Workers' Liberty

As British teachers are mobilising for a historic strike, their French counterparts are engaged in a bitter struggle of their own, in the face of a ferocious government attack and a scandalously timid

The NUT National Executive met today to consider the results of our ballot for one day strike action on pay. 75.2% of members voted in favour of action on a turnout of 32%.

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire W. B. Yeats

It’s very simple. We want to see social change in the world in which we live. We want to see this social change because we are human beings who have ideas. We think, we talk, we discuss, and when we’re done thinking and talking and discussing, well then, we feel that these things are vacuous unless we then act on the principle that we think, talk and discuss about. This is as much a part of a university education as anything else. - - Jack Weinberg, Berkeley Free Speech Campaigner

Below is an extract from a Parliamentary discussion about compulsory sex education.

Over 1000 people demonstrated in Hackney in opposition to proposed cuts in English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) courses on April 27th, with marches from Islington, Tower Hamlets and Hackney boroughs converging outside Hackney Town Hall.

Read the articles online here.

From Workers' Liberty Teachers NUT conference bulletin 2007
Heard the one about how the government are going to scrap SATs?

From Workers' Liberty Teachers NUT conference bulletin 2007
Teachers at Colonel Frank Seely, following more than a year of campaigning and action by the NUT, have finally got their just desserts.

From Workers' Liberty Teachers NUT conference bulletin 2007
Since the successful national ballot on the NUT’s guidelines on workload we have heard very little about the issue as a continuing campaign and yet it must have been clear to all involved that just voting to support guidelines wasn’t going to reduce workload.

From Workers' Liberty Teachers NUT conference bulletin 2007
Those of you who have not been to NUT Annual Conference for a few years may find the experience a very odd one.

From Workers' Liberty Teachers NUT conference bulletin 2007
Support Staff at Central Foundation Girls’ School in East London won a dispute over redundancies just before the Easter holidays began.

From Workers' Liberty Teachers NUT conference bulletin, April 2007
After John Illingworth’s powerful appeal last year for the Union to take action to relieve workload-induced teacher stress you would have thought that even our lethargic, sleep-walking executive majority would have been stung into action.

The Guardian recently published an edited version of a letter from a number of Socialist Teachers’ Association activists. They had responded to new advice issued by the DfES about school uniform.

By Liam Conway

On Thursday 22 June the Labour Party unveiled its a policy document on education: Diversity and Excellence. The report recommends the preservation of grant maintained schools (renaming them “foundation” schools), thus perpetuating the two tier-system of education the Tories introduced with their education reforms. The same document says does not recommend any increase in funds for education. This is, as one old-style Labourite, Roy Hattersley, has said, nothing short of a “repudiation of the principle of comprehensive education”. (See next page).

The News has been full of stories today about the extent of personal debt in Britain. In one report from Manchester on News 24 there was an interview with a former Headteacher who has now been funded by the Financial Services Authority to go into schools and give lessons in Personal Finance. That is good perhaps the kids could then explain it to their parents. What is unlikely is that as part of these lessons the role of the Government in encouraging the level of burgeoning personal debt will be explained - not least as the result of the scrapping of Student Grants, and their replacement by loans, and the introduction of top-up fees.

The struggle in Oaxaca was one of high points of workers struggle anywhere in the world last year. Now the movement of teachers and others in APPO is facing savage repression. We need to tell the story of the Oaxacan commune and make practical solidarity with workers under attack. (For an eyewitness account of the struggle on this website click here.)

By David Broder

The demand for free education is often linked to the assertion that “education is a right, not a privilege”. The right of access to education for all represents a great social conquest for the working-class, a gain perhaps even akin to healthcare. That right must be defended. But it would be short-sighted to think that the education system represented everything we want, or was not in its own way alienating, a weapon in the armoury of bourgeois ideology designed to serve the needs of capital.

A campaign has been launched to defend Robin Sivapalan, a London classroom assistant suspended for organising an anti-Blair protest at his school. Please sign the following statement of support for Robin.

Workers' Liberty NUT Bulletin

NUT policies go well beyond the defence of our members pay and working conditions. In particular the Union has for decades been committed to free state comprehensive schools for all and opposed to selection, privilege and social division in education. Currently we want to see the end of imposed national testing, league tables and targets because of the damage they do to children and young people. As part of the wider trade union movement the NUT supports a Trade Union Freedom Bill in the UK and workers rights to organise freely across the world.

When John Illingworth received a standing ovation at this year’s conference following his emotional appeal for the Union to take action to relieve workload induced teacher stress you would have thought that even our lethargic, sleep-walking executive would have been stung into action.

Increasingly the NASUWT takes on the appearance of a bosses union. Desperate for a place at the negotiating table the NASUWT now appear to have forgotten that the core task of a trade union is to defend the interests of members in the workplace. The workforce remodelling agreement is at the root of this change of direction.

Over a million people struck to defend pensions on March 28th. Across the country successful pickets and demonstrations showed the potential of union power.
In Nottingham over 1,000 marched through the streets to a rally in the city. Schools, libraries, museums, car parks, refuse collection and much more was severely disrupted. 207 schools closed, the largest number for any county in the East Midlands. There were lively pickets at a number of locations across the county.

The new Ofsted inspection process with its focus on so-called self-evaluation has generated panic in leadership teams everywhere.
Desperate to avoid the labels “notice to improve” or “special measures” headteachers have introduced round the clock Ofsted style monitoring of teachers.

I have now endured fourteen inspections of varying kinds - HMI, monitoring visits, Ofsted etc etc etc.
You would think with such experience that I would be aware of what an inspection involves.
But it would be fair to say that my fourteen inspections have taught me to expect nothing of certainty - so much depends on who actually arrives at the school gates. Yes you can know the system and procedures but what the inspectors are going to have a particular “bee in their bonnet” about is the luck of the draw.

Without the NUT hundreds of teachers across England and Wales would have been worse off as a result of the introduction of TLRs, and the problem is not just financial. Many teachers have faced the double whammy of cuts in pay and increases in workload.

Comprehensive Education, despite its overwhelming popularity amongst voters, is in mortal danger from the proposals in the Government’s Education Bill passed in the House of Commons only with the support of the Tories. The Bill will hand control of state education over to private sponsors with little or no experience of running schools.

THE Blair government’s obsession with “vocational education” — which is actually just training for the McJobs that the working-class kids who take it will have to get when they leave college — took an entertaining new turn recently when Britain was announced as the host of the 2011 ‘World Skills Games.’