“Value children, value their
teachers.”
Bill’s article in The Morning Star on April 24th –
NUT, UCU and PCS (& some Unison branches) Strike
Day
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alue children, value
their teachers.
This isn’t just another trite soundbite. When teachers’ pay declines it’s not
just the teacher who suffers. It’s children who bear
the long-term effects. The history of our schools demonstrates this – it’s
happened before, and will happen again – if we let it.
For the
last three years the Government has imposed “below inflation” pay settlements
on teachers. The average teacher would be paid £950 pa more today if their pay
had kept pace with inflation. The Government are now proposing below inflation
settlements again for the next three years. With inflation at its
current rate, and with pay pegged in this way, the average teacher will be paid
£2460 less a year than they should have been. By 2010 our average teacher will
have lost a total of £7960 over six years of pay cuts!
As pay is
cut in this way, and becomes less and less attractive compared to that of other
graduate occupations, fewer people apply to become teachers. The effect is a
growing teacher shortage. Class sizes rise to unmanageable levels. Children’s
education is damaged.
We know all
about supersized classes. Throughout
the late 1980s and 1990s class sizes rose towards 40 pupils - and larger.
The effects were extremely damaging. Just a few illustrations.
In oversized classes, teachers cannot properly differentiate their work for the
full range of ability. Often in Primary Schools such oversized classes are made
up of children of different age groups and National Curriculum Key Stages –
effectively two classes in one. In Secondary schools, marking in a constructive
and positive way lengthy essays or project work produced by 30+ students is
simply not possible without long hours of overwork.
Often
teachers are expected to mark all the work in all the childrens’ books – classwork and
homework - not just with a tick, but with considered comment and suggestions.
Teachers are required to keep detailed records of every child’s attainment and
progress, constantly establishing new targets for the class and individual
pupils. They need to produce short, medium and long term planning, taking into
account individual pupils’ needs – and particularly those with special needs
who are increasingly integrated into these oversized classes.
For these
reasons and many more, when class sizes increases, teachers find themselves
working around 60+ hours a week, rather than the average of 52 hours currently
worked – which is clearly too much already. Many go to work exhausted, trying
then to give 30 or 40 children individual attention and help. At the end of the
day they have another load of work to take home. This does not help to “improve
standards”!
In finally
recognising teacher shortages, instead of making teaching a more attractive
profession, the government just changed the law to allow colleagues without
Qualified Teacher Status to teach whole classes… and then paid these people
even less.
All of this
process – massively damaging to children – is stimulated and accelerated by
decline in teachers’ pay. So… “value
children, value their teachers”.
Of course,
the government pretend that their pay imposition is not below inflation.
The traditional measure of inflation is the Retail Price Index, using prices in
a “basket” of regularly used products and services. This, for example, is the
measure used by the government in determining the rate for students to repay
their student loans… currently RPI is at 4.1%, and ex-students have to repay at
4.8%. The pay settlement for teachers
(some of them these same ex students!) is set at an average of 2.35% for each
of the three years – a 1.65% pay cut.
The
government decided that they needed a new measure of inflation, to show
it running at their political “target” of 2%. So they removed all housing costs
from RPI - and called it the “Consumer Price Index”. Unfortunately, of course,
teachers like all other workers have to go on paying for their housing!
And… guess
what! The government have just discovered that there is another “unreliable
indicator of inflation” contained within the fiddled CPI figures. Escalating energy
and fuel costs – which should be removed from the calculations too according to
the Treasury – if CPI is to be kept to 2.5%!
So when we
say, “Fair Pay For Teachers” we also say “A Fair Deal
For Children”. We’ve done everything we can prior to strike action – publishing
research, lobbying MPs, meeting with Ministers, talking with the Pay Review
Body, campaigning, urging, politely requesting. All has fallen on deaf ears.
Why is
this? Perhaps there is a more sinister purpose behind the attempts to
marginalise the national pay and conditions of teachers. Perhaps the intention
is to encourage teachers to think that they have more to gain from school by
school individual pay bargaining – for performance related pay, for rationed
“responsibility allowances”, for individually paid “retention points” etc. Such
competitive individual bargaining is clearly part of the “labour flexibility”
that all employers and particularly those in the public sector are encouraged
to promote. Indeed the recent neoliberal thinktank
“Reform” report identified teachers’ national pay and conditions as a “major
block to innovation and change”, and called for them to be scrapped. We saw
this process imposed on our colleagues in the Further Education sector, as part
of the fragmentation they suffered when removed from Local Authority control.
The result there has been a general decline in earnings, conditions of service
and employment security… and the increasing marketisation of that sector of
education.
Alongside
moves to “deprofessionalise” teaching by employing
increasing numbers of non qualified staff to “teach” whole classes of children,
such moves must be seen as a deregulation process designed to facilitate the
process of making the ownership and management of schools attractive to private
providers – currently through the Academies and Trust Schools programmes… this
in itself a step on the road to full blown privatisation – perhaps through
“education vouchers” popular both with the Tories and many in the New Labour
hierarchy.
This strike
will not be the end of our campaign. Far from it. On
Thursday we’re joined on strike by colleagues in the University and College
Union, in the Civil Service Union and some branches of UNISON. But all public
sector trade unions are now pledged to consider action, in line with the
unanimous decision of the last TUC Congress for a coordinated pay campaign in
2008.
Organised
public sector workers need to coordinate action and win the support of our
local communities. In the case of teachers this means winning their support not
just for our pay campaign – but also the directly related campaign to make sure
all children have a right to a properly paid, qualified teacher in a reasonably
sized class in a good local state comprehensive school.
Only with
public sector wide unity, solidarity and coordination will we truly stand a
very real chance of success in defending our services, and the pay and
conditions of all those who work in them. It’s going to be a real battle… but one we need to win – and one that, together, we CAN win.
Bill
Greenshields
National
President NUT