Jayne Dowle: Don’t blame the striking teachers for standing up against the Government

I’m lucky, I suppose. At least I can juggle my work and try to achieve something constructive at the same time as refereeing the choice of television programmes, water-bomb fights or trampolining competitions. And when the kids are in bed, exhausted from their bonus day of romping, I will spend the evening catching up.

But forcing my way through a picket line to lead a “mums’ army” into the classroom? I don’t think so. I have heard some daft things from Michael Gove since he became Secretary of State for Education, but this has to be the daftest.

For a start, although the strike today is putting me – and millions of other parents – to massive inconvenience, I happen to agree with the teachers. And if we’re talking respect for the teaching profession nose-diving, well, I respect their right to strike.

Ostensibly, this industrial action is about pensions, but really, it is about so much more. In fact, if I happened to do my part-time university job on Thursdays, I would be involved in the industrial action myself, even though I haven’t been a member of a union since 1992.

I am hardly a revolutionary. I am outspoken about teachers, especially bad teachers. But today, it is about teachers standing up for themselves and trying to prove that they will be pushed around no longer.

Faced with reform after reform – I don’t even want to go into what we are having to contemplate at universities because it depresses me so much – teaching staff have, understandably, had enough. And although the Government says it is listening, it is clear that it is not.

So who can blame teachers for being “militant”? I don’t.

And come on. In some schools, teaching assistants can’t even put sun-cream on a child without written permission from the parents. Does Michael Gove really think that mothers can just walk into school, switch on the lights, organise a class, shepherd the pupils into the dining hall and play sport with them all afternoon, just like that?

Everybody knows that you have to pass a mind-boggling series of checks before you can even get into a classroom with other people’s children. Some of them do admittedly, seem very silly, but I assume that others are there for a good reason. Would you want to be known forever as the parent who short-circuited the entire street when she attempted to boot up the classroom computers?

And can you imagine the potential for chaos and possibly, danger, when you get a load of over-excited kids, wild at the prospect of “no proper lessons”? It is clear that Mr Gove has never been in sole charge of a birthday party which runs to more than double figures.

Perhaps his children go to a nice, quiet, orderly school where no-one runs in the opposite direction when asked to stand in line.

Perhaps he thinks that all schools are like that. And this, apart from the insulting presumption that it would be the mothers, not the fathers, who would be prepared to drop everything and descend on school to help out, is what worries me most.

This idea that all that children need is a bit of distraction to keep them engaged, shows a worrying lack of insight.

Oh, I know, it is only for one day, and no-one whinges more than me about teachers being overly obsessed with “delivering the curriculum” and “meeting goals” and that kind of thing.

But here is the Education Secretary fundamentally suggesting that teaching is an easy job, and anybody can do it. As if teachers need yet another kick in the teeth.

And I can’t even begin to imagine the impact such renegade action would have on parent/teaching-staff relations, often fraught at the best of times. It’s more “divide and conquer” than “all in this together”.

Presumably for political capital, Gove over-estimates the panic that parents feel when faced with an unexpected six hours or so without school. I’ll just say those dread words “inset day”. Nothing is guaranteed to annoy a working parent more – especially one who thinks they have their term-time childcare planned to the minute – than one of these dropping into the calendar without much notice.

We may moan and gnash our teeth, but most of us have managed to evolve our own coping mechanisms by now. We don’t have Ministers on TV suggesting that we march into school armed with papier mâché and skipping ropes every time the teachers are called off to a day-long training session.

We just grumble and get organised. So all this heart-wrenching rhetoric about “babysitting costs” and “nannies” – nannies?! – is not going to impress. Who except the rich can afford nannies for school-age children?

Gove accuses striking teachers of disturbing family life. I think someone else has to take the blame for that one. And it is his government.