Teachers Strike and Ofsted Ploughs On: When Will The Government Listen?
To everything, as aficionados of the Bible and 1960s folk music will know, there is a season: a time to be born, a time to die; a time to plant, a time to reap.
This week was just such a time: a time to make pleas that go unheard. It was a week in which people talked, and other people failed to listen.
First – though not to any degree foremost – among the great unheard were the members of parents’ WhatsApp groups up and down the country. Any other day of the year, opinions on school parents’ WhatsApp group tend to be divided over such pressing issues as how much is a reasonable amount of homework or whether it’s possible for parents to access the lost-property box outside school hours.
This week, however, middle-class parents came together with a single purpose: to point out to other parents that they really, really understood why teachers were striking, but they’d prefer it, thank you very much, if their own children’s teachers were not actually out on strike.
But the gods of social media turned away, unmoved. Fifty-four per cent of schools were either totally or partially closed on Wednesday, as a result of strikes by the NEU teachers’ union. They were striking for fairer pay, but also for proper funding for schools.
Secondary schools were particularly affected: 82.6 per cent of secondaries were fully or partially closed, compared with 47.8 per cent of primaries.
On the whole, however, the parents coped. A poll by Public First found that 47 per cent of people with school-age children believed that the teachers’ strikes were justified, compared with 40 per cent who argued that they were not justified.
And at least parents tended to limit their pleas to the confines of the WhatsApp group. By contrast, education secretary Gillian Keegan made hers in public. Please, she wrote in a letter to NEU leaders, could union members alert their headteachers in advance as to whether or not they were planning to go out on strike. This, she said, would “ensure our dispute does not cause additional and unnecessary disruption”.
In its reply, the NEU managed to refrain from pointing out that additional and unnecessary disruption is surely the precise point of a strike. Instead, it tweeted that Keegan should be concentrating on resolving the dispute: “Instead we get this cheap point scoring. Not good.” (It seems uncomradely to point out that this final “Not good” has something of the Trumpian tweet about it. And yet…there it is.)
The NEU joint general secretaries, Mary Bousted and Kevin Courtney, met Keegan on Monday, in an effort to reach an agreement. But they, too, found that their pleas fell on deaf ears. In a statement, the two union leaders said: “Gillian Keegan has squandered an opportunity to avoid strike action on Wednesday… The government has been unwilling to seriously engage with the causes of strike action.”
Of course, all of these unheeded pleas are dwarfed by those of the 300,000 teachers who took strike action on Wednesday, including an estimated 40,000 people who marched on Downing Street. Banners and placards highlighted the points of the strike: “Please sir, can I have some more?” or “I would have finished this sign, but I ran out of funds.”
Antonia Debbonaire, a primary teacher from Bristol, told Schoolsweek: “Teachers are using food banks. And it’s really hard to do a really hard job when you’re worrying about money and how you’re going to survive and all of that. So there needs to be some respect given to teachers… We should be paid properly.”
Never one to do things by half-measures, however, the government has not only chosen to ignore these pleas, but also those of the pupils speaking out in support of their striking teachers.
“It’s been a lot colder in my classrooms, because the central heating is turned on less frequently due to bills going up,” a Year 9 pupil wrote in The Guardian. “Leaks have appeared in some of our classroom ceilings.”
Lalalalala, said the government, with its hands over its ears. We can’t hear you.
But the government did not have exclusive rights to the refusal to listen to teachers’ pleas this week. Instead, it was joined by Ofsted, which ploughed on regardless, as grimly inevitable as death and taxes.
The Association of School and College Leaders had called on the inspectorate not to conduct any inspections at all during strike weeks – a request that Ofsted had duly rejected. Instead, it said that it would not inspect schools on strike days, and that it would notify schools the day before strikes if they were to be inspected the day afterwards.
As a result, Meols Cop High School, in Southport, was told on Tuesday that it would be inspected on Thursday and Friday this week. The union therefore gave its 32 members at the school a ceremonial exemption, allowing them to cross the picket line to prepare for the inspection.
(While such preparation will obviously make a difference, staff might have done well to check the sex of their designated inspector before making the decision to cross the picket line.)
New research has revealed that female Ofsted inspectors are more likely to hand out lower grades than their male counterparts – though specifically to primary schools, which would have been of limited use to Meols Cop.
A study by the University of Southampton and University College London also shows that higher grades are handed out by freelance inspectors – who largely tend to work in schools – than by those working for the watchdog full time.)
Meanwhile, using the kind of language that could have been inspired by Ofsted (which is, at least, an improvement on Donald Trump), the NEU declared that Keegan has been “put on notice” to come up with a new pay offer, in order to avoid more strikes.
Effectively placing the education secretary in special measures, the NEU general secretaries issued a statement saying: “Today, we put the education secretary on notice. She has until our next strike day for England, 28 February, to change her stance. NEU members do not want to strike again.”
Failing schools can be turned around: that is the entire purpose of special measures. To everything there is a season. Turn, turn, turn.
You can read more education news analysis by Adi Bloom, by clicking here.
