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Enter ‘Sir Kid Starver’

After decimating its left, Labour has now turned its sights on teachers and children, in a wave of policy announcements that have left the education community incredulous, writes teacher ROBERT POOLE

“THERE are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen,” wrote Lenin. Never has this been so true as this week in Labour’s pronouncements on education.

First, there was the announcement that the pledge of free school meals for all was going to be scrapped; next up was the story about how it would send in teams of “super-teachers” into deprived areas; and finally — in the most extreme case of not reading the room ever — the insistence that it would increase the number of Ofsted inspections to yearly.

At this point, I fear that Keir Starmer is reading this author’s Morning Star contributions and then doing the exact opposite of whatever I say.

To anyone with a basic understanding of historical materialism, it is easy to see how poverty and attainment in school are inherently linked. If we don’t solve one then we can’t hope to solve the other. The idea that sending super-teachers to working-class schools will solve all their woes is frankly insulting.

The excellent headteacher Simon Smith took to Twitter to point out: “Actual real long-term improvement for young people in disadvantaged areas won’t come from sending ‘hit squads’ of ‘super-teachers’ in to help those apparently ‘rubbish’ teachers in disadvantaged schools, it will come from dealing with the disadvantage and investing in communities.”

These communities are suffering from decades of neglect. Neoliberal policies have decimated them, destroying the very ability of the young people there to dream.

I taught for a while in Burnley, a run-down Lancashire mill town. The school in which I taught, now sadly closed, was on the Stoops estate, which rose to fame in the 1990s in a riot which saw the building of barricades.

The estate was also home to screenwriter Paul Abbot who once said, “Go and live in Burnley. I dare you to stay there for eight hours and not come out with storylines that we wouldn’t dare touch in Shameless.”

I taught one boy at the school named Lewis, who was once struggling in a GCSE English class. I tried the usual tactic to get him to work by dangling in front of him the promise of jam tomorrow. “If you do well in these exams,” I said, “then you can get a good job after school.”

This was a mistake. Red-faced, he turned to me and replied, “Job? There aren’t any jobs here. My dad’s not got one and my grandad’s not got one. What’s the point?” It was easy to see what he was getting at.

Lewis’s words are a stark reminder of the reality facing young people in many parts of Britain. They are growing up in a world where there are no jobs, no hope, and no future. And it is this reality that Labour’s new raft of policies is completely blind to.

Labour had the opportunity to lift 250,000 children out of poverty by removing the two-child cap on child benefits at the cost of £1.3 billion (to put that into perspective, last year we gave Ukraine £2.3bn in weapons). Instead, in another attempt to appeal to the right, the Labour leader has pledged to continue the cap, earning him the title of “Sir Kid Starver” on Twitter.

After the tragic death of headteacher Ruth Perry, it seemed like the tide had finally turned against Ofsted. One headteacher heroically threatened to refuse Ofsted entry, and the media was full of stories of wrongdoing by the inspectorate.

It is difficult to understand why, then, Labour is now suggesting that we increase the number of Ofsted inspections. There is only one Ofsted policy we should support and that is abolition.

This comes at the same time that the news came out that the likely new head of Ofsted is to be Sir Martyn Oliver. Oliver is the chief executive of the Outwood Grange Academies Trust (OAGT) and is understood to be the government’s pick to succeed Amanda Spielman next year.

OAGT have come under fire for their rate of suspensions and use of behaviour policies such as “flattening the grass” where pupils were allegedly screamed at to enforce discipline.

Oliver has been critical of Ofsted in the past for being disadvantageous to schools in disadvantaged areas. The reason for this is that Ofsted had cottoned on to the fact that some schools were gaming the system by narrowing the curriculum and teaching the GCSE syllabus for five years rather than two. While this may have increased results — at what expense?

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