This Week In Education
By Adi Bloom
Remember the days of being glorified babysitters?
There was a while, during the worst of the Covid pandemic, when the phrase “glorified babysitters” was heard on a regular basis. Large segments of the (closed) staffroom were self-isolating, the R-rate was rising, and – despite all this – the government insisted that schools must stay open for all pupils.
The rationale was that parents needed somewhere to store their children safely during the working day. And teachers, justifiably, were outraged that their health was being risked in order to provide – cue portentous cough – a glorified babysitting service.
Then everything went back to normal, and the term was heard no more. Until this week.
On Saturday, the government announced that there was to be a bank holiday to mark the Queen’s funeral. Schools would close, but it would be left up to private employers’ discretion – as it is with all bank holidays – whether or not to give their staff the day off.
So began the domino-fall of outrage. First to hit the open-mouthed emoji key were the parents, duly appalled that they may now need to work out what to do with their children if they weren’t given the day off, too.
And that’s when teachers reached for the term that had served them so well in recent years. Schools, they pointed out, were not a glorified babysitting service: their job was not to serve at the convenience of working parents.
Still, being a glorified babysitter makes a pleasant change from being a woke warrior, which appears to be the other career path open to the ambitious teacher right now.
Jonathan Gullis, a former teacher turned MP for Stoke-on-Trent North, has been appointed minister at the Department for Education, working under incoming education secretary Kit Malthouse (the fifth education secretary this year, in case anyone is still counting).
Until now, Gullis’s most notable contribution to education policy was his claim at education questions in March this year that “woke-warrior teachers” were pushing “extremist nonsense, such as white privilege” on to pupils. He suggested that they wanted to “cancel important historical figures such as Sir Winston Churchill”, aided and abetted by the NEU.
As any student studying the Second World War will aver, Sir Winston Churchill continues to appear very much uncancelled.
Uncancelling, in fact, may be the central theme of the incoming DfE team: in May this year, Gullis launched a campaign to lift the ban on opening new grammar schools. He argued that opening selective schools in poorer areas would help level up (remember levelling up? It was briefly – if elusively – a thing) education.
His fellow DfE minister, Kelly Tolhurst, MP for Rochester and Strood, represents a constituency which already has a selective education system. Tolhurst has similarly spoken out in favour of grammar schools.
The appointment of both Gullis and Tolhurst reflects the new prime minister’s leadership-hustings promise to open new grammar schools.
Absent from Ms Truss’s hustings promises, you may recall, was any concrete solution to the energy crisis threatening this winter. As school leaders try to wring enough money from their budgets to cover the five per cent pay increase for experienced teachers announced by the DfE this summer, the government has still failed to provide any detail about what financial support will be available to cope with the rising costs of energy.
Speaking at a conference this week, Paul Gosling, headteacher of the NAHT school leaders’ union, compared drawing up a school budget right now to “trying to nail jelly to the wall”.
He told the Institute of School Business Leadership, in London: “The state of your finances at the moment is not your fault. The fault is very squarely on the government.”
He said that he and his union fully intend to bang on the education secretary’s door and demand that he sort things out.
Gosling, however, was not optimistic. Neither, in fact, are many school leaders. Academy-trust leaders have expressed fears that cash shortages may impede post-Covid catch-up and limit the support schools can offer to those pupils in greatest need.
Alison Brannick, principal at Landau Forte College, in Derby, told a Tes webinar that she was trying to make savings on central costs first, so as to be able to continue to support disadvantaged pupils.
“We ringfence a significant part of our budget to support families – with uniform, paid music lessons, bus passes – to ensure that we can fund trips for disadvantaged young people, what I am absolutely determined that we will still continue to do,” she said.
But, she added, the number of families contacting her with requests for financial support is higher than ever before. And schools – very much unlike babysitters, glorified or otherwise – feel an overarching responsibility for their pupils that rarely ends with the school day.
Click here to read Adi Bloom’s This Week In Education column every week.
