Political Parties

5 Apr 2016

Jeremy Corbyn – Persuader and Evader

Teachwell Education Policy, Political Parties Labour Party 0

Yesterday I attended one of the many local Q and A events that Jeremy Corbyn is holding in his bid for election as the Labour Party Leader. I have to give him his dues; he was positive and inspiring in real life. However, he comes across on TV, in person he is impressive. Corbyn is genuine, reflective and consistent. Winning or losing this leadership election will not make him revise his opinions, as he is not interested in being elected for the sake of it. That much I am convinced of.

He does understand that repeating the mistakes of the Labour Party under Blair is not what most people are seeking, something the other candidates might wish to think about. Neither is presenting oneself as Tory-lite actually a sure-fire strategy for winning the next election. Instead of seeking those voters in the middle who are undecided, he is setting store by tapping into those who chose to vote for the Greens and to some extent UKIP, instead of Labour. He has made efforts already to reach out and understand their specific concerns – not assuming they are crazies or bigots to be ignored or whose votes he needs to compromise himself for. He knows that many younger voters, for example, preferred the Greens to Labour in the last election. Is he wrong in this strategy? I am not sure. He has to win voters from other parties in order to ever be a PM, who’s to say this is the wrong strategy in the end? Certainly of all the candidates, despite being part of the London elite, he may actually have a chance of winning back support in Scotland – if that is indeed winnable. I can see him going down well.

Why is he persuasive? Because he is genuine and because I don’t think he is really trying to persuade at all. Yet I am not going to vote for him.

I was able to ask him the question I wanted on education (he was asked several at the same time, which he noted down and then answered, rather than a back and forth Question Time style questioning). I explained that I was a primary teacher and blogger on Labour Teachers, that there are teachers who were not happy about Tristam Hunt’s education policy and its adherence to progressivism. I then asked if he would listen to those of us who dissent in forming his education policy, especially in light of the links that the Conservatives are making with social mobility.

To say the question was met with a stony response in the audience was an understatement. These were the middle class left wing supporters, plus TUSC and Green voters who had turned up to see whether he could be their man. Jeremy himself looked at me incredibly quizzically at the mention of Hunt and did not seem to really be expecting such a question. Fair enough I guess.

His response consisted of the following:

He believed that educational markets do not work and that he would bring both Free Schools and Academies back into Local Authority control.
He wanted all schools to teach the national curriculum.
He believed there was too much testing and that learning was a goal in itself (which I agree with but simply don’t see progressivism as the means to achieve this).
He wanted the damage done to FE colleges reversed and for a greater emphasis to be placed on adult learning.

So he didn’t really answer the main thrust of my question about listening to all voices. I tried. He obviously is inclined to believe that LA will do the right thing in a way a Secretary of State can’t and is convinced by the narrative that left wing equals progressive education.

So where does this leave the Gramscians amongst us Labour supporters? Well it would appear out in the cold, whichever candidate is elected. So the real question is, is there anything we can do to register our position within the Labour Party more clearly – to get our concerns based on our experience and practices across? Blogging is necessary, but even here it is the Conservatives who are paying the most heed to us. Yet, like Corbyn, my values have not changed over time. It is simply that the political party that is expressing them is not the party I am a member of.

This post was originally published on the Labour Teachers website.

5 Apr 2016

Time to Link Social Mobility and Education Again

Teachwell Education Policy, Political Parties, Teaching and Learning Children, Education Policy 0

“I’m not interested in what Labour has to say anymore.” So said the other half, while turning over from Chris Leslie’s response to a question about the possibility of a Greek exit from the Euro. How many others currently feel the same way?

The Labour Party at the moment remind me of the Conservatives during the Blair years. That they are already mooting a change in leadership before the next election, while the current one has yet to be elected, is a farce. I think it has taken the Labour Party a while to realise (again, just as the Conservatives had to during the 1990s) that having a previous long run in office is no guarantee of a quick turn-around back into power. New Labour’s crowning achievement was actually repudiating the idea that the Conservatives were better at managing the economy. This left the Tories adrift in a manner they were not used to.

While education is not as important as the economy for most people, it is still up there. So how can Labour gain any ground in this area, which Gove wrestled from them?

What can Labour do?

Renounce their link to the academies? It would seem that some of the leadership candidates and new MPs are willing to do just that. The problem is that this involves turning back the clock. The Conservatives never managed it with grammar schools and I don’t think Labour can with academies. If privatisation occurs in the end, then the Labour Party will still have to accept their role in the process that led to it. After all, even Thatcher didn’t take schools out of LA control.

Attack the education secretary repeatedly? Nicky Morgan, despite her lack of solid facts at times, is affable. Having seen her in the flesh during a pre-election Education Question Time, I was impressed with her manner and ability to hold her own. She is not combative like Gove and does not slip into insults. However she is not weak as people imagined she would be. To be honest Christine Blower and Sam Pancheri (Green Party Candidate) may have appealed to the diehard unionists at the meeting, but I was left cold by their over-emotional appeals about testing 4 year olds. The Labour Party candidate, sensing that his main rival was the greens, joined in the chorus.

Nicky, on the other hand, calmly described her experience of her son’s home visit prior to starting school, the fact that the teacher did ask him questions that would give her an idea of some of his abilities and how unperturbed her son was. In addition, she, quite rightly, pointed out that most 4 year olds would not find using an iPad a stressful activity. No doubt any anxiety they will pick up will come from adults.

Other than Howard Stevenson, she is the only one I rated on the panel, who were simply making empty, popularist appeals with no substance. Talking of which, I am sure that I am not the only one who despaired when Tristam Hunt nailed his colours to Sir Ken Robinson’s flag. In one fell swoop, he managed to make voting Labour a challenge, knowing that the education policy would be a nonsense had they got into power.

The current Labour Party needs to reflect. The ‘trendy lefty’ teachers of the seventies did not mirror the Labour Party’s own education policies or values, neither did the Labour Party accommodate theirs. Their heirs, however, held sway over New Labour and infected their education policies. It shifted the party away from seeing education as a means of social mobility. The Conservative commitment to social mobility is shaky – for example, ending grants – however Labour cannot win this ground with their current attitudes and ideas.

It is they who should have been reading Hirsch’s books, not Gove. They need to listen to why some teachers favoured Gove’s ideas, and they need to create an education policy with substance that teachers can get behind not vague ideas and aspirations.

More importantly, get someone in the education post who actually knows the impact it can have on social mobility to the same extent that Gove did. For all his faults, he completely understood and knew that he embodied the ideal of bettering oneself through education. It is this more than anything else that makes him and I similar, and why I found myself agreeing with him. It’s time to bandage the liberal bleeding hearts and form a policy that the Conservatives cannot match in either style or substance.

The original post was published on the Labour Teachers website.

5 Apr 2016

What Now for Education?

Teachwell Education Policy, Political Parties, Progressive Education Conservative Party, Education Policy, Labour Party, Methods, Primary School, Secondary School, Teachers 0

The left needs to rethink. As I have argued here, much current thinking and practice in education can hardly be considered left-wing in the first place. There are certain truths that we need to face whether we like it or not.

1. There will be academisation of schools that are special measures or require improvement.
2. There will be 500 more free schools.
3. There will be some changes to Ofsted.
4. Whoever the Secretary of State is there is, for once, an acceptance that workload is far too high, and this is a bad thing. Whatever actions are (or are not as the case maybe) taken this is still an important statement from a Conservative government, who lets face are not known to be bothered by such things. It is something tangible that they can be held to account for. It is our job to hold them to account and let’s think of some solutions here.
5. It is not all about the government. If school leaders do not act to improve workload issues, then no amount of legislation or changes to Ofsted are going to matter
6. PRP is here to stay. Again the extent to this will be corrupted is down to school leaders, not the government. We need to direct action and anger wisely and discriminately if we are to negotiate these rough waters. However, a cursory glance at teacher vacancies shows that already there is a difference between schools who are considered to be good or outstand and those that aren’t. The schools opting for paying less and who don’t ask for experienced teachers even when this seems like a good idea (i.e. they are not doing well) is there. The effect on poorer children is not one to ignore. I agree there are NQTs that do brilliantly and experienced teachers who do not. However schools that inordinately take on NQTs, who they can’t support well lead to poor outcomes for children and teachers lost to the system.
7. The national curriculum is here to stay for state schools, and that is no bad thing. Hopefully, all the detractors who were hoping for a reverse will now get on with the task. Teachers and schools who have lost that fundamental purpose need to think about how their dumbing-down only leads to deprofessionalisation. If you are going to argue that we should spend our time tending to the emotional needs of pupils above their learning then what are you doing to the profession? Yes, emotional development affects learning, but our interventions need to be to support their learning. Anything else requires skilled professionals from other fields. Stop trying to save souls and start asking for more support from mental health professionals, even if the school has to buy into that.
8. We need to seek solutions that work from Speech and Language Therapists, Behaviour Specialists, etc. This means schools need to invest in them coming to us and jointly coming up with solutions that work for the classroom and not what may work if we were one-to-one with a challenging child or one with learning difficulties.

Labour needs to distance itself from the fads and the progressive nonsense. The Greens seem happy to step up to promoting pseudoscience so let them. We have always been the party to promote opportunities for all and we need to do so once again. The ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’ is real. Those of us from poorer backgrounds who are now teachers encounter this all the time and struggle precisely because we know we are giving them less than what we had. It is not our role to instigate and reinforce a two-tier system where the poor are treated fundamentally different to their middle and upper-class peers. We need to be the ones to tackle social inequality not embed it. We need to remember and reinforce the moral purpose for having a system of education for all in the first place.