Christine Blower: Government playing a dangerous game with the future of education

The coalition Government’s cuts to public sector budgets are issues of great concern. Schools, teachers and pupils will directly feel the impact of this ruthless agenda.

In their desperate pursuit of a privatisation agenda the Government has devised much of their policy in haste. We are already seeing a huge backlash to many of their policies and U-turns have been performed on the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) and school sports, while their proposals for the dismantling of the NHS are already unravelling.

Education is the major factor in social mobility. The Government is letting down a generation of young people by vastly reducing the EMA and raising university tuition fees.

This will result in many young people struggling to stay on in education after the age of 16. The EMA is a vital means of support for young people, helping both them and their families meet the cost of transport, food and materials. The Government appears to have no grasp on the reality of many people’s lives and the struggle they have to make ends meets.

Similarly, raising tuition fees to the present astronomical level will price many out of higher education and impact severely on widening university access to working class and black, minority and ethnic students.

Many frontline services provided by local authorities will be seriously scaled back, if not entirely cut, as a result of budget cuts, yet services such as music, art and special education need support.

This will lead to a further divide between the educational opportunities of children from different economic backgrounds and the situation will only get worse as reduced budgets for the next financial year take effect.

The NUT is greatly concerned about the coalition Government’s policies on free school and academies. They pose a direct threat to any form of coherent state education in this country. Despite there being no evidence that they will improve education standards, the Government is determined to keep ploughing taxpayers’ money into these projects.

Free schools, which will allow individual groups to set up their own schools, irrespective of local planning needs, are a major step back which will create planning gridlock and social division, and will involve the transfer of billions of pounds of publicly funded assets, in the form of land and building, out of public hands.

The new academies will be run with little or no accountability measures and will remove parents’ rights to have any say in the way their children’s schools are run.

What is needed is a good school for every child within their local family of schools. To cut schools away from local authority support will lead to a serious fragmentation of the education system and leave schools without the vital support they need.

The Government frequently talks about putting trust in the teacher. Despite their avowed intentions, however, their reforms seem designed to give teachers and schools less control in the most important areas.

These are reforms which involve imposing teaching methods (such as the over emphasis on synthetic phonics), excessive testing and the English Baccalaureate as a “gold standard” for 16-year-olds regardless of whether it meets their needs – they all take professional autonomy away from teachers.

The National Curriculum should be broad and balanced and based on ongoing teacher observation and assessment of what each pupil needs.

This is not just the opinion of the NUT. International evidence shows that countries which allow schools to make choices about curricula and assessment, are more likely to perform above the OECD average.

There is a genuine need for changes to be made to the National Curriculum. League tables and high stakes accountability measures through school inspection targets are having a stifling effect on children’s learning. This situation will be exacerbated by cuts to schools budgets and will mean a reduction in the ability of many schools to provide subjects such as music, art and drama. This will obviously have the biggest impact on less advantaged pupils whose families cannot afford to pay privately for such lessons.

Teachers pensions are also under threat. The mood of conference is one of great anger. The Government wants to make teachers pay more, work longer and get less. This is despite changes having already being made to the teachers’ pension scheme, with teachers paying greater contributions and retiring later. The NUT, alongside other unions affiliated with the Trades Union Congress, will not sit by and watch public sector pensions being eroded.

The Government is playing a dangerous game with our education system. Their policies may benefit the few but certainly not the many. State education is something of which this country can be proud. It has enabled us a society to offer everyone an opportunity to gain skills and knowledge regardless of their background.

We cannot sit back and watch the systematic dismantling and privatisation of our schools. To do so would damage society as a whole.