Education

Q) Could you tell us about the anti-cuts campaigning you're involved in at your workplace? My college is being cut by £2.5 million - £2 million from adult and £550k from 16-18 provision. This is a 10% cut, and as well as threatening significant job losses, is going to critically damage our capacity to provide decent education for our community. The branch has voted unanimously to ballot for strike action in the event of compulsory redundancies. I’m Branch Secretary of the UCU at our college where the local MP is David Lammy, Minister for Higher Education. He embodies the complete failure of...

On Tuesday the 15th of December, a meeting of London UCU activists and some students met in KCL. The meeting was hosted by KCL UCU Branch, and politically dominated by the SWP - i.e. a number of SWP full-timers were in attendance, and the meeting was chaired by an SWP student from KCL. The teachers had a lot to talk about. Cuts are happening across campuses in London, and the UCU is mobilising to meet the attacks head-on. Unfortunately, the mobilisation is happening piecemeal, branch-by-branch. The UCU executive has a strategy of dealing with cuts on each campus individually, rather than...

The explosion of spontaneous protests by temporary teachers that swept across Italy at the beginning of September has continued following the opening of the school term on the 14th. Now the extent of the drastic cuts in teachers, technical and admin staff etc. has become clear to those still fortunate to find themselves in a job. This year 65,000 jobs were scheduled to be cut. There are more cuts to come in 2010. Those affected are part of the 300,000-strong temporary workforce in education. All types of public sector schools find themselves with a signicant increase in class sizes and reduced...

These cuts fall in line with a tide of xenophobic government reforms around ESOL provision; part of the big fuzzy picture of “integration” that they like to contradict. Here’s a struggle to be had out in the midst of tightening immigration controls, rising popularity of the extreme racist-right and let’s not forgot the big “excuse”, this bastard recession. But the compulsory redundancies at Tower Hamlets College were not directly implemented by local government, but they were carried out by the college principal in the interest of budget and “performance”. At the very end of term all teachers...

Jan Ducky was coming to enrol on the Access to Higher Education — social science and humanities. Jan is from the Czech Republic and is currently working as a hospital cleaner part time. He decided not to cross the picket line and instead joined the protest. Why did you decide not to cross the picket line? Because of my solidarity to the teachers. Because education is the most important thing. I attended some meetings in SOAS, “Ideas for Freedom”, about strikes, unions, things like that. I heard some good ideas, and some unrealistic ones. But I decided that I want to support people, struggling...

While the numbers of workers across the world thrown on the scrapheap of global capitalism’s current crisis continues to rise, and those responsible sing along with their house trained professional “canaries” about “green shoots” of recovery, spasms of defiance and resistance continue to be seen everywhere. The latest in Italy? Following a successful 14 month occupation and work-in by 240 workers in a machine-tool plant outside Milan against closure and removal of the machinery, teachers are occupying education offices in protest against cuts of 65,000 teaching, ancillary and admin jobs. The...

Campaigners in Lewisham, south London, are organising to prevent a planned super-trust involving Deptford Green and Addeys and Standhope schools, Crossways Sixth Form and Goldsmiths University. The plans have gone out to initial consultation, ending 21 July, with a view to a fuller consultation in September. Campaigners have held a well-attended public meeting and are leafleting outside schools. They oppose the Trust plan because it could involve private “partners” in the running of schools. The Trust would become the employer of teachers, not the council, and could set its own admissions...

According to the Teacher Development Agency (a quango overseeing teacher recruitment and training), over 50% of all newly qualified teachers will have left the job within three years. And this does not reveal the real drop-out rate from teacher-training. Substantial numbers leave before completing their courses, and yet more finish training and then decide against a career in teaching. How do the government’s latest education proposals propose to deal with this? Bizarrely, they have decided to make it even more difficult to retain teachers and even more likely that people will decide to leave...

In Lewisham this week the consultation with governing bodies in two schools, one sixth form college and Goldsmiths College opened to decide whether the proposal to set up a Trust across all four institutions should go ahead. In this round governors will decide whether to proceed with a full consulation in September. If they are successful, Depford Green, Addeys and Standhope, Crossways Sixth Form Goldsmiths will be governed by a single appointed governing body and be taken out of local authority control. The meeting at Goldsmiths was a promising start to what will be a strategic battle in...

Friday 12 June saw hundreds of English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) students, staff and supporters march in East London in protest at major cuts to ESOL announced at Tower Hamlets College. The march followed a week of action since the cuts were announced on 5 June, including an unofficial walkout on 8 June, a lobby of the principal on 9 June (with staff joined by 50 students who pushed past security after being denied entry for having the wrong pass), protests at the college's awards ceremony and joint UCU and Unison meetings on 12 June proposing a vote of no confidence in newly...