moment and the ATL (Association of Teachers and lecturers) have just completed theirs in Manchester with a summing up speech from their leader Mary Bousted. She has always come across well on television but does get paid a lot of money to do so at well over £100,000 per year. I struggle, as a teacher on around £30,000 per year to take union leaders seriously as champions of teachers' causes, but they are the only people we have, so I suppose I don't have any choice.

Bousted's speech hit the now regular union buttons of having a go at politicians and Ofsted, and three cheers for that, but her speech was ultimately useless and designed to win applause rather than bring to light real issues facing teachers. [Click here to see the article]

Her speech centred around the fact that schools and classes are "segregated" on the basis of class. She went on to say that teachers are regularly blamed for the failure of children from poorer backgrounds failing to achieve their potential academically, and with this she has a point, but is it really news? This situation is frankly always going to happen for the following reasons:

1. There may be more choice when it comes to choosing a secondary school for your child, but most will choose the closest if at all possible, purely for convenience. If the closest school to you performs poorly then you will only go elsewhere if you have academic aspirations for your children, otherwise you don't really care, as long as your children attend and therefore the authorities keep off your back.
2. As a result of the above, it therefore depends upon the situation of the school and what sort of housing is in the vicinity. Teachers can't help that, no matter what statistics you throw at it as a politician. Ok, Wilshaw turned around his academy in Hackney, but only by reducing the life expectancy of his staff by forcing them to work longer hours and deal with increased stress by offering the children a safe environment compared to the estate they inhabited. That's his vision for the future of teaching though, which doesn't bode too well.
3. Those that Bousted was going on about have no aspirations at all, and haven't needed them as the state has paid their way through life by providing them with cheap housing and spending money through benefits. Again, this is not teachers' fault, but teachers bear the brunt of the criticism as students from these backgrounds enter the "family business" after their compulsory education ends. If you have the means and the will to give your children the greatest opportunity to succeed then you will travel to get your children into a supposedly better school. You regularly hear of people moving home to get into a certain catchment area, and catchment areas can add thousands on to property prices.
4. As I said in my previous post, with few jobs available and being brought up in an environment where work is not part of the equation doesn't encourage children to perform to their academic ability.

I would like to say that not all children from a certain class, the class Bousted was talking about, have zero academic aspirations, but with the lack of opportunity in the market for young people, there seems little incentive to break the social mould.

Bousted has highlighted a valid point, but this is hardly news to anyone, despite it being rarely mentioned by politicians. - I suppose that's why she spoke about the issue After all it's far easier to blame a profession who have a history of moaning but doing little of substance. The trouble is that those who are left in the profession are beginning to do something about it, with the ATL actually striking for the first time in decades towards the end of last year over pensions. The best news from the conference was that Schools Minister Nick Gibb was heckled so badly that he had to pause during his speech, three times whilst the heckles died down. I hope he felt as small as the teaching profession does every time he and his colleagues in Whitehall open their mouths.

Interesting times ahead, but please teaching unions, stop stating the obvious.

Next year's topic for debate: the exodus of teachers from the profession due to government and Ofsted policy.