Schools

There have been strikes against cuts in schools in Liège and other areas of French-speaking Belgium since 10 May, and they're due to restart on 24 August, when schools end their summer holidays (which started 4 July).

The Times Educational Supplement reported that over a quarter of all schools closed early during the week beginning Monday 22 June. Many closed altogether. I teach at a large secondary in London and by the afternoon of days towards the end of the week classrooms were at 30-35ºC. No one was learning anything. And yet we also got off lightly. The previous hot week hit at half-term. This current spell impacted after Years 11 and 13 had left and two other year groups were on work experience. The school was much less rammed than it could have been. Kids and staff who suffered from the heat could be...

Dyonissis Zoes, a school teacher in Liège, Belgium, talked to Solidarity. Pic: Demonstrators in Brussels, 14 June. School teachers in and around Liège, in Belgium, have been striking for weeks now against government cuts, and will continue to strike until the term ends on 4 July. These cuts have been coming for two years, but now the two ministers in charge are saying they want to discuss and they're asking for a truce. It shows that if we organise together, they have to listen. On 23 April, the government sent documents to the headmasters and directors of school on implementing the cuts,...

I agree with David Axon’s articles on “unruly schools”, and want to add one further idea. Too often, “behaviour management” carries an assumption that the teachers are the “management” and the students the “behaviour”. Teachers do not have “behaviour”, only students do. Students are by definition the “managed”, not “managers”. I do not mean that “better behaved” students should be made bailiffs to “manage” the rest. My younger daughter, in one of her secondary schools, was, because considered “well-behaved”, compelled to carry round the class behaviour report-card, to be marked with each...

The TUC has threatened its fourth largest union, the National Education Union (NEU), with what they call “a partial suspension” from the organisation. The ruling made by General Secretary Paul Nowak follows an investigation into an alleged breach of rules by the NEU. It is the latest development in a long-running dispute about the increasing numbers of school support staff opting to join the NEU and the negative reaction to this of Unison, GMB, and Unite, which are the only unions officially recognised for the purposes of bargaining on the NJC for support staff. Since the creation of the NEU...

The latest addition to the Reimagining Education series published by the Socialist Educational Association is After the Review: Reimagining Curriculum and Assessment, edited by Jane Coles. I recommend it. To fulfil its manifesto commitment, the government set up the Curriculum and Assessment Review (CAR) in 2024. The previous review of England’s National Curriculum ran from 2011 until 2014 and implemented Gove’s “reforms”. The CAR looked to modernise and broaden the curriculum and judge the testing system’s efficacy. It considered in particular the “attainment gap” between richer children and...

Following David Axon’s excellent series on unruly schools, here is a consideration of some films on the topic. One of the best known, although now rather dated, is Blackboard Jungle, based on the novel by Evan Hunter (Richard Brooks, 1954).

The recent trend towards more authoritarianism in schools has been accelerated by the approach of many multi-academy trusts (MATs). Child psychologist Naomi Fisher writes regularly about the ways in which the drive for compliance and an appearance of learning in some of these MATs are harmful to children: “I visited a school recently which had posters with SLANT [Sit up, Listen, Ask and answer questions, Nod, Track the speaker] on their walls. I asked about it. The teacher was casual. ‘It’s just behaviours to help their learning’ he said. That’s what the internet says too. Behaviours to help...

The Nasuwt and NEU are now striking together at St Cuthberts High School in Rochdale. Both unions are striking Tuesday to Thursday every week, both before and after the coming half term. The dispute is about a restructure imposed on the school by the St Teresa of Calcutta Multi-Academy Trust (STOC). Whilst “official measures” of school performance don’t always measure the right things, the school was improving on all such measures prior to being taken over by STOC (suspensions down, attendance up, inspection outcomes improving, and GCSE results rising). All of those have worsened since STOC...

Two previous articles looked at the policy passed at the National Education Union (NEU) conference, taking that union closer to the approach of the Nasuwt, a union that has recently organised a number of strikes focusing on student behaviour. It looked back at the experience of the 1985 Poundswick dispute, warning that striking against “student behaviour” can very easily develop in reactionary directions. The word “behaviour” covers a lot of things - from students at Bacup sent to isolation for wearing stickers supporting striking teachers, to year elevens at the Michaela School in detention...