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How the unions took control of Britain’s classrooms

When overhauls to the education system prioritise teachers over pupils, it’s clear who is telling the Government what to do

The first week of September is a time of transformation, as the playtime of summer comes to an end, the country gets back to work and children face the excitement – or dread – of a new academic year. 
At many school gates this week parental gossip about who had the best holiday has given way to an altogether more sombre subject: whether Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour is about to wreck Britain’s education system.
The private sector is already feeling Labour’s boot on its neck with the introduction of VAT on school fees. Only this week a preparatory school in Staffordshire announced its closure because it is no longer economically viable as a result.In the state sector, meanwhile, Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, has begun Labour’s reshaping of the Tory model by scrapping one-word Ofsted inspection summaries and ordering a review of the curriculum.
The official announcement of Ofsted reform contained the following observation: “There is much work to do now in order to design a fundamentally different long-term approach to [school] inspection.”
You might assume this was Phillipson setting out Government policy, but in fact this was a statement by Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the National Association of Headteachers (NAHT).
The fact that Labour should feel the need to include the demands of a union boss in a public communique tells us much about the direction in which education policy is heading.
The scrapping of one-word Ofsted grades for schools was “a massive win for the unions”, according to the Conservatives, and there are concerns that it will be merely the first act in a schools revolution that will prioritise the needs of teachers, rather than children.
The teaching unions are already urging Phillipson to scrap times tables tests and scale back grammar tests. SATs tests are also in the unions’ crosshairs, together with the national curriculum, despite unarguable improvements in educational standards in England since Conservative reforms – opposed by the unions – were implemented.
The architects of those reforms now fear that Labour will reverse them, dragging England down to the levels of educational underachievement seen in Wales under Labour and Scotland under the SNP.
Amanda Spielman, until last year the chief inspector of schools, insisted this week that parents prefer one-word Ofsted ratings for “simplicity and clarity”, but from now on, school inspections will no longer classify them as outstanding, good, requires improvement or inadequate. 
Instead, Ofsted reports will give separate ratings across different categories, before a “report card” system is introduced next year with a summary of the school’s strengths and weaknesses.
Spielman warned against “putting the interests of schools and their staff ahead of children”, and opponents of the changes have insisted that is exactly what is happening.
Molly Kingsley, of the parents group Us For Them, says: “The pandemic was a paradigm example of schools being run for the teachers and the unions seem to forget that the end stakeholder of the education system is children.
“Schools are heavily unionised and the unions’ primary stakeholders are teachers, but parents don’t have a union. There has to be some metric by which schools and teachers are assessed and judged.” 
On X, Katharine Birbalsingh, regarded as Britain’s strictest headteacher, said scrapping the one-word Ofsted ratings is “an indulgence of the tyranny of ‘feelings being more important than facts’”.
She added: “The reasoning behind the decision worries me re this government’s future decisions.”
The Government and the teaching unions have insisted reform was needed following the suicide of Ruth Perry, a headteacher from Berkshire, who took her own life after discovering Ofsted was going to rate her school as inadequate.
One of the reforms announced this week would give such schools more time to get their house in order before they might have help imposed from above. Instead of becoming eligible for a takeover by a successful academy trust, schools will be given a three-month grace period, and then if they are still struggling they will work with what Labour has termed regional improvement teams.
Damian Hinds, the shadow education secretary, says: “It’s a problem because academy trusts have been central to school improvement. Labour say they’re decentralising by creating regional improvement teams – whatever that means – but it looks a lot like the opposite.”
Quite what the regional improvement teams will look like, and what their relationship will be with local authorities, is as yet unclear.
The speed with which Phillipson gave the unions what they wanted on Ofsted does not bode well for supporters of the current curriculum. Labour has announced a review of the curriculum, and teaching unions are already making clear that they expect times tables tests to be scrapped and grammar tests to be scaled back, describing them as “an unnecessary waste of time”.
Hinds says the curriculum review is “in many ways the biggest worry”. Whereas the Conservatives have favoured a knowledge-heavy approach, championed by Michael Gove when he was education secretary, Labour prefers a skills-heavy approach, even though the current system has a track record of success.
“We’ve got a good, knowledge-rich curriculum now,” says Hinds, “and that has been an important part of England’s performance improvement, along with proven methods like phonics and maths mastery.  
“There can be a lot of politics in the curriculum, and on a subject like history, the national curriculum is really quite loose, more of a framework, and that’s helped over the years to keep the politics down.”
Keeping the politics down may be a forlorn hope. The woman in charge of the curriculum review is Left-wing academic Professor Becky Francis, who criticised the Blair government for “an obsession with academic achievement”.
One of the people feeding their ideas into her review will be Charles Clarke, who was education secretary under Tony Blair and was commissioned by the Oxford, Cambridge and RSA examinations board to write a report on the curriculum and exams.
He said this week the curriculum contained “glaring omissions” on climate change and sustainability, which conjures visions of Ed Miliband and his net zero evangelists choosing set texts.
Toby Marshall of the Academy of Ideas Education Forum, a parent of three children and A-level teacher, said: “What we need to be having, really, is a debate about what Labour plans to do with the curriculum.
“I think what is likely to happen in the national curriculum review is that it is going to pull back from many of the good things that happened under Michael Gove’s reform. 
“Many of the things that Gove did I think were very good because they prioritised knowledge and made that the priority, both through the new national curriculum but also through the EBacc [English Baccalaureate].”
Clarke’s review concluded that children take too many exams, and that the volume and intensity of exams at GCSE are “too high”. It was music to the ears of the unions. Pepe Di’Iasio, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: “The excessive volume and intensity of GCSEs, as reformed by the last government, is completely unnecessary for the purpose of aiding progression.”
Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the National Education Union, said: “NEU members have reported since their introduction that reformed GCSEs are far too overloaded with content.”
The tone of those comments chimes with the unions’ allergic reaction to the primary school testing regime, in the form of SATs, short for standardised assessment tests.
The NEU, the biggest teaching union in the UK, wants to abolish SATs, which are taken in years 2 and 6 to assess children’s progress.
Kebede said earlier this year that: “SATs are not a useful or accurate way of assessing what children can do at the end of their primary education. These out-of-date and harmful tests must stop, and learning, not school accountability, must be at the heart of our assessment system.”
That school accountability that Kebede wants to deprioritise has been at the heart of driving up standards. As a reliable way of assessing pupil progress through their primary school years, they enable parents to see which schools are lifting pupil attainment and which are letting them down. 
Failing schools and failing teachers would, of course, rather they did not exist, while good schools have nothing to fear from them. 
Stephen James, a former primary school teacher, who now works as an educational consultant, says: “Schools don’t like them because it means you can’t hide failure. But equally, you can’t hide success.
“SATs are absolutely crucial as points of measurement in a child’s career and development, and they are also useful for schools to be able to measure their own performance.
“As we saw during Covid, teacher assessment is so unreliable. Some teachers will give children better grades to make themselves look better, so there has to be a standardised way of measuring progress.
“The unions’ job is to represent the interests of their members, which is fine, but it’s time unions stuck to employer relations and stopped trying to change education policy.”
The internationally-recognised standard for measuring educational achievement is called the Programme for International Student Assessment, or Pisa, which ranks countries for their pupils’ achievement in maths, science and reading.
The UK is currently ranked 14th in the world for maths, 15th for science and 13th for reading. In 2009, when Labour was still in power, it was 26th, 14th and 16th. 
But the overall UK score is being dragged down by the poor performance of Labour-run Wales and SNP-run Scotland compared with England.
If England was ranked separately, it would be 11th for maths, 13th for science and 13th for reading. 
Wales would be 33rd, 35th and 35th, while Scotland would be 30th, 31st and 14th. Wales is below the OECD average scores for all three subjects.
Wales, under Labour, shunned the knowledge-based approach taken by Gove, and put the emphasis on skills, believing this to be modern and progressive. Not only has Wales become the worst performer in the UK, its decline in standards (experienced by all four UK nations post-pandemic) is by far the steepest.
Nick Timothy, who served as an adviser to Gove when he was education secretary and who is now a Tory MP, says: “The evidence is quite clear that [Gove’s reforms] worked and what worked is exactly what they are attacking.”
One question that remains unanswered is how Labour policy will affect discipline in schools. There is uncertainty over whether Tom Bennett, the Department for Education’s behaviour tsar, will be kept on beyond the expiration of his current contract in 2025, and Labour has failed to rule out reducing suspensions and exclusions.
“Discipline is the very starting point of everything you do in a school,” says James, “but look at the way they treat Katharine Birbalsingh.”
Birbalsingh, whose relentless focus on discipline and respect for teachers at the free school she set up in north-west London has been the foundation of her school’s record-breaking progress in the state sector, is inevitably a target for Left-wing trolls.
Rather than applauding her astonishing achievements in turning children’s lives around, they ridicule her “one size fits all” approach to behaviour, and accuse her of “indoctrinating” children with British values by flying the Union flag at the Michaela School and inviting children to sing Jerusalem and I Vow To Thee My Country (Birbalsingh is a New Zealander of mixed heritage who grew up in Toronto).
While successive Conservative education secretaries have held up the Michaela School as the model of how a state school should be run, and Birbalsingh has been invited to speak all over the world by those who want to replicate her success, the Left sneers at her methods.
Birbalsingh describes giving children detention as “an act of love” that improves discipline and therefore learning, while the teaching unions say the only way to improve behaviour is to throw more money at schools.
Kebede said over the summer that free school meals for all, and scrapping the two child cap on child benefit, are part of the solution to the “downward spiral” of bad behaviour.
The education budget, of course, has already been increased thanks to the 5.5 per cent pay increase given to teachers by Phillipson in her first month in the job – an average of £2,500 per teacher. 
Kebede responded to the announcement by crediting his union for influencing the official School Teachers’ Review Body (STRB), which formally advised Phillipson to opt for 5.5 per cent. 
“Phillipson funded [the rise] … But it was our members engaging in the #PayUp24 campaign and through our indicative ballot (90 per cent Yes to strike for fully funded above inflation award) that moved the “independent’ review body”, he tweeted.
NEU members will only vote later this month on whether to accept the offer or, as the union says, “reject it and move to a formal ballot on strike action”. The NEU is recommending that its members agree to the 5.5 per cent increase, but its long-term goal is “pay restoration to compensate for years of below-inflation increases”. 
There is little doubt that the unions will keep turning the screw on Labour, and while none of the teaching unions are formally affiliated to Labour, the NEU and the NASUWT have political funds that they can use at their discretion as both a carrot and stick in negotiations over future pay deals.
In Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, one mother of children aged 12 and 16 says parents on the school run are worried about the effect of Labour policy on both private and state schools.
She says: “It does seem like a short-sighted appeasement of the unions, adding to the long list of what Labour are doing.
“With new parents on the WhatsApp chats and new parents moving to the area, [the Ofsted rating] would definitely come up. People would say ‘we can’t fault the school, consistently outstanding’. It’s also in every single house advertisement round here. 
“The private school tax feels like jealousy politics, which feels similar to Ofsted, as it doesn’t feel thought-through and it doesn’t feel like a solution to the problem. 
“People move to Buckinghamshire for the grammar schools, so what does this mean for those? I’m deeply concerned that we’ve got a government that is focused on the wrong things, is looking for quick-win actions with no long-term benefit rather than listening to what the majority of the UK population is concerned about.”
A mother from Whitby who has children aged four and six at primary school says: “On WhatsApp chats there have been messages about ‘I’ve always voted Labour [but] how’s this going to work?’
“I think people are waiting with bated breath to see what the policy changes actually mean.  ‘How bad is it going to be?’ is the general sentiment.”
For the future of our children, and the nation itself, we can only hope that grammar school-educated Starmer finds the strength of character to stand up to the unions.

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