Children can't afford further disruption to their education as teachers set to strike - The Yorkshire Post says

It is simplistic to blame the vote to strike on just inflation, as the education secretary Gillian Keegan attempted to do. Recruitment and retention is becoming a headache for the sector and points to deeper malaise in the profession.

How the Government engages with the teaching profession over this dispute will define Rishi Sunak’s premiership. After all, he used his first major speech of 2023 to talk up the prospects of children continuing to learn maths until the age of 18.

The only problem being that there is already a shortage of maths teachers. How he expects to improve numeracy amongst future generations without skilled professionals capable of dispensing that knowledge is hard to understand.

Therefore, alienating the entire teaching profession would be counterintuitive to how he feels Britain needs to gear up to compete on the world stage.

However, Ms Keegan’s more constructive tone is to be welcomed. She said that the Government hoped not to use the controversial minimum service legislation being introduced.

A game of chicken must be avoided at all costs. Children, who have already suffered major disruption to their education due to the pandemic, cannot afford to miss out more classroom learning. It will be those in disadvantaged areas that will take the longest to recover ground with schools there often struggling for resources. In order to get the futures of young people back on track, the Government needs to tap into the expertise of the likes of Anne Longfield, chair of the Commission on Young Lives, and Sir Kevan Collins, the former education recovery tsar.