BRITAIN’S government has declared war on schools. But from the overwhelming rejection of its measly pay offer for English teachers at the start of the week to the launch of a new campaign to abolish Ofsted today, the message from the profession is that battle is joined.
A short-lived bid to split the health unions by negotiating only with the Royal College of Nursing quickly backfired, prompting joint talks with unions across the sector last month.
But over at the Department for Education officials seem cruder still: when the National Association of Head Teachers votes by a huge margin to reject its pay offer, they can only brief that “you expect this sort of rhetoric from the [National Education Union], not the NAHT.” Not so much divide-and-rule as see-how-many-unions-you-can-offend-at-once.
A marked feature of the last year’s strike wave has been its breadth. Millions who have never considered striking before have been plunged into class confrontation by sky-high inflation driven by corporate greed.
Tory media outlets used to demonising the “usual suspects” have been wrongfooted as everyone from nurses to criminal barristers walked out. The seemingly universal character of a “refusal to be poor any more” after 15 years of shrinking pay packets is behind the unusual levels of public support for striking workers.
That should make ministers think again. Head teachers are hardly the “usual suspects.” If heads are right beside their staff on picket lines, then the Tories are confronting schools as a whole.
And schools are uniquely rooted in communities. We saw the negative side to that during Covid when schools acted as “vectors of transmission” — children being impossible to isolate from wider family networks.
Following the NEU’s huge strike vote earlier this year, joint general secretary Kevin Courtney pointed to the positives: that 337,000 balloted teachers were in regular contact with over 10 million parents or guardians.
Sure enough, it soon emerged that parents — the people whose lives might be expected to be most disrupted — were actually more supportive of teacher strikes than the general public.
Schools are community hubs, vectors for the transmission of solidarity as well. And parents who can see first-hand teachers’ concern for their children’s education are unlikely to be duped by Daily Mail attack lines.
That places education workers at the heart of the ongoing surge in industrial action, one which the NEU conference this week suggests will run all summer and beyond unless the Tories change their tune.
It also gives them a chance to address longer-term distortions of our education system imposed by Tory ideology — and the new campaign against Ofsted shows it.
The schools inspectorate stands disgraced by the suicide of head teacher Ruth Perry following her school’s downgrading.
The immense stress Ofsted’s “arbitrary, ill-informed and brutalising” inspections cause teachers is now well documented. But the campaign against it should encompass the whole exam-factory culture imposed on schools in recent decades.
Its relentless tests have created a culture where pre-school children are interviewed for school places — often without parents present — and schoolkids’ mental health suffers from pointlessly competitive SATs.
All in service of the “drive in education policy towards competition, choice, standardisation, privatisation, test-based accountability and performance-related rewards… the manifestation of neoliberalism in education,” in the words of author and former teacher Gawain Little.
Teachers are standing up for education in the face of budget cuts and rising poverty among both pupils and staff.
Their campaign to scrap Ofsted can become a challenge to a whole model of education that has stripped creativity and flexibility out of education at all ages, and open up bigger discussions on what education is for that have profound social implications.
Politicians should beware the consequences.
