NATIONAL Union of Teachers leader Christine Blower has reacted to the remarks of Education Secretary Ed Balls, who addressed the NUT’s conference in Liverpool on Monday.
‘While Ed Balls is right to say there is a big choice for parents and teachers at this election, there is also a big choice for government,’ said the NUT general secretary.
‘Education is a public service,’ she said.
‘It is absolutely vital to the future social and economic health of this country.
‘Tough decisions should mean supporting and reinforcing the number of qualified teachers and the quality of school buildings, not taking decisions which erode the quality of state education.
‘We are pleased that Ed Balls said that it is “very important that we trust teachers to get on and teach in the classroom’’.
‘We now need him to turn these words into action.
‘Ed Balls should drop his continuing commitment to the irrelevant and bureaucratic licence to practise and excessive and overlapping mechanisms for school accountability.
‘The NUT believes that there is one big choice facing the electorate,’ said Blower.
‘Either it wants a confident and dynamic education system leading the world in terms of creativity and innovation, or a system where teachers and parents are constantly looking over their shoulders worrying where the next cut is coming from.’
The union’s conference heard from the leader of the PCS civil service union, Mark Serwotka, who launched an angry attack on the government and urged the teachers and other public sector unions to join up with the PCS.
The PCS general secretary, said: ‘We need to do what the trade union movement does best. It is to stand together.
‘I have to say to you this – that if you judge a government by how it behaves as an employer, this is the worst government in the history of this country,’ Serwotka told NUT delegates.
He added: ‘I tell you why. Not because I have any illusions that David Cameron is going to be better – but the facts speak for themselves.
‘In the civil service, the people I’m representing, in four years, the last four years of New Labour, we’ve lost 100,000 jobs, 2,000 offices have closed.
‘More privatisation of our work than under the governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major combined.’
Serwotka said that, whoever wins the election, ‘we know that jobs will go in education, and in public services’.
He continued: ‘It’s in all of our interests to defend our pensions and our terms and conditions.
‘Our message to the politicians should be simple – if you’re coming for our jobs, our pensions, our services and our education, we are going to stand together and we are going to defend them.
‘And we are going to take united industrial action as a last resort if we have to, because we know it’s the best way of defending ourselves.’
NUT delegates gave Serwotka a standing ovation, while dozens, with their fists raised, chanted ‘the workers united will never be defeated’.
Delegates at the NUT conference debated the highly contentious issue of unqualified staff now taking over the role of supply teachers.
The union is concerned about this increasing use of non-teaching staff as classroom supervisors.
‘As a consequence there has been a significant drop in the employment of supply teachers,’ the NUT says.
The conference heard that many agencies are paying supply teachers the support staff rate, rather than the qualified teacher rate, and some are not offering work to qualified teachers at all.
‘It is also unacceptable that many supply teachers find themselves working for organisations which do not pay pension contributions,’ the NUT adds.
The NUT has a policy of ‘a qualified teacher for every class’ and says: ‘It is unacceptable that for many children and young people this is not the case.’
Unqualified staff are taking charge of classes ‘sometimes for days on end’ as part of the cost-cutting, privatisation measures now being implemented.
‘Supply teaching through agencies was the first, and completely by stealth, privatisation of the education service.
‘It is a disgrace that it has gone on so long and an urgent remedy is needed’, says the NUT.
The NUT conference also debated the issue of ‘malicious or unfounded information’ being disclosed to employers.
The union is extremely concerned about the disclosure of unproven information to employers as part of the Criminal Record Bureau checks.
The same disclosures will now be considered by the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA) in assessing whether staff should be cleared for registration.
There is no justification for the same non-conviction material being passed to prospective employers, the NUT says.
This ‘soft’ information does not have to be true and may be malicious or unfounded.
‘The effect of disclosure of any inaccurate, irrelevant or misleading information is already blighting careers and lives,’ the union warns.
The NUT conference discussed the importance of decent pensions for all workers.
The rush by private sector employers to abandon their occupational pension schemes will simply push the cost of supporting their workers when they retire onto future taxpayers.
Making public sector pensioners poorer will not make private sector pensioners richer; it just means poverty in retirement for everyone, the conference was told.
Pension provision needs to be improved, not worsened.
‘New teachers must wait until 65 to receive their pension,’ says the NUT.
‘All teachers are already contributing more to their pensions…
‘Recent attacks on public sector pensions come from self-interested sources – private pension providers, who have a poor record in delivering good pensions, and shadowy organisations such as the Taxpayers’ Alliance.’
The NUT pledged to defend decent pensions for all workers, in the private and public sectors, to protect everyone against poverty in old age.
The union said that the UK education system is still not as well-funded compared to many other countries.
The union warned that cutting education funding ‘will irretrievably harm children and young people, particularly the poorest ones’ and lead to more youth unemployment.
The union also warned that it will not accept privatisation, saying: ‘The NUT will reaffirm its support for the free state comprehensive schools system which is threatened by the proliferation of unproven initiatives such as Academies and so-called “free schools”.’
The NUT also rejects ‘restrictive pay limits or pay freezes in the public sector’.
l Teachers suffering from stress, burnout and depression have even considered suicide after a lack of support from their school and management teams, according to a survey by the NASUWT teachers’ union.
The report revealed that teachers are suffering from a range of stress-related symptoms, including heart palpitations, lack of sleep, eating problems and depression.
The cost of support and the stigma associated with mental health problems were cited as one of the main causes of affected teachers feeling isolated.
A wide range of causes were blamed for the stress being suffered by teachers, including bullying school management, the tick-box culture, targets and difficult pupils.
Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT, commented: ‘Teaching is widely recognised as one of the most stressful occupations.’
She said the research commissioned by the union ‘confirms the need to tackle the root causes of stress in schools, such as the impact of the high-stakes accountability regime on the well-being of school leaders, teachers and other staff’.
The NASUWT conference carried the following motion on the issue: ‘Conference asserts that workplace stress is endemic in the school and college environment and believes that the pressures under which teachers work have resulted in high levels of stress and anxiety in the profession.
‘Conference believes that the culture of institutional bullying which has developed in many schools and colleges, often associated with a target-driven culture, is a cause of stress and anxiety, impacts adversely on the health and well-being of many teachers and makes their work environment intolerable.’
The resolution called on the NASUWT national executive ‘to campaign, with greater urgency, for. . . (i) greater awareness among school and college leaders. . . of their statutory responsibilities for the health, safety and wellbeing of teachers’.
It also demanded ‘(v) workforce impact assessments, including the effect on health and well-being, of educational policies and initiatives, assessment arrangements and pupil indiscipline and (vi) reductions in the workload and working hours of teachers.’
