Schools

The threat of strikes by teachers in seven secondary schools in Lewisham, south London, has forced school managers to withdraw an unfair pay policy. The NUT’s national dispute on pay, workload, and pensions, provides a framework for union groups at school or borough level to escalate action in order to “secure an acceptable pay policy”, and the victory in Lewisham shows that, by standing firm, teachers can force concessions from local managements. Schools in Lewisham had wanted to peg teachers’ pay to Ofsted grading of lessons, which the NUT described as “arbitrary and unfair”. Union activists...

Present-day schools teach failure more than they teach anything else. They are inefficient at teaching knowledge. A recent survey found that MPs and business bosses, despite mostly having had many years of schooling, can’t work out the probability of getting a head and a tail when a coin is tossed twice; and we all know that many of them cannot write adequate English. Yet, by the time they have finished school, most young people will have had one big idea drummed into them: that they are failures. Not just that they have failed at something. We all often fail at things. Schools drum into...

The Lib Dems were bound to seek to put distance between themselves and their Tory coalition masters as the general election in May 2015 approaches. Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg has chosen to make the sharpest differentiation so far on Tory schools policy. Tory education minister Michael Gove is the least popular minister in general opinion polls, and (according to the ConservativeHome website) by far the most popular among Tories. He wants to turn schools into a sort of market system, rather as the Tories also want to turn health care into a market system. In Gove’s education market, the...

Many young women attending secondary school will be aware of the almost fanatically zealous way schools pursue a particular aspect of the uniform policy: namely the length of the school skirt. Schools routinely rebuke pupils for any length deemed too short, remind us to check our skirts before going into assembly, and occasionally deliver an admonitory spiel with a threat of some form of sanction following. Usually this is done under the pretext that “male staff will feel uncomfortable” or even sometimes about how members of the general public feel about our attire. A cursory examination...

A strike bulletin written by AWL teachers. Click here to download the PDF.

Friday, April 2 Arrive at the NUT Conference in Brighton expecting a lively and constructive weekend. Teachers are deeply angry about the Green Paper proposals for performance related pay. Yet it is hard to think about anything but the unfolding crisis in Kosova. The previous week I had been to an involved discussion on the issue. This conflict is not reducible to the well-worn slogans - 'the main enemy is at home', 'stop the war', etc. Politics starts immediately with a Socialist Teachers Alliance (STA) meeting. The main issue is, rightly, the Green Paper, but I am approached by some comrades...

In 1870, when the Elementary Education Act paved the way for universal state education in Britain, the population was 27.5 million. Over half of these people lived in industrial towns or cities. Over a quarter of them lived in London. Acts of Parliament had restricted work for children and new technology like the threshing machine had industrialised farming. Yet Michael Gove claims that the school day is based on a Britain of agricultural production, with holidays to allow children to help on the farm. Perhaps Gove thinks that working-class children in London used to rush home from school to...

Bulletins produced by Workers' Liberty education workers for the National Union of Teachers conference 2013. Click here to download the main conference bulletin. Click here to download the bulletin for Sunday 31 March. Click here to download the bulletin for Monday 1 April.

Education Secretary Michael Gove is to scrap his proposals to replace some GCSE exams with a new English Baccalaureate Certificate (EBC). Gove’s initiative was the inevitable result of his “back to basics” approach to education; seeking a reputation as a reformer (and the support of the Tory right wing) he has hit the education sector repeatedly — undermining terms and conditions, reducing pensions and introducing the divisive and discriminatory Academy Phase Two programme. This humiliating change in policy is doubly ironic. Firstly, the majority of the critical committee were Conservative MPs...

On the day of the June 1987 General Election journalist Peter Wilby, then education editor of the Independent, predicted that “The return of a Conservative government… will mean the break-up of the state education system which has existed since 1944”. It has taken twenty-five years, but it looks as if Wilby will see his prediction come true. Education Secretary Michael Gove’s war aim is now clear. In one electoral term he will fragment the education system and parcel it out amongst academy sponsors (and supporters of free schools) so that a future Labour government would baulk at restoring a...