TEACHERS will have to be re-licensed every few years or face the sack under a future Labour government.
This is the just unveilled position of Labour’s shadow education secretary, Tristram Hunt, that will put enormous pressure and strain onto teachers, and continues the Gove-style attacks on the profession.
At the moment, the Tories are bringing in Free Schools and Academies where state funding is being used to privatise education, and schools are being allowed to employ teachers without any formal qualifications, and also to totally ignore nationally negotiated agreements made with teaching trade unions.
Instead of fighting Gove’s lurch to the right, Labour’s Tristram Hunt is competing with it, turning his fire onto much attacked and abused teachers.
Adopting Gove-speak, Tristram Hunt has said regular re-licensing of teachers would allow the worst ones to be sacked whilst helping others to receive more training and development.
In fact, his proposal marks the return of the plan of the last Labour government, which called for ‘classroom MOTs’, that would highlight failed teachers and ‘take them off the road’.
This was dropped after being condemned by the teaching unions. But now it is back. Labour is travelling in Gove’s wake, and cannot resist the lure of adopting Tory policy as a way of winning the right-wing vote.
When former schools secretary Ed Balls proposed a so-called ‘licence to practice’ in 2009, the National Union of Teachers said it would be ‘another unnecessary hurdle’ for teachers while the Association of Teachers and Lecturers said it would be a ‘bureaucratic nightmare’.
Tristram Hunt, speaking to the BBC, played the playground bully. He said: ‘If you’re not a motivated teacher – passionate about your subject, passionate about being in the classroom – then you shouldn’t really be in this profession.
‘So if you’re not willing to engage in re-licensing to update your skills then you really shouldn’t be in the classroom,’ he added.
This is just a Gove-like threat to the teachers that they must accept his scheme for biennial relicensing, or face the sack.
Yesterday, the NUT teachers’ union was wrestling with its loyalty to the Labour Party.
‘If this turned out to be a continuation of the Michael Gove denigration of teachers, a top-down judgemental prescription of how teachers teach, it would be very negative,’ said union official Kevin Courtney.
‘But if re-licensing were truly based on a new entitlement to high quality professional development that was controlled by the teacher profession then we could talk about the details of how to improve it.’
NUT general secretary Christine Blower warned: ‘There will be a good many teachers who will just see this as another hurdle.’
In fact, 90% of teachers will just see this as Labour competing with the Tories for the right-wing vote.
The NASUWT was cautious saying: ‘important preconditions’ needed to be met before the move could be introduced.
Chris Keates, the union’s general secretary, hit out at commentators for hijacking any debate about how to improve the profession and turning it into an attempt to ‘root out incompetent teachers’.
‘No group of workers, least of all teachers, deserves to be treated in this way,’ she said.
The truth is that the Labour Party is engaged in a race to the right with the Tories. Labour is already committed to austerity measures to match those of the Tories and has pledged that it will cut even more savagely than Osborne should such cuts become necessary to save British capitalism. Now it is committing itself to anti-immigrant policies.
Shadow business secretary Chuka Umunna told a Question Time audience that Labour had been considering the case for new restrictions on migrants for some time. ‘I think there is one important thing about the European Union. The founders of the European Union had in mind free movement of workers not free movement of jobseekers.’
Labour is adopting Tory policies and opposing the socialist policies that the working class needs.
Waiting for a Labour government is no solution to the problems that the working class faces.
The solution is that the trade unions must call a general strike to bring down the coalition and bring in, not a Labour government, it will only betray, but a workers’ government and socialism.
