Education Worker

In the coming days lecturers from 61 universities across the country are going on strike. In Liverpool, the UoL and the School of Tropical Medicine will be affected.

The strike action, called out by UCU, is in response to the newest attack to their working conditions. This time is about the pensions.

Lecturers are faced with the proposal of much less security in retirement. Currently, they are aware of the amount of money they will receive from their pension when they retire. It is being proposed that this will change and will instead be based on investments of their pension contributions. This results in an unsecure situation, where they cannot be sure they will receive enough money to support themselves in retirement.

I work in admin at one of the universities in the city. Recently, one of my colleagues left the department for a new job. It was expected that I would take on some of their workload. This was not something I could really do, and when I started to be asked, I found it stressful. I talked about it at the drop-in, and a number of useful suggestions were made.

The NUT and NASUWT unions in the East Midlands, West Midlands, Yorkshire and Humberside and the Eastern regions are on strike on Tuesday October 1.

The strikes are over pay, pensions, workload and conditions. If you live or work near a primary or secondary school do your best to show your solidarity.

PAY

As of 1st September this year, schools are now free to implement performance-related pay. This will in effect result in the depression of wages and not the proposed improvement in 'quality of teaching'. Teachers will be subject to a new performance management cycle, including Oftsed-style observations, that will determine whether they will make their progression on the teachers pay-scale. Some boroughs and local authorities have decided not to adopt the new format, but many academy heads are using their new found autonomy to effectively pay whatever they want from next year on.

(Un)Qualified teachers wanted.
While the eyes of most people, both critical and uncritical, are drawn to the Olympics, secretary of state for Education, Michael Gove, has introduced possibly his most significant and destructive piece of reform.

Academies no longer need to employ qualified teachers to teach lessons. Gove heralds this as 'freedom' for academies to employ 'the best for the job'. So while trying to raise the profile of teaching, he's doing the exact opposite. But this is a smokescreen. This is nothing to do with profile, or improving education, or getting 'the best for the job'. It has everything to do with driving down pay and conditions.

Bournville School on strike next week. Worthing High out this week. Noel Park School, Haringey out.

Bournville School Strike
Bournville School in south Birmingham is set to face two days of strike action next week over plans to convert the school to 'foundation' school status. Workers at the school had successfully defeated plans to force an academy conversion less than a year ago after threats of joint strike action and a community campaign.

The latest action is set for Wednesday 18th and Thursday 19th July in "protest at the failure of the school to enter into meaningful consultation regarding proposed conversion to Foundation status and in protest at the change of employer with resultant threat to terms and conditions."

In Jan 2011 my school became an academy, as set out by the government that outstanding schools could become academies. As a staff we were duped into this. There was some consultation with unions, but as previous headships broke the unions in the school with their “divide and rule” regime, consultation was limited. We were sold the lie that we were now free of the thrall of the LEA, HMI inspections and, due to an outstanding status, free from OFTSED inspections for at least 5 years. This has not been the case , in fact being taken from LEA control now subjects us to far more stringent work practices, where union guidelines are not applicable or at the very least are bent to suit the requirements of management. Also being out of LEA control means if the school hits any financial difficulties, it will be teaching staff who suffer. As under LEA control they can apply financial help that does not endanger staff jobs. Fortunately this has not happened, yet.

Oasis Community Learning, a christian educational trust currently running 14 academies in England, is typical of the theological style of industrial relations promoted by the cheerleaders of the Academy sector. Back in November, in the middle of the school year, 13 teachers at its Media City (Salford) Academy were sacked, sparking 5 days of strikes as well as a walk out by year 10 and 11 pupils in the run up to christmas. Ultimately, the campaign to defend the teachers did not win.

Thinly disguised as a cost-cutting exercise, local opinion strongly suspects the sackings were more of an exercise in weeding out those teachers who hadn’t signed an agreement to teach christian beliefs. This is backed up by the fact that the one maths teacher sacked, and the only one to be graded outstanding last year, was a practicing muslim. Further evidence for this came in January, when the academy advertised a number of teaching posts, including one in maths.

Some thoughts of an academy school worker in England.

I’ve recently taught in an academy school for over two years, and in that time I saw a lot of things that have angered me as a worker and as someone who values education, and made even more apparent to me the need for a radical overhaul in education that can only be achieved by revolutionary change in society as a whole.

Downhills Primary School, in Tottenham, North London, is fighting a strong community campaign against attempts to turn it into a sponsored academy.
Participation in the campaign has been huge. “I haven’t seen anything like it since the eighties,” said one mother looking at a packed meeting of over 600 people.
In January, more than a thousand people marched through Tottenham in support of the four Haringey primaries which are under threat of being handed over to academy sponsors, including teachers from all over London. They have shown support to other schools across the country which are rejecting academy status.
Parents, carers, teachers and governors at the school say that they are up against a system which is highly undemocratic. They were shocked at an unexpectedly harsh judgement that they were “inadequate'”by Ofsted, though recognise that this inspection, rushed through on the request of education minister Michael Gove, was a highly political one.