Education secretary Gavin Williamson is the one person who has made the most difference to our schools in the past year - but only because his time in office has been “calamitous”.
That’s the view of Robin Bevan, president of the NEU teaching union, whose exclusive interview is featured in this week’s Tes magazine.
Mr Bevan, a grammar school headteacher in Southend, Essex, says the education secretary “has unleashed a tsunami of incompetence that has had an extraordinary effect within the profession”.
He says: “I’ve never known the profession so united, school leaders collectively, and because we live in an age where immediate connectivity allows for groups of people to come together very, very easily, within minutes of a DfE announcement, there will be hundreds of teachers sharing responses to that.
Gavin Williamson ‘needs to listen to teachers’
“Some of them will be emotional responses, of course; some of them will be more informed and out of that emerges a consensus view.
“And when you think that, because of Gavin Williamson’s policies, the NEU had a meeting on Sunday 3 January which was live-streamed and viewed by over 400,000 people, most of whom would have been within or associated with the profession.
“That’s not the consequence he wanted, but it is certainly a consequence of the decision to seek to reopen primary schools to all pupils the following day in the face of not just ultimately opposition from the unions in regard to the safety of their members but in the face of what was so obviously an escalating level of infection in, through and beyond schools.”
Mr Bevan appears in a new weekly feature in Tes magazine in which 10 questions are put to a key educationalist to find out what motivates them.
When asked what would be the first thing he would do if he became education secretary tomorrow, Mr Bevan says: “Apologise for my predecessor.”
And he says there is “a desperate need” for consultation and engagement in the profession.
He says: “It’s almost been a badge of honour for [schools minister Nick] Gibb and Williamson and the Department for Education to overtly disregard what the profession is saying through the trade unions, and through [their] representatives. If that’s what the trade unions say, if that’s what teachers are saying, it’s almost as if they’re saying that ‘we definitely won’t do it’.”
The DfE has been contacted for comment.
You need a Tes subscription to read this article
Subscribe now to read this article and get other subscriber-only content:
