The following article first appeared in the Tes Daily newsletter - a free newsletter that provides an essential morning briefing for schools, featuring the latest education news and analysis, alongside exclusive content from the Tes senior editorial team. You can sign up for free here.
“The teaching profession has only too much reason to know that parents, except a very small proportion, take very little interest in it, and the general public very much less - were it otherwise, many radical evils would long since have disappeared by pressure of their opinion.”
Is this statement, written in a letter to Tes in September 1919 following teacher strikes, still true of the situation education finds itself in today?
The fact that members of the NEU had to strike last week not just over pay, but over education funding more generally, and that these issues are persistent “evils” long unresolved, would suggest that things haven’t improved. If the public really cared about education, would we have ever got to this situation?
And the reaction to the strikes in parts of the media also suggests ingrained misunderstanding born of indifference: we had to publish this fact-check on teacher pay to correct numerous inaccurate reports in the wider press, while the scale of the accusations of teachers “letting pupils down” for a missed day of education was bizarre to witness (especially given the silence on the significant government-related problems that cause persistent learning loss).
However, I’m not as pessimistic as our letter-writer from 1919. Society is interested in education, I am certain, but our relationship with it is stubbornly personal: we care about what stops our own child doing well, not the range of issues that impact children more generally. We care about how far our own pet topics are represented in education, not which topics are more generally essential. We look for validation of our own experience of education, rather than looking at the system objectively.
Unless a way is found to connect these varied - and often competing - causes to a single, national issue, it’s incredibly difficult to achieve critical mass and force action.
It is this, not disinterest, that means most “radical evils” persist. And it is this that the unions will have to overcome if they are to have any chance of success on pay.
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