ACTING GENERAL SECRETARY’S SPEECH – CONFERENCE 2009
President, Conference
I want first to congratulate you, President, on your rousing speech which had, at its heart, the core values of our great Union; a union for teachers in Wales and in England. I am delighted that you have been able to begin your presidency inCardiff, the City in which you went to University and with which you have a long association and great that both the home teams won too. You – along with so many delegates who have made great speeches this week, have set out the programme we will follow as we leave this Conference.
I stand before you as the Acting General Secretary. I got this job under the most tragic and unexpected of circumstances. Much mention has been made of Steve in the past few days. His death has focussed attention on his life. He was at his very centre a teacher. His trade unionism and his internationalism grew from his deep commitment to equality and justice, to education as the great liberator. We may not all have expressed it in those terms but that is why many of us became teachers. It’s less fashionable today to talk about teaching as a vocation but Conference I believe it to be just that for many people. I also believe it to be the best job in the world and so did Steve. A patient and sympathetic teacher can make all the difference to a young person who comes to school less than well equipped and ready to learn. Teachers can create life chances for young people who might otherwise have lacked them. Teachers can make a real difference. It’s a great responsibility but also a great privilege. It’s tough and tiring but it can also be great fun. Many of our young teachers are all too well aware of this and some of our older ones as well. Betty Brett, for instance, current President of Waltham Forest, started teaching in 1951, the year of my birth and is still teaching to this day. It may not be a unique record but it is one of which we and she can be very proud. The truth behind the slogan of ‘every child matters’ is one that has always been a touchstone for teachers and was the key to Steve’s tireless fight for good quality education for all children.
Steve’s legacy will be seen through the union and across the educational landscape but nowhere will it be more appropriately seen than in the redoubled efforts we will all make to eradicate child poverty at home and ensure that all the world’s children have access to a good quality education wherever they live. Steve was at the forefront of the Union’s engagement with the Global Campaign for Education. Nelson Mandela, a great supporter of the Global Campaign, has said this year: “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world”. That’s why we in the NUTare signed up to the Big Read. I trust that either on April 22 or on a day of your choice you will get all the young people in your schools involved in this year’s events to help get all the world’s children into primary education by 2015.
Globally we were making progress but that progress has now stalled. Over 30 million more children are in school than when the campaign began but still over 70 million miss out. Fairness and justice on a global scale require Education for All.
In the UK, too, we are only too well aware that child poverty persists. As the CPAG campaign ‘2 Skint 4 School’ states:
“The educational attainment gap between children from high income and low income families starts at a young age and grows.
“Educational under-performance is a cause and a consequence of poverty. Narrowing the gap is essential to improving child outcomes and, thereby, preventing future poverty.”
Or as many of us have said, we don’t use the poverty in which many of our children live as an excuse for their performance in school but itsurely is a reason for why they face difficulties.
Both at a global level and here at home we must hold the Government to account. The prime minister, on behalf of the government, has made pledges to children. However, not enough has been done and the gap between the rich and those in poverty in our society has widened and as that gap widens, so does the attainment gap. Even at a time of economic uncertainty the pledges to those in poverty at home and globally must be kept.It’s a scandal that this year Save the Children is having to run programmes to feed children in the UK, such are the levels of poverty some families face. We will continue to campaign and lobby alongside the Child Poverty Action Group to win fairness for those families, starting with the £3 billion needed in this month’s budget to reach the target of halving child poverty by 2010.
At this point, Colleagues, I would like to pay tribute to Bethany and James, the winners of the Steve Sinnott award, who are working to raise awareness of the Global Campaign. Those of you who heard them speak at the International Fringe Meeting will have been powerfully struck by how articulate, committed and persuasive they are. They are indeed a testament to what being educated, in a free State comprehensive school, is all about.
On April 5th last year, as we heard of Steve’s death, we were preparing for the first national strike in two decades. I think Steve would have told us “Don’t mourn, organise”. And that we did in a magnificent way. We marched and demonstrated the length and breadth of England and Wales alongside our sisters and brothers in UCU and PCS. The marches and rallies and speeches of April 24th were in pursuit of the justified claim for Fair Pay for Teachers but became, too, a way of marking Steve’s leadership of that campaign. Dave Prentis sent a personal and handwritten note to me which said: “Steve would have been so proud of you all!”
The case for Fair Pay for Teachersis as justified now as it was then, but as the economic background has changed, we have refocused our campaigning. We need to win back work/life balance through our campaign on workload and we must be ever vigilant to protect our pensions, not just in teaching but across the public sector. Our pensions are deferred salary. We earn them. Unlike Sir Fred Goodwin and no doubt many other failed bankers. Teachers’ pensions and the pensions of other public sector workers are far from overly generous. Two-thirds of retired women teachers have pensions of less than £10,000 a year. Not a fortune. We must ensure that we stand ready to protect our pensions should the need arise.
Our debate on the economic crisis, facing not just us but the entire world, has set out some demands. It is crucial that investment in education should not just be maintained but increased. Here inWales we have talked on many occasions about the “funding fog”. It is now time for the sun to shine and for the last vestiges of the fog to be lifted. We can no longer accept the unfairly lower levels of funding to schools in Wales. If schools are to rise to the challenges they face, the governments, here in Wales as well as in Westminster, need to heed the Union’s call for class sizes of 20 by 2020, not discussed on our agenda this week but already policy, and more urgently to ensure that schools can deliver on the promise that from September 2009 teachers should only rarely cover across the whole of England and Wales.
Every child deserves to be taught by a qualified teacher for their whole time in school. If the 5 outcomes from the ECM agenda are to be met for every child, high quality teaching provided by fully qualified teachers, not, I might add, out-of-work bankers with six month’s training, are critical to that success.
The turnout at the TUC demonstration on March 28th from NUT members was really good to see. Although the echoes of the People’s March for Jobs from the 1980s were all too clear a reminder that the economic cycle of boom and bust has not been broken. Dispiriting isn’t it, to see the job loss and bankruptcies which marked the 70s and 80s back with a vengeance. Education International, our Global Federation, in a declaration in Washington last November, called on all education unions to campaign for:
“a renewed commitment to the provision of publicly financed quality public education.”
In the NUT we would add to that, democratically accountable schools as part of re-invigorated local authorities, not run by the privatisers who wish to see a market in everything.
Education International also assert, as do we, that education is a public good and not a commodity, it is a human right of all not a privilegeof the few.
So at home in the UK we echo the call made by the TUC and many charities and NGOs to Put People First.
We endorse the call to Government by the TUC ahead of the budget later this month to raise taxes on the wealthiest of UK citizens and tackle tax avoidance and evasion. We welcome the Government’s intention to make moves against tax havens.
We agree with Samuel Brittan of the Financial Times when he writes that far higher debts and deficits have accumulated in times of war. His question is:
“Why should it be more alarming for governments to get into debt to put people into useful work satisfying human needs than to borrow for guns and tanks?”
So we agree,too, with Peter Hain and other backbenchers when they say that this is not the time for cuts in the public sector and in public spending but the time for greater investment.
Conference, we learned with regret from therecent UNICEF Report that our children are amongst the unhappiest in the world. Phil gave us a great speech on this.
Well, Conference, we in the NUT are determined to play our part in changing that.
Early years education is key to giving children the best possible start in life. We know however, that poverty shapes children’s development. We know from research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation that poverty predicts educational outcomes more strongly in the UK than in any other OECD country, that by the age of 6 a less able child from a well off family is likely to have overtaken an able child born into a poor family and by age 14 children from poor families can be two years behind their better off peers.
The Government’s prioritisation of early years provision, precisely to help equality of educational opportunity, has been almost universally welcomed by those working in the sector, according to an NUT survey. The extension of provision from 12½ to 15 hours isno exception to this. However, the lack of funding or realistic plan for how this can be implemented has left many feeling that early years teachers are being used by Government to deliver its political commitments without the necessary support and investment.
Our members working with children in those all important early years need and deserve the best possible resources and they need and deserve the best possible conditions of service. What they don’t need is to be told that they can’t have PPA or a lunch break, or that setting up needs to be done in their own time. The great speech from Jane Walton of Wakefield covered it all.
The Union will work at national, regional and divisional level to ensure that early years education is not afforded to our children on the cheap. We will protect conditions for teachers and high quality provision for children.
As our children move into Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2 – or what I still think of fondly as infants and juniors! – this education can suddenly become beset by ‘the standards agenda’.
One of the more dispiriting aspects of the Robin Alexander Review was his exposure of the fact that literacy and numeracy are not viewed by government as being ‘curriculum’ but ‘standards’.
Alexander opines that:
“As children progress through the primary phase, this statutory entitlement to a broad and balanced primary education is increasingly but needlessly compromised by the ‘standards agenda’.”
No surprise there, then Conference! Delegates have been coming to the rostrum at our conferences for two decades to say precisely that!
He goes on to say:
“The most conspicuous casualties are the arts, the humanities and those kinds of learning in all subjects which require time for talking, problem-solving and the extended exploration of ideas; memorisation and recall have come to be valued over understanding and enquiry and transmission of information over the pursuit of knowledge in its fuller sense.”
These are things, colleagues, which we have known for a very long time. Many, many children have been put through this.
Fortunately, many of our primary colleagues will have deployed all their creativity to make sure that the unrelenting and sterile pursuit of standards is not the only thing our children remember from their primary days.
On the question of the National Curriculum more widely, guess who said this:
“-the National Curriculum should be slimmed down and a cap placed on the amount of time it can account for;
-the National Strategies should be discontinued in their present form
-the freedom Academies enjoy in relation to the National Curriculum should be extended to all schools.”
And who went on to add:
“… the level of central prescription and direction through the National Curriculum and National Strategies has deskilled teachers. At times, schooling has appeared more of a franchise operation dependant on a recipe handed down by Government rather than the exercise of professional expertise by teachers. The education system needs confident and well-qualified teachers capable of shaping the best possible education system for their pupils.”
Who was that? Not me, Conference, neither was it any other teachers’ union General Secretary but, in fact, Barry Sheerman in the report of the Select Committee for Children, Schools and Families on the National Curriculum.
I have, subsequently, heard him speak in meetings on the theme of the need for a National Curriculum from 0-19 which is coherent and based on an overarching statement of aims but which is underpinned by the principle that it should seek to prescribe as little as possible and of subsidiarity with decisions about the curriculum made at an appropriate, i.e., the lowest level – that is the school and the classroom.
Here, Conference, is another section you might enjoy:
-the idea that there is one best way to teach is not supported by research evidence and so should not be the basis for the determining of the National Curriculum.
And finally:
-the Department must not place pressure on schools to follow certain sets of non-statutory guidance such as it has done in the case of letters and sounds.
He recommends that the Department send a much stronger message to OFSTED, local authorities and school improvement partnersand schools themselves as to the non-statutory nature of such guidance.
And colleagues, if the Department doesn’t send that strong message or even if it does the National Union of Teachers will.
This is the point from which we redouble our efforts to get workload under control and win back work/life balance.Conference, it will be good for teachers, good for children and good for education.
When we say teachers need 20% non-contact time, it’s not about a four day week, as some in the Press have suggested, but winning back a two day weekend. Conference, teachers are still amongst those who work the longest hours. We know that the teaching profession is one which suffers particularly from stress, as colleagues struggle to fit both work and a personal life into their day. It is a scandal that those who teach and nurture young people should bear the brunt of insufficient funding, always trying to paper over the cracks, for the benefit of their pupils.
We will build on the work of the Mental Health Working Party and work hard on all of their recommendations to make teaching the job we all want it to be.
From September this year, teachers will be entitled to only rarely cover. Teachers need this and we will be working with all of you to make sure that it becomes a reality. But we will also be working to ensure that pupils do not suffer as a result. The excellent debate on Motion 35 gives us a clear way forward.
One of Robin Alexander’s big issues is, of course, testing or what he calls “the elephant in the curriculum.” We are still waiting for the report of the expert group on assessment. Is it that Sir Tim, like the lone voice in ‘12 Angry Men’, is trying to turn the tide? Whatever the reason, we and our colleagues in the NAHT know that the tide has turned. If the Government doesn’t make the change to the testing regime for which we are calling, in case anyone is in any doubt, we will ballot to boycott the 2010 SATs.