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Standing up for our kids

Michael Gove has forced strike action on Britain's teachers

DECISIONS by Britain’s two biggest teachers’ unions to take industrial action should come as no surprise to Education Secretary Michael Gove.

He will feign shock, anger and concern for pupils and parents — but he must know that he has provoked teachers beyond endurance.

Yesterday’s conference vote by the National Union of Teachers to strike in the last week of June follows the previous day’s decision by NASUWT delegates to give their leadership a mandate for such action.

Like other public servants, most teachers have suffered a real-terms pay cut after their national pay framework was abolished last year.

This has occurred in a period when their workload has continued to grow since Gove first took office.

The average primary school teacher now puts in a 56-hour week at the chalk face and their secondary school colleague 60 hours.

This represents an unrewarded rise in productivity of 12 and 20 per cent respectively.
 
Worse still, the deregulation of teachers’ pay now threatens to spark a race to the bottom from next September, as employers seek to make use of their new found “freedoms” to introduce localised and performance-related pay (PRP).

How must our dedicated, hard-working teachers have felt when a sororal guest from across the Channel told the NUT conference that French teachers were determined to hold on to their statutory 35-hour week and to keep out PRP?

No wonder thousands of teachers are leaving the profession over here when they see their own working life getting longer as their pension contributions increase and the entitlements shrink.

Indeed, according to Ofsted, two teachers in five quit within five years of starting, beaten down by long hours and all the extra burdens imposed on them by politicians and bureaucrats who usually have no experience of the job.

However, those attending the NUT and NASUWT conferences have courageously decided to stay and fight.

Importantly, too, they are placing their immediate concerns within the wider context of securing high-quality education for all our children and communities.

Surveys indicate that four-fifths of parents believe that all teachers should be professionally qualified.

We now require an equally widespread recognition that this Tory-led coalition’s priorities lie elsewhere and must be changed.

Instead of pouring public money into so-called “free” schools and academies, the government must ensure that democratically accountable education authorities have the freedom and funds to enhance and extend local education provision.

Parents should therefore join the NUT lobby at Westminster on June 10 to demand that MPs stand up for education.

The People’s Assembly national demonstration in London on June 21 will provide another opportunity to showthat more and more people want an alternative to austerity.

The mobilisation’s demands include reversing the public spending cuts and ejecting the profiteers from our education, health and social services.

Both events should help win public opinion to the side of teachers in England and Wales when they strike in June.

Co-ordinated industrial action between the teachers’ unions and others in the public sector fighting for pay and workplace justice would be invaluable.

And demagogic attempts by our anti-union mass media to turn working parents against striking teachers should be answered by pointing out that teachers are not childminders and they are sacrificing a day or more’s pay for the sake of our children’s future.

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