Schools

New head teachers in a school always want to stamp their authority by making a few changes. The new head at Central Foundation Girls School, in Bow, East London, went a few steps too far. Under her “leadership”, the sickness policy changed to trigger procedures against absentee staff after four days (previously eleven). Support staff became subject to a new evaluation process. Observations of teachers increased. Data entry went through the roof. Not surprisingly, morale hit rock bottom. This was the backdrop to the announcement, in December 2011, of a restructure, affecting both teachers and...

Picket lines at Central Foundation Girls School in east London, where workers are striking against job losses, pay cuts and increases to workload, were well attended on Friday 11 May (the most recent day of action). The increasingly nervy and confrontational headteacher repeatedly threatened to call the police because there were more than six people on the picket. The action has already forced the school management into concessions, and it has now conceded on both job losses and pay cuts, which primarily effected support staff (i.e. Unison members). Despite accepting management’s concessions...

24 free schools have opened in the UK and many more are planned to open next September. Free Schools, after academies, are the second bow in the government’s plans to privatise education, under the guises of giving parents greater “choice”. Further expansion will have extremely damaging consequences for comprehensive state education. So far there has been less resistance to free schools then academies. This is partly because you cannot have a fight from within in a school that doesn’t exist. The free schools agenda offers a certain style of education aimed at niche audiences, with no public...

Children's Minister Sarah Teather has announced changes to provision for children with special needs. Despite her claim that this will create 'a more integrated and less bureaucratic system', the plans amount to a significant attack on support for the most needy kids, perhaps a new low even for this government's austerity drive. Government plans include giving parents a 'personal budget' for their children. Rather than being able to expect the support and services that our kids need, parents will need to 'shop around' for services, putting cost rather than need at the centre of decision-making...

An accumulation of small cuts means that the number of teachers in England's state schools - which had been rising for a decade - fell by 10,000 in the year to November 2011. The BBC (25 April) reports that an official workforce survey showed 2% fewer teachers. The number of teaching assistants is still rising. It has almost trebled since 2000, and there is now one teaching assistant for every two teachers. The hidden story there is that often teaching assistants, with much lower pay than teachers and less training, are being pushed into taking classes previously taught by qualified teachers...

Nottingham teachers struck for a second day on 17 March in their campaign of industrial action against the Local Authority. Inspired by Michael Gove's plans to change school holiday patterns, the Labour-controlled council has attempted to force through a change to a five term year in Nottingham city schools. Implementation of the five term year will mean a shortening of the six week summer holiday to four weeks and a regular pattern of eight week terms. Members of all teaching unions — including a majority of head teachers in the city — and the body representing school governors have rejected...

This week owners and administrators of private capital will assemble in London to share ideas about how state education can be further opened up to their insurgency. Education Investor magazine (yes, it does exist) is hosting a conference to bring together established edubusinesses such as Pearson (owners of the “awarding body” or exam board Edexcel), academy sponsors (including Balfour Beatty and ARK), and representatives of private equity companies, some of whom have given large amounts of money to Education Secretary Michael Gove in recent years. According to material published by the GMB...

AWL teachers bulletin for NUT conference 2012, discussing the pensions battle, campaigns on workload and pay, and more. Click here to download the bulletin as a PDF.

Last year Education Minister Michael Gove rushed through legislation which allows him to force schools to become academies against their wishes. Now hundreds of primary schools which are not achieving Gove’s “floor targets” in Year 6 SATs are under threat of being taken out of the democratic control of local authorities, and put into the hands of private sponsors regardless of the opinions of staff, parents and governors. Schools are being told: capitulate and hand over their school to the private sector, or democratically elected governing bodies will be disbanded and heads told to clear...

In School Wars Melissa Benn lays out in details the increasing privatisation of Britain’s schools, the scale of an impending disaster. Benn begins by highlighting a 2011 Guardian article which revealed that “civil servants privately advised ministers that schools should be allowed to fail, if government was serious about reform”. The Tories’ vision rests on an ideological belief in a market system which will allow thousands of students in unfashionable schools, the ones with difficult pupil intakes, bolshie staff not keen on pay-and–conditions-smashing privatisation, or parents not willing to...