السبت، 26 مارس 2016

Teachers could strike over academisation


Teachers have threatened to strike following plans to turn every school into an academy, which could lead to disruptions before the end of the summer.
The National Union of Teachers (NUT) is set to debate a motion on joint industrial action and it is expected to call on the Government to halt its academisation agenda.
The teaching union will call for a "dispute" with Nicky Morgan, Education Secretary, to seek more funding and improve pays and conditions.
The motion will also urge members to seek coordinated action with other unions and to look to have a "one-day strike before the end of summer term".
The last time there was a national teachers' strike was July 2014, when around 3,000 schools across the country fully closed their doors over pay
Christine Blower, general secretary of the NUT, said: "We genuinely believe that there is both very wide and very deep opposition to this. We think it’s in the frame of the government wanting to behave in a way that’s not democratic.
"Because actually if they had thought about academising all schools, they could have gone to the country with that as part of their manifesto.
"We believe there is a very wide range of people that think this is an appalling proposal.
"It’s not the right thing to do to our education system.
"It’s the nature of the compulsion which people are finding offensive and undemocratic."
The debate on industrial action emerged as Ms Morgan was challenged to provide evidence supporting the Government's plans for sweeping school reforms.
The Education Secretary has come under fire from the NUT over the Education Excellence Everywhere White Paper, which included proposals to turn every state primary school in England into an academy by 2020.
NUT deputy general secretary Kevin Courtney sent an open letter to Ms Morgan on Wednesday, outlining concerns that the Department for Education's plans are founded on 'tortured statistics'.
In the letter, he wrote: "You propose the forcible academisation of 17,000 primary schools. However, and astonishing for such a far-reaching proposal, there is no evidence section in the White Paper to support this belief.
"Can you explain why you have not produced evidence which shows academy schools doing better than comparable local authority schools?"
In an address to journalists at the NUT's spring conference in Brighton, Mr Courtney said the department was misleading people by comparing the progress of sponsored academies - failing state schools forced to become an academy as part of a government intervention strategy - with successful local authority control schools.
He said: "They (the department) have given us absolutely tortured statistics to justify this huge proposal. They say the results show primary-sponsored academies opened for two years have improved their results by 10%, more than double the rate of improvement in local authority-maintained schools.
"That is statistically meaningless. They are not comparing like for like.
"It is like me as a not very good jogger - if I trained for another four hours a week I would get quite a lot faster, and if (Olympic gold winner) Mo Farah trained for another four hours a week he wouldn't improve at all because he's already going as fast as you can go.
"They are comparing schools that are already doing well and saying they have not improved much in the last two years.
"They are already as far as you can get - of course they haven't improved much. Whereas schools that aren't doing well can improve."
He said the real comparison should be between struggling academies and struggling local authority-maintained schools.
Continuing the running analogy, he said: "When you look at those statistics, you find the local authority jogger does better than the academy jogger."
In its White Paper, the Department for Education said it believed that "the fastest and most sustainable way for schools to improve is for government to trust this country's most effective education leaders, giving them freedom and power, and holding them to account for unapologetically high standards for every child, measured rigorously and fairly".

Teachers could strike over academisation

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