As a NASUWT member for over 25 years (now retired), I was disappointed that my old union invited a Conservative Education Secretary to its annual conference, but, after listening to extracts from Nicky Morgan's speech today, I have to admit to being more enlightened, if not in the way Mrs Morgan would like.
Now, as regular readers of this blog know, I am not a fan of the educational establishment. This lack of enthusiasm is based upon having been on the receiving end of numerous inspections and an awareness of the growing pressures on the teaching profession. I have escaped those pressures, but am well aware that those pressures have worsened since my retirement. Having worked as a supply teacher since I retired in 2011, I can bear witness to those worsening pressures, and will discuss them later.
Let us return to Mrs Morgan's speech. I am often amazed at how senior politicians - in particular those who deal with education - are out of touch with reality, but this speech speaks loudly of someone who has passed through the looking glass. For those who have not read the speech (and those who have avoided listening to it), here is a gem:
“I visited the NASUWT website recently and found of the last 20 press releases that the NASUWT had issued only three said something positive. Wouldn’t it be more helpful if your press releases were more positive?”
Please note: Mrs Morgan is not disputing the veracity of the press releases; it's just that she doesn't like their tone. Anyone would think it was the job of teaching unions to act as a public relations agency for the government, rather than represent the interests of their members.
Mrs Morgan was adamant on one issue, however: all schools will become academies. According to her:
"It isn't for me or officials in Whitehall or Ofsted to decide how best to teach or run schools, it's for you, the teachers who know better than anyone what works in the classroom."
I laughed out loud at this, as academies will be able to employ teachers that are unqualified and - more seriously - the trusts that run the academies will be the ones that decide how schools shall be run - not the teachers. If you click on the link above, you will see that Mrs Morgan laughed a lot during her speech, which perhaps indicates that even she knows how laughable her claims are. As Lucy Powell, Shadow Education Secretary, said:
“Nicky Morgan has failed to provide a single compelling argument as to why these changes are necessary when the vast majority of schools affected are already high performing schools.”
It may also be pointed out that, had a Labour government imposed reforms (or in the case of academies DE - forms) in such a high-handed way, the Tories would have been incandescent with rage at what they would call Stalinist tyranny, or some such thing.
To conclude, I would like to bring a personal perspective to bear on this topic. Let's return to today's speech, and look more closely at what Mrs Morgan said about the negativity put out by the NASUWT. The Guardian quotes here:
“Wouldn’t it be helpful if more of your press releases were actually positive about the teaching profession? Because If I were a young person making decisions about my future career, and I saw some of the language coming out of NASUWT as well as some of the other unions, would I want to become a teacher?” Morgan asked. “No I wouldn’t.”
Once again, I had to laugh. Anyone would think that it is only the teacher unions who are being negative about the state of the profession. Mrs Morgan is so out of touch that she is completely unaware that it is ordinary teachers, current and retired, who are telling the truth about their workload, pay and conditions and, quite rightly, are warning young prospective teachers of what awaits them. I have written a number of blog items about the demoralisation of teachers in the past - is Mrs Morgan going to tell me to be more positive? (She'd better not). Is she going to threaten legal action against older or ex-teachers telling young people not to become teachers - as indeed we do? Somehow, I doubt it.
Lastly, I would like to quote two young teachers, both in their twenties, whom I met recently while doing supply work:
"I've been teaching for five years and I feel like I just want to run away" - male teacher, facing serious classroom discipline problems with little support.
"This is the end. I'm stressed out as it is" - female teacher, facing an imminent OFSTED visit.
40% of newly qualified teachers leave the profession in their first year of teaching, and even Michael Gove has acknowledged that there is a serious problem with a teacher exodus. Perhaps Michael Gove should tell Nicky Morgan about it? Her return through the looking glass is long overdue.
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I interpreted Nicola Morgan's laughter as a touch of nerves combined with her thinking they were laughing with her, not at her. It didn't take long for the latter illusion to vanish. Her comments about negative press releases on the union website prove that she doesn't understand the purpose of trade unions. It also shows that she doesn't understand that those negative views aren't just the province of union hotheads and their website, but are symptomatic of a malaise among teachers generally. Even if she did recognise that there was demotivation among many teachers, I've no doubt she'd blame it on the union propaganda: teachers would find their job depressing, not because of increasing class sizes, lack of support with disciplinary problems, never-ending testing and the accumulating administration, but because of that union circular they struggle to find time to read.
ReplyDeleteI did a 4-year BEd course, although a permanent teaching job never resulted. At that time, the Labour government's aspiration was to have a fully qualified, graduate teaching profession. Thirty eight years after I graduated, not only have we moved away from that aspiration, but we have now set up systems whereby anyone who has been a success in an entirely unrelated field, such as business or the armed forces, can become a teacher. If teachers don't need to be trained, what was the government doing paying for me to be a student teacher for four years?
The reality is that the state school system is now, more than ever before, an experimental laboratory for extreme right-wing ideology, and if it goes wrong, they don't really care because neither they nor their children need to use the system. In the meantime, schools will have been converted into investment opportunities for their mates. They have finally abandoned any figleaf of parental choice by scrapping parent governors, and acadamies will have absolutely no local accountability, being answerable only to the boards of the trusts concerned.
Increasingly, I believe that our rulers want the working classes to have only a limited education. They utterly hated the fact that widening access to higher education in the 50s, 60s and 70s produced many working class people who were educated and articulate, but who didn't necessarily adopt the values of the classes they were entering by virtue of their qualifications and resultant career opportunities. Their response to this rejection of what they saw as their munificence to the lower orders has been the introduction of tuition fees.
I am becoming more and more certain that all the changes (not reforms) to the education system from top to bottom derive from this mindset.
Nev, you are 100% right about the decline (or is it destruction?) of social mobility. This was brought home to me a couple of years ago in an unexpected way. Back in 1977, while working as a parks gardener in Southport,, I took an "A" level evening course at what was then Southport Technical College. At that time, there were numerous examination courses for evening students at both "O" and "A" level. thanks to my A level pass, I went to University, then on to train as a teacher. Well, three years ago, I checked to see what exam courses were still on offer at the now Southport College. I was shocked to see that very few exam classes were on offer now. It is no different down here in London, as I discovered last year. Effectively, it has become very difficult, expensive or both to gain qualifications after leaving full time education, giving people who want to improve their job and life prospects a grim uphill struggle.
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