PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS BY MAX HYDE
NUT ANNUAL CONFERENCE
BRIGHTON, 19 APRIL 2014
CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY
I am the daughter of an immigrant. My father came over to the UK after fighting alongside the allies in the Second World War. His entire family disappeared. He had no home to go back to. So, just as for immigrants today, he wanted to make a new life. He came here and married my mother, a St Helens woman. He worked hard for the rest of his life, building a secure family life for us all. He and my mother encouraged my sister Christine and I to study. Education changed my life chances. I, like many of my generation, was the first in my family to stay on at school, the first to go to university, the first to get a degree and, the most prestigious of all, the first to qualify as a teacher. In my life, I have seen some wonderful things and met some inspirational people, young and old.
And I have spent my working life hoping to open up the life chances, the life-long chances, of others. I am proud to be a teacher and to have educated thousands of young people in my career as a teacher of physics and chemistry. So why does the Coalition Government label me an enemy of promise?
Perhaps the answer lies in the quote from honorary NUT member, the great Nelson Mandela.
“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”
I think Mr Gove and I have somewhat different visions of how we want to change the world. (I think he’s focussed on the word ‘weapon’.)
Ah, the words often sound promising and very plausible but trust me, I’m a teacher (that’s a qualified teacher). I listen but I also assess, reflect critically on practice and evaluate it.
How about his quote, made in September 2013:
“It is because the teaching profession is so crucial that our programme of education reform has been designed to empower teachers, to give them more freedom, more power and more prestige.”
Ohreally? So crucial that you have allowed academies and free schools to employ unqualified teachers?
The NUT asked teachers:
“To what extent have government reforms empowered teachers? 20% said ‘not very much’, 69% replied ‘NOT AT ALL.’”
The NUT YouGov survey last year revealed 79% of teachers say the government impact on education has been overwhelmingly negative. 74% of teachers report a decrease in teacher morale since the 2010 General Election.
This is hardly surprising given the almost daily denigration of teachers by the government and their friends in the right-wing media.
It doesn’t matter that there is a wealth of evidence that shows teachers are doing their important work very well indeed.
And all of the evidence shows that qualified teachers are essential for quality education. ASCL President, Ian Bauckham, said in March 2014:
“Teachers are the most important resource.”
We know it, parents know it and the NUT has never deviated from the simple message.
We believe your children and grandchildren should be taught by a qualified teacher every lesson of every day.
Nothing less will do.
Mr Gove and Mr Wilshaw say we have the best generation of young teachers ever.
Fantastic! I celebrate my young colleagues but also add that that’s because I and my colleagues taught those young teachers and inspired them. So we are pretty damn good too!
But we are losing these very teachers in droves.
A worrying number of teachers are leaving the profession – good teachers, successful teachers, wonderful teachers, experienced teachers.
You would think that this would be of great concern to the government and that they would want to know why. Wouldn’t you?
The NUT asked teachers about the reality of their work in 2013.
The findings would be of concern to anyone who valued teachers and valued education.
Teachers said they were now less likely to remain in the profession especially because of the conditions they work under.
Teachers: Not trusted or treated by government like the professionals they are.
Teachers with an unsustainable workload, and a significant part of that workload does not directly benefit children’s learning:data overload, data that’s compiled for Ofsted, not for learning.
Teachers who know they cannot work until 68, 69, 70.
That is why the NUT is asking teachers to Stand Up for Education, to engage, to pressure and to take action.
To engage with parents and the public by telling their stories.
The response from the weekend stalls has been magnificent, from parents, from grandparents and from those with no children at all, because education is important.
To pressure politicians by talking directly to local MPs, exposing the truth behind the political rhetoric and asking politicians why, when education is so vital to the future of the country, they can just sit and watch as we hurtle towards a crisis of teacher supply.
Teachers do not take strike action lightly. We care very much about the children and young people we teach and the communities in which we work.
But we cannot stand by when teachers’ pay is eroded, our pensions attacked and our workload is unsustainable.
We are the Union and we act.
Mr Gove says he is always willing to talk. We are willing to talk too.
But he has not yet done anything to address our very real and immediate concerns. How exactly does depressing pay, worsening pensions and increasing workload help recruit and retain qualified teachers in our classrooms?
So our Union says, enough is enough and is not afraid to lead the fight for decent pay, pensions and working conditions for teachers.
We are very positive about working with other unions, to coordinate action together. But if we don’t Stand Up for Education now, who will? So we are not afraid to lead the fight. We are the largest teachers’ union in Europe and must be a strong defender of teachers’ rights.
One young teacher recently wrote that, after calculating his pay over the hours he was actually working, it was barely more than the minimum wage. There’s something seriously wrong with that, isn’t there? No wonder we lose so many of ‘our best generation ever.’ Overtime is not a vocation.
And what about the attempt to introduce so-called performance related pay to be decided at school level at the very time that school budgets are under attack?
Teachers are already performing well. Even Ofsted says so. The system of national pay was fair and transparent. It worked well. There was no need for change.
Indeed, there is a wealth of evidence that performance related pay does not benefit children in the classroom at all.
Quite the contrary.
We risk turning our children into a factory-line product. Testing and testing things that may be easy to measure to show progress, ignoring things that are less easily measurable but very important.
Teachers know that skills and values are vital too.
In fact, educational and professional matters are inextricably linked to trade union matters for teachers. The NUT is our professional body as well as our trade union.
We Stand Up for Education. Despite our current successes, there are serious problems with the education system as it currently is.
Einstein encapsulated this in a quote:
“If you judge a fish by its ‘ability’ to climb a tree, it will spend its entire life believing it is stupid.”
Only a seriously dysfunctional system would want to treat children like this. A Stepford system for Stepford children.
As professionals, we have grave concerns about the further wholesale changes in the curriculum:
- early years education is not the same as childcare. Both are important but they are not the same.
- primary education is not about fact after fact and test after test. Nor are primary schools merely a service for secondary education. Good primary education is much more than that. Rich learning experiences in a supportive environment;
- secondary education must be about skills as well as exams. There must be adequate funding so that, for example, there can be practical science lessons for all children, not just videos of them. Seeing is not the same as doing;
- children with Special Educational Needs should have those needs met. But the SEN Bill makes it even less likely that they will be.
Will all our children see themselves in the curriculum?
Will it enable them to thrive physically, emotionally?
Will it challenge stereotypes?
Will it encourage and enthuse girls and boys?
One example. A current concern is girls not going on to study physics at A level. It’s a gateway subject to lots of STEM careers. And I am concerned about it, too.
A knee-jerk reaction in the media in this current culture is to blame teachers.
But the truth is much more complex.
We know, as a trade union, that an important factor is that there is a lack of physics and maths teachers in schools. Yet again, recruitment in these vital areas has missed targets significantly. The pay and working conditions of teachers are significant factors, as well as pressures of demonstrating pupil progress when you are only part-way through a topic.
One head of maths I know left her job because she was frustrated to be forced to account for pupil progress every four weeks during a six-week topic. Children learn in different ways and many, like me, have holistic learning where it all makes sense at the end; where it all comes together. So why is the teacher not allowed to test in the way she thinks fit, at the time she thinks fit for formative purposes?
Tackling stereotypes is vital too. This benefits all girls and all boys. Professor Athere Donald, Professor of Physics at Cambridge, agrees and talks about doing something not producing yet more evidence.
We agree and our publications following our Breaking the Mould project: Stereotypes Stop You Doing Stuff and It’s Child’s Play are practical resources that do just that.
There is also no coherent independent careers provision for girls or boys. How can they make informal choices?
We are actively involved with other bodies looking at providing solutions to a complex problem.
A professional voice, a voice for equality, putting teachers at the heart of the issue.
Just one small example of the work of the Union, the work of our members.
So why are far-reaching curriculum changes being imposed at breakneck speed on teachers, rather than involving them in creating a curriculum that is fit for the 21st Century?
It’s not an accident. It’s deliberate. It’s part of the Global Education Reform Movement. Competition in the name of choice. Pursuit of deregulation across the education system. Attempts to introduce performance measures for teachers, deregulate their pay and conditions and bring in more standardised tests for children.
When I was in Palestine as part of the NUT delegation, looking at education in Palestine and the experiences of teachers and children, we met with the East Jerusalem members of the GUPT. They and the children they teach face extraordinary challenges every day. So what did they want to talk to us about – the curriculum and their concerns that the Israeli Government was writing Palestinian culture and history out of the curriculum. Their children would not see themselves in the curriculum.
I attended the Congress of the Turkish Teachers’ Union, Egitim SEN and they, too, were concerned about curriculum changes; how children who spoke minority languages could access the curriculum. They spoke about pedagogy and equality, universal concerns of teachers.
Professional voices, under attack because of the aim of marketising and fragmenting education.
We might not have wholesale education for profit in England and Wales yet, but there is a growing market for education services. How much money will state-funded schools pay out to private companies, because of the new hastily introduced curriculum, on the books and resources needed?
Is private better than public? Well, the evidence says not. 82% of teachers and 87% of school leaders say academies and free schools are the wrong direction for education. Despite that, billions of pounds worth of public assets have been transferred to academy trusts in England: the school estate – public land, buildings and assets.
In January 2014, an investigation by the Guardian newspaper found that academy chains had paid millions of pounds into the private businesses of directors, trustees and their relatives; this is on top of salaries and payouts to the bosses of academies.
Here is a telling quote from the CEO of Kunskapsskolan, a Swedish for profit firm that runs three academies through the Learning Schools Trust. In 2008, he told the Economist:
“We do not mind being compared to McDonald’s. If we’re religious about anything, it’s standardisation. We tell our teachers it is more important to do things the same way than to do them well.”
You can see, then, the purpose of denigrating teachers, demoralising them, employing unqualified people who will teach by numbers, delivering lessons.
There’s a better way. A better vision. A better education system.
Where teachers are valued as professionals. Where they have no word in their language for accountability. Where teachers, academics and the unions plan the curriculum together with government. And where children achieve.
Our colleagues in Finland in the OAJ stand in solidarity with us.
We fight for teachers and we fight on for education because they are battles we must not lose.
The NUT has over 330,000 qualified teachers in membership. 75% of our membership is female. Fantastic women and there should be more of them on our Executive and leading our schools. The men aren’t bad either.
We are a strong union, led by lay members. All professionals, proud to be teachers, proud to be trade unionists.
We fight for the right of teachers to be treated like the professionals we are and for decent pay, pensions and conditions.
We fight for equality. For young and old, women and men, black and white, LGBT and straight, disabled or not.
We fight for the rights of the children we teach and the communities we serve.
My mother and father would be proud to see me stand here today, before you, but they cannot be here. My mother died when she was 59 years old and my father died at the age of 68. No golden years of retirement. No more precious time together after a lifetime of hard work.
So I stand before you today, determined to fight on so that I do not see my valued colleagues die before they receive their pensions, become ill through overwork or leave the profession they love because they are blamed instead of celebrated.
I stand before you because I want my grandchildren to be taught by qualified teachers just as my children were.
I stand because you Stand Up for Education.