Education Secretary Gove ‘has launched a vicious assault on teachers’ commitment and professionalism’, said NASUWT general secretary Chris Keates yesterday.
This is ‘to deflect from an agenda of savage cuts and elitism and its free market ideology,’ she said.
Commenting on Gove’s statement to MPs on the publication of the Education White Paper, Keates added: ‘The Secretary of State’s statements are a disgraceful denigration and misrepresentation of the performance of schools and teachers.
‘Teachers will be doing today what they do ever day: working hard to ensure that all children and young people succeed.
‘But all they will hear from the Secretary of State is that their qualifications are not good enough; they shouldn’t have been in the classroom in the first place; they need to be subject to more monitoring because they can’t be trusted and they must be told how to teach because they have been short -changing pupils.
‘Children and young people’s hard work and achievements, over the last decade, fare no better.’
She added: ‘We are now witnessing the plans for another lost generation of young people.’
National Union of Teachers General Secretary Christine Blower said: ‘Michael Gove seems determined to pursue an ideologically driven education agenda that, despite the avowed intentions of the white paper, will increase bureaucracy and government interference and will increase the divide between schools not close it.’
She slammed ‘narrow performance targets’, and cuts in teacher pay and school funding.
Blower said: ‘We already know that schools in England and Wales will lose out in real terms and the Pupil Premium of which so much is promised is not new money.’
She warned: ‘The coalition government needs to end this obsession with floor targets.’
Blower added: ‘The expansion of the academies and Free Schools programme, regardless of any evidence to show that it is the solution to raising attainment in schools, is a wrong move and will lead to a two-tier education system.’
She stressed: ‘If all children are to be given the chance of a good education, regardless of their background, the government needs to ensure that classrooms are staffed by fully-qualified teachers, class sizes need to be reduced and the poverty gap closed.’
Gove announced ‘a new generation of teaching schools on the model of teaching hospitals’, doubling the number of ‘graduates who enter teaching through Teach First’.
He intends to ‘attract high performers from other professions into teaching’ through a new Teach Next scheme.
He also announced ‘a new Troops to Teachers programme to attract natural leaders from the Armed Forces into the classroom.’
He continued to say ‘we will take decisive action on discipline’, and that the National Curriculum will be ‘reformed’ and slimmed down, ‘simply specifying the core knowledge in strategic subjects which every child should know at each key stage.’
GCSEs are to be ‘more rigorous by stripping out modules’, and ‘performance tables’ will include ‘English, and maths, science, modern languages and the humanities like history and geography’.
‘Primaries and secondaries which fail’ will be ‘eligible for intervention’.
Local authorities are to be required to ‘step back from management’, blow the whistle on ‘weak’ schools, and commission ‘new provision, whether from other high-performing schools, academy sponsors or free school promoters.’
