TOMORROW, delegates at the first National Education Union (NEU) conference will debate issues in post-16 education. 

The sector has suffered significant underfunding; approximately 20 per cent in real terms under this government. 

The cuts have coincided with significant and rapid government changes. Assessment has been the main focus, coursework is disappearing and exams have been altered to force students to simply regurgitate knowledge.

The cuts have crippled the post-16 sector. Our teachers are facing redundancies, pay cuts and increased workload. 

In further education (FE), more and more teachers have been reduced to terms and conditions similar to precarious work with temporary contracts and salary insecurity. 

The University and College Union (UCU) has found that FE teachers have suffered a 25 per cent real-terms pay cut since 2009. 

Pay has also been cut in sixth-form colleges, with the current offer at 3 per cent for points 1-6, 1.5 per cent for points 7-9 and 1 per cent for leadership. This is 0.5 per cent below schoolteachers at each equivalent point. This would break pay parity with schools, which we can’t accept.

Class sizes have tripled in many post-16 providers. It is not uncommon to see classes of up to 35/36 students on a Level 3 programme (A-level or BTEC equivalent). 

Other than the obvious consequences like less teacher time per student, this means that the style of teaching preferred by many teachers in this sector has been compromised. 

We are forced to adopt a greater focus on behaviour management and crowd control at the expense of the curriculum. Our pedagogy is under attack.

In conjunction with cuts to post-16 provision, we have dealt with a relentless barrage of government changes. 

In my six years of teaching I have managed significant government changes, which have affected my daily praxis, every year. 

The most recent of these has been the phasing out of AS-levels and the introduction of Linear assessment. Linear assessment is far more difficult than the AS/A2 model while measuring a drastically reduced skill set. 

It is the worst of both worlds. It is not uncommon for each A-level course a student undertakes to have several exams, each several hours long and all bunched together in a short space of time. 

Most of the assessment is basic knowledge recall. The students are assessed on their ability to regurgitate enormous amounts of content with little skill or application. 

In order to drag our students through this horrendous form of assessment, our classrooms are now becoming exam factories. We deliver large amounts of shallow content and the students attempt to remember it. 

There is little or no time for depth, discussion or application of concepts covered. Teaching sociology and politics in this way has been soul-destroying, as I am sure many other teachers have felt watching their subjects reduced to this nonsense.

The crushing need to achieve a higher position in the league tables, to attract more students and secure funding has led to an increase in off-rolling. 

This is where students are withdrawn from end-of-course exams, or sometimes excluded from a centre entirely, because it is not believed they will achieve well. It is shameful to deny students the opportunity to complete their education.

Teachers who still assess and deliver coursework have experienced attempts to devalue and deprofessionalise their work. Teachers have traditionally assessed coursework and then had their marking checked, either entirely or through a sample, by the exam board. 

Well, now the students have to check the marking as well, and if they don’t like their mark the teacher has to do a lot of work to get someone else to mark it in another college for free. Asking children to check their own teachers’ marking is a disgusting insult to our profession.

In order to tackle these issues, which are plunging post-16 education into crisis, we need to prioritise the response of our unions. 

The attacks on post-16 funding, pay and assessment must be a priority for all educators, because it will affect all of our students. We need to take on the government over funding for the sector and reject the highly inadequate pay offer from sixth-form college employers. 

We need to raise awareness of the changes to post-16 assessment and how these are linked to the drive to narrow assessment and curriculum to “measurable” outcomes across the board. 

We need to challenge the reliability and validity of these tests. The data simply isn’t accurate and doesn’t tell us what we need to know about students’ learning and understanding.

To do this, we need our unions to work together. Only close collaboration between UCU and NEU can tackle the crisis in post-16 education. But we also need to build in workplaces, up and down the country. 

We need to engage all post-16 educators, and their colleagues across all phases, in fighting on these issues. In sixth-form colleges, the first step will be to organise around the inadequate pay offer, engaging education professionals in the fight for parity between sixth-form college teachers and schoolteachers, and the funding to back it up. 

Aretha Green is a college rep and district secretary of South East Hants NEU.