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How the NEU is working internationally to help build an education system our children deserve

KIRI TUNKS draws hope from the election of Amlo in Mexico that the damaging Global Education Reform Movement can be reversed

THE news that Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador plans to scrap the neoliberal education policies implemented by previous president Enrique Nieto will be welcome news to millions of education workers in Mexico, and to many of us in Britain. 

Nieto’s policies were based on the Global Education Reform Movement (Germ), a pernicious ideology which is responsible for a deterioration of education systems around the world. 

Educators everywhere are clear that these reforms are being used to drive down the terms and conditions of staff and increase the privatisation of public schools.

In its drive to commercialise education (and to access some of the $4.4 trillion available in the education “market”), high-quality public education systems are under attack as teaching and learning becomes target-driven. 

This is to the detriment of our young people, our education workers and wider society. We are seeing the results of the Germ in Britain, with high levels of underfunding, increased privatisation and fragmentation of our schools and an obsession with testing which is narrowing the curriculum and causing real distress and alienation to our children.

The NEU takes our international links with education trade unions very seriously because we know that the battles we fight are being fought by education staff all over the world. 

By working with them and supporting them in their struggles, we learn lessons for our own. 

Take the recent strikes by the Chicago Teachers Union against the Acero Charter schools, the first of their kind, which have won real concessions not just on staff working conditions but on the human rights of their largely migrant community. Or the stand taken by the Kenyan National Union of Teachers against the privatised Bridge schools. 

It was as part of our international work that we have sent three delegations of NEU members to Mexico in the last year. 

Our first delegation was a fact-finding mission on education and human rights in the country. We visited several schools and met human rights groups. 

One result of this trip was a commitment to send some delegates to act as observers in the recent elections which saw Amlo returned as president. 

More recently, we sent four delegates to the 13th Conference of the Tri-National Coalition in Defence of Public Education which is organised by radical educators in Mexico, the US and Canada. 

As well as giving insights into the ways that different unions are tackling the threat of the Germ in their own countries, workshops and plenaries offered a chance for delegates to talk about organising and building national and global campaigns for well-funded, high-quality public education.

Indigenous people in Mexico make up around 15 per cent of the total population, often living in poor, rural communities. 

It was from one such community in Guerrero, Oaxaca, that 43 teaching students were travelling to a protest against the government in 2014 when they “disappeared.” 

Despite continuing – and international – pressure, the truth of what happened to them has yet to come to light. These students were from a movement which prioritises the needs of the indigenous community in opposition to the Germ drive to homogenise curriculum and pedagogy. 

In theory, the rights of the indigenous peoples of Mexico are enshrined in law but in practice these rights are routinely disregarded or abused. 

For example, the Mexican government is obliged to provide education in indigenous languages but often fails to provide schooling in any language other than Spanish. As a result, many indigenous groups have resorted to creating their own small community educational institutions.

In a visit to the mountain village of Necoxtla, NEU delegates attended the inaugural opening of their pre-school. The school’s aim is to strengthen their language and culture through interacting with the natural environment. 

The teachers and parents create materials and resources to ensure their cultural roots are valued and enriched.

Many Mexican schools struggle with funding. Teachers work very long hours with very high levels of contact time. This means planning, preparing and assessing is done outside of teaching time. There is a high student-teacher ratio and a heavy workload. 

Taking into account the contextual differences, this is a picture that will sound familiar to educators in Britain; as will the struggle to build a broad, rich, global curriculum which will be meaningful and inspiring to our children. 

The Germ may have fragmented our education systems globally but an unintended consequence is the way it has given trade unionists around the world the motive and the motivation to defeat it and instead build an education system our children deserve.

Kiri Tunks is NUT president, NEU.

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