Former education secretary Michael Gove created an education system with “failure baked into it” and that prevents teachers from being the “educators we want to be”, the president of the NEU teaching union has warned.
Speaking as the union’s annual conference got underway in Bournemouth this morning, Emma Rose criticised the damage that Gove’s “world-class education system” has had on schools.
“We have a system with failure baked into it,” Ms Rose told delegates in her first annual conference speech as president of the union.
She said the systemic failure started with the phonics screening check, “where six-year-old children - who in other countries wouldn’t even have started school yet - are classified as ‘not meeting the expected standard’.”
Ms Rose used her speech to criticise the assessment system, telling members that she feared that some pupils would be “classed as failures” in the current model.
“The failure extends up to GCSEs where regardless of how well you do, the grade you come out with is based on how you perform compared to your peers,” she said. “Doing better than everyone else just isn’t possible for all children.”
Strike action over pay
The president’s speech opened the conference this morning, which is set to see the country’s biggest teaching union debate its next move over teacher pay tomorrow - after most of the 50.3 per cent of members who took part in an indicative ballot last month voted to support strike action again this year.
Last year, the government faced months of teacher walkouts by NEU members, with all four major education unions backing industrial action in disputes over pay and workload.
That industrial action came to an end after the unions accepted a pay offer from the Department for Education, which gave teachers and leaders a 6.5 per cent pay rise from September 2023.
Ms Rose also warned the conference of a “lack of professional autonomy”, which is becoming “ever more prevalent” in the education system.
“I’ve heard of schools where there are prescribed schemes of learning that are determined by the [multi-academy trust],” she said, adding that “scripted lesson plans” are being written by people “who don’t know the students in the classroom”.
“All of these damage a school’s capacity to relate to the experiences and needs of their communities and undermine a student’s right to access a broad and balanced curriculum,” she added.
Union members to vote on teacher supply crisis
Members are set to vote on a motion over the “failure to recruit and retain teachers” this week, amid a worsening supply crisis.
The move comes after the government missed its target for the recruitment of secondary teacher trainees by 50 per cent - an even greater shortfall than last year.
Meanwhile, the government’s plans to restrict future teacher strikes are also set to be debated by NEU members in Bournemouth later this week.
“Beating the ballot thresholds - designed to make it virtually impossible for us to strike - led to us becoming more organised and galvanised than ever before,” Ms Rose told the conference.
Under the government’s proposed plan for minimum service levels (MSLs) for schools, particular groups of pupils would have to be in school on strike days.
The union is also set to hold debates on motions regarding pay and conditions, wellbeing, support staff, special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) and curriculum and assessment this week.
Assessment, curriculum and accountability are the first set of motions set to be debated by members this morning, including a resolution to abolish Ofsted.
The motion comes after Ofsted launched its Big Listen consultation last month, which has been criticised by some for not answering the “right” questions.
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