(Quoting from the
Bulletin of the Opposition!)
T
he Government is set on implementing a schools “remodelling” agenda which they promise will benefit everyone – schools, staff and pupils. But the only real winners will be the Treasury – who want to drive down the cost of education – and the Labour advisers whose real aim has always been to cover-up teacher shortages with underpaid and underqualified staff.
The Government have employed a clever strategy. By promising that “workforce reform” will meet the long-standing grievances of school staff, they have won the support of the leaders of all the school staff unions – apart, thankfully, from the NUT.
Support staff hope to finally gain recognition for the important role they play in the classroom – along with improved pay and conditions. They certainly deserve far better than the miserly wages and term-time only contracts that many have suffered for too long. However, rather than being paid properly for their current duties, pay rises for many will depend on them taking on the work of a teacher – but without earning a salary to match.
Many support staff are questioning what their union leaders have signed up to. So much so that UNISON’s Annual Local Government Conference in June agreed that “the experience of school remodelling for our members has been largely negative …. and underlines the argument of those who saw it as an attempt to use our members to provide teaching on the cheap”.
Any teachers that still believe in this Government’s promises may have hoped for a real “work/life balance” at long last. But the only genuine way of “raising standards and tackling workload” – as the Government claims to stand for – is to recruit more teachers.
With adequate budgets and staffing, every school could employ enough additional teachers to release colleagues for non-contact time and, together with pools of qualified supply staff, the ability to limit cover as well. Class sizes – a big factor in workload – could also be reduced, particularly as the overall pupil population falls. But, when it comes to expanding teacher numbers, the Government’s “Time for Standards” consultation paper put it bluntly, “this is not an option”.
Labour’s real agenda has always been about introducing “teaching-on-the-cheap”. As long ago as 1998, then DfES minister Margaret Hodge stated that “We should be thinking of employing fewer teachers, not more”