THE Tory conference this week stepped up its vicious attack on teachers and their unions with education secretary Michael Gove treating them, as befits a Thatcherite, as ‘the enemy within’.
Gove’s outburst was aimed at the two largest teaching unions, the NUT and NASUWT, whose members last month commenced a work-to-rule campaign against cuts to pay and pensions.
This work-to-rule, which merely involves teachers working to their agreed hours of employment and agreed levels of responsibility, has driven Gove and the Tories into a frenzy of hatred towards the profession.
Apart from calling them ‘bigots’ who were holding back pupils from attaining their full potential, Gove made it plain that he intends to force teachers to work late during the week, work at weekends and that he intends to ‘create an atmosphere of strict discipline’ in schools – both for teachers and pupils.
The truth is that schools have always relied on teachers willingly giving up their free time to take on extra-curricular activities such as sport, drama or providing extra lessons, and doing so willingly and for no extra pay.
This threat comes on top of plans disclosed last month to introduce changes that would make it easier to sack teachers accused of underperforming and to institute a virtual reign of terror in classrooms with teachers being continually ‘assessed’ on their performance, until they crack up and can then be fast-tracked for the sack.
No-one enters the teaching profession for the money. What has angered teachers is not self-interest but the understanding that free state education is under direct threat from a government that is determined to destroy it, and with it the futures of millions of pupils.
The Tory-led coalition has followed on from the last Labour government’s policy of trying to turn every school into an Academy – whether staff or parents want it or not – and spending huge amounts of money on the creation of ‘free schools’.
These schools, outside local government control and answerable to no-one but the businesses or groups that set them up, depend on state money but are free to recruit unqualified staff at much lower rates of pay, and break all the national agreements made with the teaching trade unions, with the full backing of the coalition. Schools that can hire and fire at will, pay what they like, and lengthen the teachers working day as they wish – these are the future as far as Gove and Cameron are concerned.
Last June, Gove made a speech extolling the new Norwich free school which will be open six days a week for 51 weeks of the year, with pupils and teachers getting only Christmas and bank holidays off.
This is more of a workhouse than a school.
Norwich free school got high praise from Cameron in his speech to the Tory conference as the blueprint for education in the 21st century.
The education and future of children is not under threat from teachers or their unions, it is being systematically undermined by a government that is determined to open schools up to private enterprise to make the profit motive the guiding principle of education.
The main obstacle to the destruction of free state education is the teachers and their unions. This is why they are hated by the Tories. The entire drive to force Academy status onto every school and set up unwanted free schools is to break the teaching unions, leaving teachers in a situation where they have only one choice: to be sacked or submit to cuts in pay, pensions, teaching standards and employment rights, to guarantee profits for private enterprise.
Christine Blower, NUT general secretary, said yesterday that ‘the teaching profession has never before come under such sustained criticism and attack.’
The response must be to defend the teachers and the entire system of free state education, by forcing the TUC to call a general strike, to lay the basis for a socialist revolution that will get rid of Gove, Cameron and capitalism once and for all.