Four young teachers discuss academies and free schools, the impact of the cuts on their teaching and the attempts of the coalition government to improve the quality of teachers.
Rob Illingworth is head of modern foreign languages in a school in Nottinghamshire.
Dave Mingay is a primary special needs teacher in Luton.
Nick Wigmore is a primary teacher and divisional secretary, Rochdale.
Neil Young is a secondary maths teacher in Brecon. They talk about (in order): the dangers of turning schools into academies; the effects the cuts have already had on their teaching; the proposed changes to the curriculum; and the coalition's plans to 'raise the quality' of new teachers. The education white paper set out the importance of academies to the coalition's education reforms, saying 'we want every school to be able to shape its own character, frame its own ethos and develop its own specialisms, free of either central or local bureaucratic constraint. It is our ambition, therefore, to help every school which wishes to enjoy greater freedom to achieve Academy status.'
DM: It's like putting a big for sale sign outside your school. 'Do you want to run my school for profit? Do you want to run my school to make a business? Feel free. We don't have to pay our teachers on national pay and conditions, we don't have to do what the school round the corner does... We'll do whatever you say if you give us enough money.' RI: There are local agreements in education we fought for in the union for years, with local authorities, which are just completely being dismantled. When you get an academy, the bribe to academies is £400,000 extra a year, which is going to come from other schools in that local area. DM: £25,000 just for expressing an interest. RI: So, if you look at the amount of money that's being taken away from the schools that refuse on principle to become part of this - and I will fight any attempt to turn my school into an academy - those children are punished for it. It's a repeat of what we saw in the '90s with grant-maintained schools being bribed to leave local education authority control. It's an appalling treatment of the system. I can't believe anyone thinks it's the right way. And actually, if companies wanted to be involved in education to improve it, it's gone on for many years before the academies programme happened. Companies who wanted to do it for the good of children in certain areas, for the good of their workforce further down the line, did it. Speedo had a huge influence in schools in Nottinghamshire. Raleigh used to do the same. They did it because they thought it was the right thing to do. They didn't want control of a governing body to do it. They didn't want to make the decisions; they wanted to do something that they thought was beneficial, and that's a fantastic thing for them to do. Doing it to make profits, that's taking money out of education when, frankly, more in education would benefit children more. How do you think becoming an academy would affect your lessons? RI: If you assume that the private industries are getting into this for profit - because if they weren't, as I said before, they could have done it another way - that takes money out of education. Now the question is, where does that money come from? It either comes out of the numbers of teachers and staff you have at that school, or it comes out of the building and looking after the area in which you teach. It can't really come from anywhere else. Each of those would have a detrimental effect on my ability to teach a class. I would either have a bigger class, I would have a classroom in which it's more difficult to do it, [or] I would have fewer resources at my disposal with which to do that. We would be working longer hours than we already are; we would have larger numbers of children in our classroom, because that's the way of getting the money out for them. And that would obviously mean less contact time with the children. You would have less time to plan interesting exciting lessons, feedback would not by definition be there as quickly. Five extra children in a classroom, when it comes to marking and assessing a student, adds a huge amount of time, which would mean you wouldn't be doing such a good job. The feedback that we give to help students improve would not be as good, by definition. The other thing is that there's an academy in the East Midlands that had a funeral in the school hall half way through a school day. Now, I find that very hard to deal with because of the effect that clearly must have on a school day and the ability of children to focus on what they're doing. NW: I think we've got to be careful, because there are so many different types of academy now. You do have the multinationals but also you have the stand-alone academies. They are by definition isolated; they don't have these safety nets of local authorities or sister academies elsewhere, albeit somewhere else in the country; they don't have that type of corporate body that they can depend on. And I think my worry would be the way that the profile of the classroom would change. Academies, almost by definition, become exclusive. They become exclusive by either having a different admissions policy, allowing only certain types of children in, or having a particular exclusions policy, which means they let everyone in but they've got the back door open to push people out. And so attitudes towards inclusion would invariably be affected. Funding for special needs, things like that, would be skewed one way or another. RI: If you look at those elements of it, it's quite frightening the changes. The academy sponsor effectively has a ready-made majority on the governing body. That gives you a lot of power to impose things on the head teacher. I think that what Nick says about the profile of a class is very important. Comprehensive education means that people mix with all elements of society, and that is beneficial for society as a whole. You learn to deal with different people from different backgrounds. The academies process and the changing of the profile is likely to change people's ability to do that. But it's argued that academies perform better. The White Paper argues, 'academies improved at GCSE level twice as fast as other schools in 2008 and 2009,' for example. RI: The way they do it is completely fixed. We are encouraged to do the same things now in schools that aren't academies to try and keep this up. NW: It's a race to the bottom. Essentially it is lowering your standards. How? RI: The BTEC in science is two GCSEs, and it is frankly a qualification in copying out a textbook. I teach science and maths on occasion, and I am appalled by it. Say you're put onto that course because it'll get you a C grade, and that'll look good for the school because the results will go up. But you want to be a midwife. If you do the BTEC, you can't go on to do A level sciences, therefore you can't be a midwife. If you do the GCSE and get a C grade, you can then do the sciences at A level. You may, if you work hard, do well enough to achieve the grades to get you on to that [midwifery] course. It's for the benefit of the school that these qualifications are taken. So you agree with the coalition when they say, talking about the increase in the take-up of vocational qualifications, 'So, while more young people are participating in education for longer, the curriculum and qualifications they are pursuing contain too much that is not essential and too little which stretches them to achieve standards matching the best in the world.' RI: If you're not suited to some of the academic learning further up your time in a comprehensive school, then I think actually having vocational engineering or construction is very useful. Too many vocational subjects, too little uptake of academic subjects? That's because of the pressure we put on schools as well. If that pressure wasn't there for these results to always be there, then you wouldn't find head teachers suggesting things that aren't for the benefit of children. NW: We've got a complete mess in the exam system. Secondary is a complete mess. It's bewildering; it's confusing even for the people who work within it, so that needs to be levelled out - I'm absolutely certain of that. As a parent, you would hope that your child was doing the right subject for them. It doesn't matter whether it's basket weaving or science; it's what is right for them. It's not what will get them the highest grade or the most passes; it's got to be what is right for them. It might be the vocational PE, or it might be physics. We can't afford to have this snobbishness and this complete lack of parity. So I'm sympathetic to what they say, but to suggest that there are too many vocation subject, well, what's too many? DM: What the statement does, it undermines what he's saying about trust and respect in teachers, because he's saying, 'Yes, we trust you but, by the way, you're not doing your job properly.' Why aren't these children getting more A levels, why aren't they doing more GCSEs? Why are they being put into BTECs? Why are they being put forward for vocational qualifications? Because if they get a BTEC, they can get two GCSEs, and it's easier. NY: These vocational courses are a joke, you know. Content is going down, the pass mark is being reduced, but [we are told] standards are going up! One academy that is often brought out to support academies in general is Mossbourne Academy, in Hackney, which does have a lot of kids from poorer backgrounds. It's not selective and its students received 70 offers from Russell Group universities in 2010; 83% 5 A* to C grades at GCSE and was ranked in the top 1% of secondary schools nationally. NW: No doubt it's a good school. You can have a school that is really good and an academy. But it would also be a good school if it wasn't an academy. But it wasn't [a good school before it was an academy]. NW: I know, but this is the effect of good teaching, strong leadership, investment from the government. It's the result of a combination of factors which could equally, if not more so, apply to an ordinary state, local authority school. DM: That school did well and improved because it became an academy and got the funding. If it maintained its status but got the same funding and the same support, it would probably still be a very good school. What came with the academy status was new buildings, more money, lots of support. RI: Some schools will do very well as academies but there is a lot of danger to the academy system. Once you've become an academy, you cant go back into local authority control. We're disbanding the support networks, we're taking money from schools in an area and we're giving it to other schools. And we're doing that because then we can say that academies work and here is proof. We could all give you examples of academies that have had that sort of funding, have had those improvements, and are still receiving the same results that they did before the funding, but we have got enough about us not to name schools in those circumstances. Personally, I don't think it would be a reasonable thing for me to do. DM: In Luton we have the studio school. The [academy] doesn't have to exclude children in order to get better results; they can simply transfer the children who aren't doing very well, who aren't going to achieve excellent academic subjects, into the studio school, which is a school designed to do vocational subjects. Therefore the children that are left are the more able children. They're not surrounded by children who are struggling in school, and they do better. It's just another form of selection. NW: Three years ago now, I looked at some data which was in the TES on exclusion. My fag packet calculations were that you were 10 times more likely to be permanently excluded from an academy, compared to peers in another school. RI: The National Union [of Teachers] statistic would suggest it is at least five times as great. Clearly that's slightly strange. The schools budget was protected in the recent Spending Review, with the White Paper saying, 'At a time when deficit reduction is an urgent national priority, and other budgets are being cut, there is a real terms growth in school funding.' DM: No, there isn't. That's not true at all. NW: In Rochdale, there's been a massive hit on what we call the area-based grounds, which means that essentially Rochdale schools were kept afloat by grants from various sources; central government grants, which are now being removed. The impact is huge. Every single week Im going to meetings at schools where staff are being made redundant. Ten schools are going through restructuring, which involves numbers of teachers, other support staff, losing their jobs. That's just in Rochdale. RI: I could give you similar statistics from Nottinghamshire. DM: It's a spin, because the Dedicated Schools Grant didn't face cuts, which did remain the same, but schools aren't just funded by the Dedicated Schools Grant. Numerous other methods of funding that schools, particularly in deprived areas, relied upon, those funding streams got cut and dried up. So schools which relied on those levels of funding - external funding sources - have had part of their budgets cut. RI: And not just that. Vast swathes of the support system in education is being cut. It might not be a direct schools project but it has a direct effect on us. We get funding for something through the British Council, for trips internationally. The British Council's grant is being cut. When you look at the myriad of things that actually aid the education system, the cuts have been huge. DM: Every single school in the region has had a reduction overall. In real terms they've had their budgets cut. And the pupil premium, which we got told is to the benefit of children from more disadvantaged areas, has been taken out of the education budget. The theory is very good: that children from a more deprived area have more money attached to them, therefore increasing the school's funding. But it was taken away from other schools, so other schools have suffered as a direct result. NY: I just think if education is going to move forward - and let's be honest, and I'll be controversial - we have got to tighten our belts; we've got to cut the wasting of money. It's not rocket science what we do. If I wanted to learn how to keep pigeons or keep greyhounds, or keep racehorses, I'd speak to somebody who did that. If they want to know about education, why don't they bloody speak to us? Speak to people on the front line. Look at the [former] education minister for Wales, Jane Hunt. Because she was garbage at [education], she went to farming. She cocked up farming and now she's in the health service. She's an expert teacher, expert farmer and an expert nurse! I think they're scared to speak to us because they think they're going to get a grilling, and rightly so - they deserve one. We have all these teaching bureaucrats and the figure is, I think, it's 700 behind-the-scenes office workers, bureaucrats in education. Five of them are teachers, or were teachers. I think the really good teachers get promoted and go to these places and they forget what they did to get there. Also, as well as the cuts, we can all sit here and talk about money being wasted - ridiculous sums of money. Industry in Wales at the moment is screaming out, because they're having to move industry abroad. They're trying to invest in Wales and the local economy, and they're saying they can't because there's a lack of a skilled workforce. And by cutting now, we're ruining that skilled workforce for the next generation. What happens to the generation after that? NW: But the money-saving that is going on in education isn't because of a 'deficit' or whatever else. One of the drivers, one of the motivating factors, is to cheapen education so that the private sector will find education affordable. Because as education is, it's not well-suited to privatisation. The cuts and the cheapening in education at the moment aren't because of an overspend in education, because spending is still going on. The spending that went on over the last 10 years, for things like the PFI, will continue for another 15-25 years. Are you saying that, if there's not as much public funding, there's an excuse to get the private sector in, because they say they can invest more? NW: Well, the desire is that all schools will become academies, [so they] essentially will be privately run. In order to get sponsors into academies, you need to make it tenable. You need to make it financially affordable and viable as a business plan, and so the one thing you start doing is lowering the cost each school has to meet DM: If everything that has to come from central funding is decreased, then the private sector is much more likely to come and say, 'You know what, I'll have that, I'll run that school for profit, because it's not costing me as much. Wages have been driven down; I don't have to pay as much into their pension. I don't have to have qualified teachers; I can pay people what I want. I can do what I want with that school. I can promote my company and I can make lots of money.' RI: I think a lot of the cuts in education are going to have an effect on how the organisation of secondary schools goes on. We used to have a modern languages faculty; we now have a 'directorate of learning'. Since when? RI: Two years it's been in place, and that's due to the financial constraints on the school. So previously, where we had two managers in a modern languages department, 5.4 teachers (full time equivalent), a head of German who looked at the curriculum for that, and a department that was still finding it very hard to do its job. I now have three teachers, one manager and I'm overseen by somebody who was the Head of English. The departmental budget has probably halved in that time. I'm now being given exactly the same sets as the English department to teach them modern languages, because that is how the timetable now apparently works. So the assumption is, if a student is good at English, they are good at French, which I would like to think is true, but I'm aware that it isn't. I'm not being able to move students into a group appropriate for their level because I am hamstrung by the system I work in. The amount of ridiculous quality assurance I am now expected to do on my own, which previously was done by the managers in the department, means that I do not have time to focus on developing a more interesting curriculum, which I think is the most important thing to teaching modern languages. A more active curriculum that will motivate students in an area where parental attitudes to the subject are not great. It doesn't take a genius to work out why the results are as they are. NY: In Wales we're having a massive cut of sixth formers at the moment. There's only one bottom line that local education authorities have, and that's a balance sheet. I just can't understand how you can condone closing sixth forms. RI: Class sizes are going up because we're spending money on more non-qualified teachers in the classroom, more administrators; and in a subject like modern languages, the bigger your class size gets, the far more difficult it is to do the speaking, the listening and the elements of the modern languages curriculum that are so important to actually getting a qualification. NY: It's [the same with] any subject. Once the class size gets bigger beyond a certain limits, it's impossible. Maths, you know, you're totally watering down your expertise. You're spending more time preparing and more time doing the things which don't actually benefit the children. [If class sizes were smaller,] I might have spent the time creating resources. Maths is a very mundane subject and it can be mechanical, dry and boring. But I think if I had the time and the money to put into my subject, it would have enthused those children who are coming in, the lower-end kids. And I also think we miss the middle out. The good little girls and the good little boys who don't stick their head above the parapet; who are not incredibly bright but who are not incredibly poor either - I think we miss them out. I think if I could have spent that time preparing resources to make the subject more accessible for children, that'd be fantastic. I could have made a maths game, maths resources, made a maths club. I could have used a maths jigsaw. You've got to do it yourself. Creating jigsaws, you'll take three hours each to do them properly, get them laminated, number the backs so when they get mixed up you know where they all go. DM: When I was a mainstream primary teacher, hearing a child read once a week was a real challenge when you've got 30 children in your class and you've got to teach those children English, maths, science, RE, geography, history, all the other subjects. And if you say to the parent, 'By the way, I haven't heard your child read this week,' it's an outrage. They expect their child to read every day. Well, if you've got 30 children, then your time with each individual child is minute. NY: We could sit here now and put together, on one of these A5 sheets of paper, a plan which is better than the one now. I just don't know why they don't listen. All of these great ideas, grand words, they never ever seem to speak to teachers. RI: The important thing about teachers, as much as the job that they do, is the numbers of them. Michael Gove says that people leave school unable to read and write. But if he gave primary teachers a smaller class, they would be able to have more impact further down, where you can actually make more of a difference. As a secondary teacher, I hold my hands up to the fact that I am aware that the most difference you can make in the education of a child is in primary school, especially when it comes to their literacy and their numeracy. NW: Looking at the coalition now, we have an entire government that has not had proper access to state education, whose experience of education is skewed towards private provision. That problem is then increased by the fact that the various consultations, and various working parties, that they've got tend to avoid including teachers, or at least practising teachers. Just thinking about href="www.education.gov.uk/inthenews/inthenews/a0076435/key-stage-2-testing-assessment-and-accountability-review-progress-report-published">Lord Bew's review panel on assessments, there is not a single working, practising teacher on that review panel. They've got various people from private enterprise, as you could call it, but no-one who's actually a bloody teacher. So it seems to be increasingly accepted that, in order to steer policy in education, you talk to everyone but teachers. And, in fact, you actively exclude teachers from that process. RI: In my life time, I think we've had one education minister who's been a teacher, and she resigned because people weren't allowing her to do what she felt was right. The coalition, and Michael Gove in particular, has focused on changes to the curriculum, with the White Paper saying, 'We need a new approach to the National Curriculum, specifying a tighter, more rigorous, model of the knowledge which every child should expect to master in core subjects at every key stage. In a school system which encourages a greater degree of autonomy and innovation the National Curriculum will increasingly become a rigorous benchmark, against which schools can be judged rather than a prescriptive straitjacket into which all learning must be squeezed.' RI: They talk about freeing up teachers to do these things but then talk about [them being] tied to a more rigorous curriculum - you can't do both. NW: It's dangerous when you've got someone who doesn't understand the consequences of the stuff that he says, which is continually bluster. This idea of a rigorous curriculum, it's just staggeringly stupid because you're opening up Pandora's box. He hasn't explained what he means, really. He hasn't explained how this would be applied in the real world. All of it is spin; it's twisted; it's not consistent with other aspects of what their policies are in the white paper. It's a worry, where you can have creationism or intelligent design being taught as a science subject. RI: As a sound bite, it appeals to people. There will be people who go, 'Oh well, yes, the teachers I speak to have said [they need more freedom]; they've said that's important'. And you'll get people who go, 'It was a bit more rigorous in my day and I think that's probably a wise idea.' But actually, if you don't work in education, you don't actually see the effect. NW: Basically, what Gove is saying is: teachers will be free to do what I tell them to do. Here's what I envisage freedom to be and you must do that. RI: And to make sure you're doing it, we're going to test them at 6, 11 and 16 to make sure that that's what's happening. The coalitions say their reforms are going to end the culture of preparing for tests. RI: It says that but it also says it's going to value teachers; it's going to make teaching the 'noble profession.' They've got no desire to take away the key stage tests. They want to actually increase the information that goes onto league tables, so what they're actually doing is making the key stage tests and league tables, and giving them an even greater profile. They're quite explicit about this. So they might say we're going to remove that focus of teaching to a test. How? How are they going to do that? While the head teacher and the Year 6 teachers' careers depends on it, I'm afraid their hands are tied. You might have that desire to broaden and enrich the curriculum, but you've got this great big axe hanging over your head. I'm afraid while there remain such high stakes tests at the end of Key Stage 2 particularly, but increasingly across the school, you can't do anything but teach to the tests. NW: Having a single event test, which is - to say high stakes is an understatement everything. It's that school's future. It's no longer a simple snapshot to inform teachers on how that child is doing. It's a con that parents have been hoodwinked into. They've bought into it, understandably, because once you've been told SATS tests, and these fairly arbitrary levels, are really essential to your child's education; once you've been told that so many times, then you believe it. It's become out of control. It's no longer just taken over the Year 6 curriculum - that's bad enough, but it's now the entire primary school. RI: It's having a huge effect on secondary schools as well. NW: Precisely, it's now being taken back into the early years foundation, where you've got testing of children. The testing's unreliable; it's just a very crude proxy indicator. It's a monumental waste of money. It's a huge waste of time. NY: We don't have SATs in Wales, mind. NW: Well, yes, of course, and indeed the sky didn't fall in, did it?, when you chased those out of Wales, back across the border into England? The White Paper argues that among the most important aspects of education is the quality of teachers, with David Cameron and Nick Clegg saying, 'The most successful countries, from the Far East to Scandinavia, are those where teaching has the highest status as a profession; South Korea recruits from their top 5 per cent of graduates and Finland from the top 10 per cent.' To do this, the White Paper says the government will 'continue to raise the quality of new entrants to the teaching profession, by ceasing to provide Department for Education funding for initial teacher training for those graduates who do not have at least a 2:2 degree; expanding Teach First; offering financial incentives to attract more of the very best graduates in shortage subjects into teaching; and enabling more talented career changers to become teachers.' NW: Yet again, it's this lack of consistency. It is labouring under this false impression that teaching is all about the academic prowess of the teacher that's stood in front of the class. Now, you don't need that much academic prowess to teach, say, a Year Four class of seven to eight years old - teaching them maths. What you need is an understanding of the art of teaching, and that is not something that is necessarily reflected in my degree. DM: I went to university and I studied teaching for three years. There were many people in my course who were going to get first class honours who made great teachers. Likewise, there were many who got first class honours degrees who made rubbish teachers. There are people who are going to get a third, or a 2:2, who are going to make great teachers. We keep saying this to the government: just because you can get a good degree doesn't make you a good teacher. Teaching itself is a craft. It is an art form. Being an academic doesn't make you a good teacher. RI: There's something else in there, and that is how teachers are valued in their societies. In the Far East, teachers are seen as one of the most respected positions you can possibly be in. They are well rewarded; they are given time to do their job properly; they are trusted in their opinions of how you go about doing the job. Finland, Scandinavia, the same is true. I actually think, with the graduates we have doing the job now, if they were left to their professional judgement, education would be better and standards would be better. You may say the words are hollow, but phrases the government is using, like 'the teacher is society's most valuable asset,' will help, won't they? RI: You can say that until you're blue in the face as a politician. Every generation of politicians have said how important teachers are, because if you don't say that, then you face a problem. It's not about what you say in those circumstances; it's about what you do within an education system that allows us to do our jobs to the best of our ability. And the expansion of Teach First? NW: I think if anyone could prove to me that there's something fundamentally wrong with the provision for training teachers that already exists, then I'd be convinced. DM: There are now so many different routes into teaching: you can join the army and then become a teacher; you've got Teach first, you can go and ruin the stock exchange and then become a teacher... there are so many different ways. RI: I've met a lot of [Teach First teachers]. Now, they've gone into it for the right reasons. They've not got a background in education in most cases, so they aren't necessarily aware of some of the issues they're going to face. Because they are not trained as such before they go in, in the same way that teachers are, they face problems that we don't. Yes, in some cases they are very passionate about their subject, but I think most teachers are very passionate. That sort of stuff is there already. You're getting a highly qualified graduate out of it, but you're not giving them the tools to do the job. Now, encouraging these people to go through initial teacher training and become teachers, I'm all in favour of. Putting this short cut in place, which actually disadvantages them, I don't agree with. Supporting schools with these people where they do have more problems with the achievement in core subjects, I can't say I don't agree with giving more resources to a school that's struggling. However, if you're going to get these people to do it, get them to go through teacher training and then get them into a classroom with the strategies they need to cope. NW: And again, it's teaching on the cheap. It's creating a false idea of what teaching is. It's grossly over-simplifying the skills that you need and the training that you need. We're back to this mixed message from the government, which is: teaching is a highly skilled craft, but it's one that you don't need any training in. RI: I think in some respects as well, those who are that academically able have not necessarily had to struggle to get through education. I found school very easy; I found university very easy; I got into teaching and one of the things that was very important for me to understand, through teacher training, was how it feels not to succeed; how I can help those students bridge those gaps. And that training was massively important. [Not having that] has a massive effect on their ability to cope. So they sometimes have a bit of a rocky start and then, as in any classroom, when you have a bit of a rocky start, the kids take advantage of that situation. But many Teach First teachers go on to become deputy heads, or take on management positions. DM: That's out of the classroom. RI: They're all academically bright people. I think some of the management that I've met over the years are not necessarily the more capable teachers. I think they're the more driven and ambitious teachers. So how do you think we'll get from the position now, where these reforms are being passed, into a position where the decent changes that you think need to be made can be made? NW: I think one of the key things is that we engage with parents. Not just talking to the converted. Making sure that we can share [ideas] with parents; that we can encourage parents to take part in the process of consultation; that their voices are heard and that they do what's within their democratic power to support the interest of their children and their community school. DM: When you communicate with parents, you're not spinning them a lie. We've talked about SATs. Parents are told that these tests will improve their children's education. They are told it's really vital that we have league tables so we can judge schools. If you talk to parents, they don't move into an area because they've got a better school, because they're further up the league tables than the school they were at when they lived in their other house. If you just go to school at the end of the road and you have a real input, a real say into how that school is run without being spun constant lies and hypocrisy and spin, that is how you're going to improve education. RI: But we need all of them to stand up and be counted. We can't afford to be a small number of activists. We need a large number of activists, standing up and saying, 'We can't let this go on for the good of teachers, children and society.' They say we're borrowing from the future to pay for today as far as the banking is concerned. Well again, if we let down our education system, then again we're borrowing from tomorrow to pay for today. We're just doing it in a completely different way.
Dave Mingay is a primary special needs teacher in Luton.
Nick Wigmore is a primary teacher and divisional secretary, Rochdale.
Neil Young is a secondary maths teacher in Brecon. They talk about (in order): the dangers of turning schools into academies; the effects the cuts have already had on their teaching; the proposed changes to the curriculum; and the coalition's plans to 'raise the quality' of new teachers. The education white paper set out the importance of academies to the coalition's education reforms, saying 'we want every school to be able to shape its own character, frame its own ethos and develop its own specialisms, free of either central or local bureaucratic constraint. It is our ambition, therefore, to help every school which wishes to enjoy greater freedom to achieve Academy status.'
DM: It's like putting a big for sale sign outside your school. 'Do you want to run my school for profit? Do you want to run my school to make a business? Feel free. We don't have to pay our teachers on national pay and conditions, we don't have to do what the school round the corner does... We'll do whatever you say if you give us enough money.' RI: There are local agreements in education we fought for in the union for years, with local authorities, which are just completely being dismantled. When you get an academy, the bribe to academies is £400,000 extra a year, which is going to come from other schools in that local area. DM: £25,000 just for expressing an interest. RI: So, if you look at the amount of money that's being taken away from the schools that refuse on principle to become part of this - and I will fight any attempt to turn my school into an academy - those children are punished for it. It's a repeat of what we saw in the '90s with grant-maintained schools being bribed to leave local education authority control. It's an appalling treatment of the system. I can't believe anyone thinks it's the right way. And actually, if companies wanted to be involved in education to improve it, it's gone on for many years before the academies programme happened. Companies who wanted to do it for the good of children in certain areas, for the good of their workforce further down the line, did it. Speedo had a huge influence in schools in Nottinghamshire. Raleigh used to do the same. They did it because they thought it was the right thing to do. They didn't want control of a governing body to do it. They didn't want to make the decisions; they wanted to do something that they thought was beneficial, and that's a fantastic thing for them to do. Doing it to make profits, that's taking money out of education when, frankly, more in education would benefit children more. How do you think becoming an academy would affect your lessons? RI: If you assume that the private industries are getting into this for profit - because if they weren't, as I said before, they could have done it another way - that takes money out of education. Now the question is, where does that money come from? It either comes out of the numbers of teachers and staff you have at that school, or it comes out of the building and looking after the area in which you teach. It can't really come from anywhere else. Each of those would have a detrimental effect on my ability to teach a class. I would either have a bigger class, I would have a classroom in which it's more difficult to do it, [or] I would have fewer resources at my disposal with which to do that. We would be working longer hours than we already are; we would have larger numbers of children in our classroom, because that's the way of getting the money out for them. And that would obviously mean less contact time with the children. You would have less time to plan interesting exciting lessons, feedback would not by definition be there as quickly. Five extra children in a classroom, when it comes to marking and assessing a student, adds a huge amount of time, which would mean you wouldn't be doing such a good job. The feedback that we give to help students improve would not be as good, by definition. The other thing is that there's an academy in the East Midlands that had a funeral in the school hall half way through a school day. Now, I find that very hard to deal with because of the effect that clearly must have on a school day and the ability of children to focus on what they're doing. NW: I think we've got to be careful, because there are so many different types of academy now. You do have the multinationals but also you have the stand-alone academies. They are by definition isolated; they don't have these safety nets of local authorities or sister academies elsewhere, albeit somewhere else in the country; they don't have that type of corporate body that they can depend on. And I think my worry would be the way that the profile of the classroom would change. Academies, almost by definition, become exclusive. They become exclusive by either having a different admissions policy, allowing only certain types of children in, or having a particular exclusions policy, which means they let everyone in but they've got the back door open to push people out. And so attitudes towards inclusion would invariably be affected. Funding for special needs, things like that, would be skewed one way or another. RI: If you look at those elements of it, it's quite frightening the changes. The academy sponsor effectively has a ready-made majority on the governing body. That gives you a lot of power to impose things on the head teacher. I think that what Nick says about the profile of a class is very important. Comprehensive education means that people mix with all elements of society, and that is beneficial for society as a whole. You learn to deal with different people from different backgrounds. The academies process and the changing of the profile is likely to change people's ability to do that. But it's argued that academies perform better. The White Paper argues, 'academies improved at GCSE level twice as fast as other schools in 2008 and 2009,' for example. RI: The way they do it is completely fixed. We are encouraged to do the same things now in schools that aren't academies to try and keep this up. NW: It's a race to the bottom. Essentially it is lowering your standards. How? RI: The BTEC in science is two GCSEs, and it is frankly a qualification in copying out a textbook. I teach science and maths on occasion, and I am appalled by it. Say you're put onto that course because it'll get you a C grade, and that'll look good for the school because the results will go up. But you want to be a midwife. If you do the BTEC, you can't go on to do A level sciences, therefore you can't be a midwife. If you do the GCSE and get a C grade, you can then do the sciences at A level. You may, if you work hard, do well enough to achieve the grades to get you on to that [midwifery] course. It's for the benefit of the school that these qualifications are taken. So you agree with the coalition when they say, talking about the increase in the take-up of vocational qualifications, 'So, while more young people are participating in education for longer, the curriculum and qualifications they are pursuing contain too much that is not essential and too little which stretches them to achieve standards matching the best in the world.' RI: If you're not suited to some of the academic learning further up your time in a comprehensive school, then I think actually having vocational engineering or construction is very useful. Too many vocational subjects, too little uptake of academic subjects? That's because of the pressure we put on schools as well. If that pressure wasn't there for these results to always be there, then you wouldn't find head teachers suggesting things that aren't for the benefit of children. NW: We've got a complete mess in the exam system. Secondary is a complete mess. It's bewildering; it's confusing even for the people who work within it, so that needs to be levelled out - I'm absolutely certain of that. As a parent, you would hope that your child was doing the right subject for them. It doesn't matter whether it's basket weaving or science; it's what is right for them. It's not what will get them the highest grade or the most passes; it's got to be what is right for them. It might be the vocational PE, or it might be physics. We can't afford to have this snobbishness and this complete lack of parity. So I'm sympathetic to what they say, but to suggest that there are too many vocation subject, well, what's too many? DM: What the statement does, it undermines what he's saying about trust and respect in teachers, because he's saying, 'Yes, we trust you but, by the way, you're not doing your job properly.' Why aren't these children getting more A levels, why aren't they doing more GCSEs? Why are they being put into BTECs? Why are they being put forward for vocational qualifications? Because if they get a BTEC, they can get two GCSEs, and it's easier. NY: These vocational courses are a joke, you know. Content is going down, the pass mark is being reduced, but [we are told] standards are going up! One academy that is often brought out to support academies in general is Mossbourne Academy, in Hackney, which does have a lot of kids from poorer backgrounds. It's not selective and its students received 70 offers from Russell Group universities in 2010; 83% 5 A* to C grades at GCSE and was ranked in the top 1% of secondary schools nationally. NW: No doubt it's a good school. You can have a school that is really good and an academy. But it would also be a good school if it wasn't an academy. But it wasn't [a good school before it was an academy]. NW: I know, but this is the effect of good teaching, strong leadership, investment from the government. It's the result of a combination of factors which could equally, if not more so, apply to an ordinary state, local authority school. DM: That school did well and improved because it became an academy and got the funding. If it maintained its status but got the same funding and the same support, it would probably still be a very good school. What came with the academy status was new buildings, more money, lots of support. RI: Some schools will do very well as academies but there is a lot of danger to the academy system. Once you've become an academy, you cant go back into local authority control. We're disbanding the support networks, we're taking money from schools in an area and we're giving it to other schools. And we're doing that because then we can say that academies work and here is proof. We could all give you examples of academies that have had that sort of funding, have had those improvements, and are still receiving the same results that they did before the funding, but we have got enough about us not to name schools in those circumstances. Personally, I don't think it would be a reasonable thing for me to do. DM: In Luton we have the studio school. The [academy] doesn't have to exclude children in order to get better results; they can simply transfer the children who aren't doing very well, who aren't going to achieve excellent academic subjects, into the studio school, which is a school designed to do vocational subjects. Therefore the children that are left are the more able children. They're not surrounded by children who are struggling in school, and they do better. It's just another form of selection. NW: Three years ago now, I looked at some data which was in the TES on exclusion. My fag packet calculations were that you were 10 times more likely to be permanently excluded from an academy, compared to peers in another school. RI: The National Union [of Teachers] statistic would suggest it is at least five times as great. Clearly that's slightly strange. The schools budget was protected in the recent Spending Review, with the White Paper saying, 'At a time when deficit reduction is an urgent national priority, and other budgets are being cut, there is a real terms growth in school funding.' DM: No, there isn't. That's not true at all. NW: In Rochdale, there's been a massive hit on what we call the area-based grounds, which means that essentially Rochdale schools were kept afloat by grants from various sources; central government grants, which are now being removed. The impact is huge. Every single week Im going to meetings at schools where staff are being made redundant. Ten schools are going through restructuring, which involves numbers of teachers, other support staff, losing their jobs. That's just in Rochdale. RI: I could give you similar statistics from Nottinghamshire. DM: It's a spin, because the Dedicated Schools Grant didn't face cuts, which did remain the same, but schools aren't just funded by the Dedicated Schools Grant. Numerous other methods of funding that schools, particularly in deprived areas, relied upon, those funding streams got cut and dried up. So schools which relied on those levels of funding - external funding sources - have had part of their budgets cut. RI: And not just that. Vast swathes of the support system in education is being cut. It might not be a direct schools project but it has a direct effect on us. We get funding for something through the British Council, for trips internationally. The British Council's grant is being cut. When you look at the myriad of things that actually aid the education system, the cuts have been huge. DM: Every single school in the region has had a reduction overall. In real terms they've had their budgets cut. And the pupil premium, which we got told is to the benefit of children from more disadvantaged areas, has been taken out of the education budget. The theory is very good: that children from a more deprived area have more money attached to them, therefore increasing the school's funding. But it was taken away from other schools, so other schools have suffered as a direct result. NY: I just think if education is going to move forward - and let's be honest, and I'll be controversial - we have got to tighten our belts; we've got to cut the wasting of money. It's not rocket science what we do. If I wanted to learn how to keep pigeons or keep greyhounds, or keep racehorses, I'd speak to somebody who did that. If they want to know about education, why don't they bloody speak to us? Speak to people on the front line. Look at the [former] education minister for Wales, Jane Hunt. Because she was garbage at [education], she went to farming. She cocked up farming and now she's in the health service. She's an expert teacher, expert farmer and an expert nurse! I think they're scared to speak to us because they think they're going to get a grilling, and rightly so - they deserve one. We have all these teaching bureaucrats and the figure is, I think, it's 700 behind-the-scenes office workers, bureaucrats in education. Five of them are teachers, or were teachers. I think the really good teachers get promoted and go to these places and they forget what they did to get there. Also, as well as the cuts, we can all sit here and talk about money being wasted - ridiculous sums of money. Industry in Wales at the moment is screaming out, because they're having to move industry abroad. They're trying to invest in Wales and the local economy, and they're saying they can't because there's a lack of a skilled workforce. And by cutting now, we're ruining that skilled workforce for the next generation. What happens to the generation after that? NW: But the money-saving that is going on in education isn't because of a 'deficit' or whatever else. One of the drivers, one of the motivating factors, is to cheapen education so that the private sector will find education affordable. Because as education is, it's not well-suited to privatisation. The cuts and the cheapening in education at the moment aren't because of an overspend in education, because spending is still going on. The spending that went on over the last 10 years, for things like the PFI, will continue for another 15-25 years. Are you saying that, if there's not as much public funding, there's an excuse to get the private sector in, because they say they can invest more? NW: Well, the desire is that all schools will become academies, [so they] essentially will be privately run. In order to get sponsors into academies, you need to make it tenable. You need to make it financially affordable and viable as a business plan, and so the one thing you start doing is lowering the cost each school has to meet DM: If everything that has to come from central funding is decreased, then the private sector is much more likely to come and say, 'You know what, I'll have that, I'll run that school for profit, because it's not costing me as much. Wages have been driven down; I don't have to pay as much into their pension. I don't have to have qualified teachers; I can pay people what I want. I can do what I want with that school. I can promote my company and I can make lots of money.' RI: I think a lot of the cuts in education are going to have an effect on how the organisation of secondary schools goes on. We used to have a modern languages faculty; we now have a 'directorate of learning'. Since when? RI: Two years it's been in place, and that's due to the financial constraints on the school. So previously, where we had two managers in a modern languages department, 5.4 teachers (full time equivalent), a head of German who looked at the curriculum for that, and a department that was still finding it very hard to do its job. I now have three teachers, one manager and I'm overseen by somebody who was the Head of English. The departmental budget has probably halved in that time. I'm now being given exactly the same sets as the English department to teach them modern languages, because that is how the timetable now apparently works. So the assumption is, if a student is good at English, they are good at French, which I would like to think is true, but I'm aware that it isn't. I'm not being able to move students into a group appropriate for their level because I am hamstrung by the system I work in. The amount of ridiculous quality assurance I am now expected to do on my own, which previously was done by the managers in the department, means that I do not have time to focus on developing a more interesting curriculum, which I think is the most important thing to teaching modern languages. A more active curriculum that will motivate students in an area where parental attitudes to the subject are not great. It doesn't take a genius to work out why the results are as they are. NY: In Wales we're having a massive cut of sixth formers at the moment. There's only one bottom line that local education authorities have, and that's a balance sheet. I just can't understand how you can condone closing sixth forms. RI: Class sizes are going up because we're spending money on more non-qualified teachers in the classroom, more administrators; and in a subject like modern languages, the bigger your class size gets, the far more difficult it is to do the speaking, the listening and the elements of the modern languages curriculum that are so important to actually getting a qualification. NY: It's [the same with] any subject. Once the class size gets bigger beyond a certain limits, it's impossible. Maths, you know, you're totally watering down your expertise. You're spending more time preparing and more time doing the things which don't actually benefit the children. [If class sizes were smaller,] I might have spent the time creating resources. Maths is a very mundane subject and it can be mechanical, dry and boring. But I think if I had the time and the money to put into my subject, it would have enthused those children who are coming in, the lower-end kids. And I also think we miss the middle out. The good little girls and the good little boys who don't stick their head above the parapet; who are not incredibly bright but who are not incredibly poor either - I think we miss them out. I think if I could have spent that time preparing resources to make the subject more accessible for children, that'd be fantastic. I could have made a maths game, maths resources, made a maths club. I could have used a maths jigsaw. You've got to do it yourself. Creating jigsaws, you'll take three hours each to do them properly, get them laminated, number the backs so when they get mixed up you know where they all go. DM: When I was a mainstream primary teacher, hearing a child read once a week was a real challenge when you've got 30 children in your class and you've got to teach those children English, maths, science, RE, geography, history, all the other subjects. And if you say to the parent, 'By the way, I haven't heard your child read this week,' it's an outrage. They expect their child to read every day. Well, if you've got 30 children, then your time with each individual child is minute. NY: We could sit here now and put together, on one of these A5 sheets of paper, a plan which is better than the one now. I just don't know why they don't listen. All of these great ideas, grand words, they never ever seem to speak to teachers. RI: The important thing about teachers, as much as the job that they do, is the numbers of them. Michael Gove says that people leave school unable to read and write. But if he gave primary teachers a smaller class, they would be able to have more impact further down, where you can actually make more of a difference. As a secondary teacher, I hold my hands up to the fact that I am aware that the most difference you can make in the education of a child is in primary school, especially when it comes to their literacy and their numeracy. NW: Looking at the coalition now, we have an entire government that has not had proper access to state education, whose experience of education is skewed towards private provision. That problem is then increased by the fact that the various consultations, and various working parties, that they've got tend to avoid including teachers, or at least practising teachers. Just thinking about href="www.education.gov.uk/inthenews/inthenews/a0076435/key-stage-2-testing-assessment-and-accountability-review-progress-report-published">Lord Bew's review panel on assessments, there is not a single working, practising teacher on that review panel. They've got various people from private enterprise, as you could call it, but no-one who's actually a bloody teacher. So it seems to be increasingly accepted that, in order to steer policy in education, you talk to everyone but teachers. And, in fact, you actively exclude teachers from that process. RI: In my life time, I think we've had one education minister who's been a teacher, and she resigned because people weren't allowing her to do what she felt was right. The coalition, and Michael Gove in particular, has focused on changes to the curriculum, with the White Paper saying, 'We need a new approach to the National Curriculum, specifying a tighter, more rigorous, model of the knowledge which every child should expect to master in core subjects at every key stage. In a school system which encourages a greater degree of autonomy and innovation the National Curriculum will increasingly become a rigorous benchmark, against which schools can be judged rather than a prescriptive straitjacket into which all learning must be squeezed.' RI: They talk about freeing up teachers to do these things but then talk about [them being] tied to a more rigorous curriculum - you can't do both. NW: It's dangerous when you've got someone who doesn't understand the consequences of the stuff that he says, which is continually bluster. This idea of a rigorous curriculum, it's just staggeringly stupid because you're opening up Pandora's box. He hasn't explained what he means, really. He hasn't explained how this would be applied in the real world. All of it is spin; it's twisted; it's not consistent with other aspects of what their policies are in the white paper. It's a worry, where you can have creationism or intelligent design being taught as a science subject. RI: As a sound bite, it appeals to people. There will be people who go, 'Oh well, yes, the teachers I speak to have said [they need more freedom]; they've said that's important'. And you'll get people who go, 'It was a bit more rigorous in my day and I think that's probably a wise idea.' But actually, if you don't work in education, you don't actually see the effect. NW: Basically, what Gove is saying is: teachers will be free to do what I tell them to do. Here's what I envisage freedom to be and you must do that. RI: And to make sure you're doing it, we're going to test them at 6, 11 and 16 to make sure that that's what's happening. The coalitions say their reforms are going to end the culture of preparing for tests. RI: It says that but it also says it's going to value teachers; it's going to make teaching the 'noble profession.' They've got no desire to take away the key stage tests. They want to actually increase the information that goes onto league tables, so what they're actually doing is making the key stage tests and league tables, and giving them an even greater profile. They're quite explicit about this. So they might say we're going to remove that focus of teaching to a test. How? How are they going to do that? While the head teacher and the Year 6 teachers' careers depends on it, I'm afraid their hands are tied. You might have that desire to broaden and enrich the curriculum, but you've got this great big axe hanging over your head. I'm afraid while there remain such high stakes tests at the end of Key Stage 2 particularly, but increasingly across the school, you can't do anything but teach to the tests. NW: Having a single event test, which is - to say high stakes is an understatement everything. It's that school's future. It's no longer a simple snapshot to inform teachers on how that child is doing. It's a con that parents have been hoodwinked into. They've bought into it, understandably, because once you've been told SATS tests, and these fairly arbitrary levels, are really essential to your child's education; once you've been told that so many times, then you believe it. It's become out of control. It's no longer just taken over the Year 6 curriculum - that's bad enough, but it's now the entire primary school. RI: It's having a huge effect on secondary schools as well. NW: Precisely, it's now being taken back into the early years foundation, where you've got testing of children. The testing's unreliable; it's just a very crude proxy indicator. It's a monumental waste of money. It's a huge waste of time. NY: We don't have SATs in Wales, mind. NW: Well, yes, of course, and indeed the sky didn't fall in, did it?, when you chased those out of Wales, back across the border into England? The White Paper argues that among the most important aspects of education is the quality of teachers, with David Cameron and Nick Clegg saying, 'The most successful countries, from the Far East to Scandinavia, are those where teaching has the highest status as a profession; South Korea recruits from their top 5 per cent of graduates and Finland from the top 10 per cent.' To do this, the White Paper says the government will 'continue to raise the quality of new entrants to the teaching profession, by ceasing to provide Department for Education funding for initial teacher training for those graduates who do not have at least a 2:2 degree; expanding Teach First; offering financial incentives to attract more of the very best graduates in shortage subjects into teaching; and enabling more talented career changers to become teachers.' NW: Yet again, it's this lack of consistency. It is labouring under this false impression that teaching is all about the academic prowess of the teacher that's stood in front of the class. Now, you don't need that much academic prowess to teach, say, a Year Four class of seven to eight years old - teaching them maths. What you need is an understanding of the art of teaching, and that is not something that is necessarily reflected in my degree. DM: I went to university and I studied teaching for three years. There were many people in my course who were going to get first class honours who made great teachers. Likewise, there were many who got first class honours degrees who made rubbish teachers. There are people who are going to get a third, or a 2:2, who are going to make great teachers. We keep saying this to the government: just because you can get a good degree doesn't make you a good teacher. Teaching itself is a craft. It is an art form. Being an academic doesn't make you a good teacher. RI: There's something else in there, and that is how teachers are valued in their societies. In the Far East, teachers are seen as one of the most respected positions you can possibly be in. They are well rewarded; they are given time to do their job properly; they are trusted in their opinions of how you go about doing the job. Finland, Scandinavia, the same is true. I actually think, with the graduates we have doing the job now, if they were left to their professional judgement, education would be better and standards would be better. You may say the words are hollow, but phrases the government is using, like 'the teacher is society's most valuable asset,' will help, won't they? RI: You can say that until you're blue in the face as a politician. Every generation of politicians have said how important teachers are, because if you don't say that, then you face a problem. It's not about what you say in those circumstances; it's about what you do within an education system that allows us to do our jobs to the best of our ability. And the expansion of Teach First? NW: I think if anyone could prove to me that there's something fundamentally wrong with the provision for training teachers that already exists, then I'd be convinced. DM: There are now so many different routes into teaching: you can join the army and then become a teacher; you've got Teach first, you can go and ruin the stock exchange and then become a teacher... there are so many different ways. RI: I've met a lot of [Teach First teachers]. Now, they've gone into it for the right reasons. They've not got a background in education in most cases, so they aren't necessarily aware of some of the issues they're going to face. Because they are not trained as such before they go in, in the same way that teachers are, they face problems that we don't. Yes, in some cases they are very passionate about their subject, but I think most teachers are very passionate. That sort of stuff is there already. You're getting a highly qualified graduate out of it, but you're not giving them the tools to do the job. Now, encouraging these people to go through initial teacher training and become teachers, I'm all in favour of. Putting this short cut in place, which actually disadvantages them, I don't agree with. Supporting schools with these people where they do have more problems with the achievement in core subjects, I can't say I don't agree with giving more resources to a school that's struggling. However, if you're going to get these people to do it, get them to go through teacher training and then get them into a classroom with the strategies they need to cope. NW: And again, it's teaching on the cheap. It's creating a false idea of what teaching is. It's grossly over-simplifying the skills that you need and the training that you need. We're back to this mixed message from the government, which is: teaching is a highly skilled craft, but it's one that you don't need any training in. RI: I think in some respects as well, those who are that academically able have not necessarily had to struggle to get through education. I found school very easy; I found university very easy; I got into teaching and one of the things that was very important for me to understand, through teacher training, was how it feels not to succeed; how I can help those students bridge those gaps. And that training was massively important. [Not having that] has a massive effect on their ability to cope. So they sometimes have a bit of a rocky start and then, as in any classroom, when you have a bit of a rocky start, the kids take advantage of that situation. But many Teach First teachers go on to become deputy heads, or take on management positions. DM: That's out of the classroom. RI: They're all academically bright people. I think some of the management that I've met over the years are not necessarily the more capable teachers. I think they're the more driven and ambitious teachers. So how do you think we'll get from the position now, where these reforms are being passed, into a position where the decent changes that you think need to be made can be made? NW: I think one of the key things is that we engage with parents. Not just talking to the converted. Making sure that we can share [ideas] with parents; that we can encourage parents to take part in the process of consultation; that their voices are heard and that they do what's within their democratic power to support the interest of their children and their community school. DM: When you communicate with parents, you're not spinning them a lie. We've talked about SATs. Parents are told that these tests will improve their children's education. They are told it's really vital that we have league tables so we can judge schools. If you talk to parents, they don't move into an area because they've got a better school, because they're further up the league tables than the school they were at when they lived in their other house. If you just go to school at the end of the road and you have a real input, a real say into how that school is run without being spun constant lies and hypocrisy and spin, that is how you're going to improve education. RI: But we need all of them to stand up and be counted. We can't afford to be a small number of activists. We need a large number of activists, standing up and saying, 'We can't let this go on for the good of teachers, children and society.' They say we're borrowing from the future to pay for today as far as the banking is concerned. Well again, if we let down our education system, then again we're borrowing from tomorrow to pay for today. We're just doing it in a completely different way.