Schools

One recent Wednesday, a planned lesson in which my year 9 class would have been spotting the persuasive techniques in a past editorial of Solidarity had to be postponed when I was told at very short notice that I had to attend a meeting of a group called PiXL. PiXL is a so-called not-for-profit educational consultancy organisation based around its guru-type leader, Sir John Rowling, a former headteacher with links to the Emmanuel Schools Foundation, whose academies got into trouble a few years ago for teaching creationism in science lessons. PiXL is dedicated to helping the schools in its...

My experience with a school system which has no (or almost no) public exams — in Queensland, Australia — encourages me in the view that Patrick Yarker ( Solidarity 257) is right to oppose school exams. In Queensland you can leave school in year 10, with a statement from the school, based on continuous assessment, of what you’ve learned, or you can continue to year 12. At the end of year 12 students are graded for admission to universities on the basis of continuous assessment within schools. The one public exam, the Queensland Core Skills test, is used not to grade individuals, but to...

The government plans to replace GCSEs with a new qualification, the English baccalaureate, which will put the focus on end-of-year examinations. Pat Yarker discusses the history of school exams, and how they have been used. End-of-school exams for all, like mass compulsory education, arrived fairly recently in England. The situation before 1945 was different, but for two decades or so after that date most working-class pupils were prevented from sitting public exams. Denied access not only to fee-paying schools but also to the grammar schools Labour had established, they could not take the O...

Last Friday (24 August) a teacher from south east London, a member of Workers' Liberty, woke up feeling very miserable indeed. She’d been slaving her guts out over a year and a half to make sure that her English class achieved C grades in their GCSE. This is a longer version of this article than in the printed paper. Due to Education Secretary Michael Gove that didn’t happen, most of them ostensibly failed (a D no longer guarantees you a place in further education). So, after an obligatory mope, she contacted local union executive member and suggested a demonstration outside the DFE. He...

According to the BBC (26 June 2012) a number of Ofsted inspectors have no teaching experience whatsoever.

As an ex-journalist, Tory education minister Michael Gove knows how to use the press to further his own agenda. A timely leak from his department to the Daily Mail (20 June) flagged up Gove’s intention to replace GCSE exams taken by most students at 16 (and brought in by the Tories thirty years ago) with a system based on the previous model: O-Levels and CSEs. There was much excitement among Tories who rushed to equate O-Levels with “academic rigour” because the exam was designed to fail four out of five members of the school population. Some commentators lamented the damage caused by the...

The Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child (SPUC) and East London Mosque have launched phase two of their anti-SRE (sex and relationship education) campaign in Tower Hamlets. Following a public campaign against schools using the Channel Four resource Living and Growing, a DVD that is accused of “priming” children for sex because it shows a brief animation of sexual intercourse, a petition has been launched to ban the programme of study many schools replaced Living and Growing with The Christopher Winter Project. This too has been termed “sexually explicit”, by which they must mean...

An industrial bulletin by and for education workers in the London borough of Tower Hamlets. Click here to download PDF.

Click here to download as pdf a briefing on the struggle to limit teachers' workload produced for the Local Associations conference in Liverpool on 16 June 2012.

Joint strikes of support staff and teachers, involving Unison and National Union of Teachers (NUT) members, at Central Foundation Girls School in East London, have forced school management to back down on plans for pay cuts and job losses, and have won victories on teachers’ workload, observations and sickness policy. Below, a trade union activist in the school explains how the battle was won. From the moment that both Unison and NUT began their ballots, all meetings, bulletins and decisions were joint. No single action took place unless both unions were in it together. This ensured that...