Friends in unlikely places

By John Blake

Why, despite the public differences last weekend, the Labour Party should look on the National Union of Teachers as an ally for success in education.

The last time the National Union of Teachers held their conference in the capital city of Wales, certain delegates illustrated their disdain for the then-Education Secretary who had come to speak with them by holding up placards reading “We Won’t Cover”. Sadly for them, the then-Education Secretary was David Blunkett, and – as he himself noted afterwards – the placards were not an especially effective protest to a blind man.

Blunkett had experience of the bizarrely childish nature of protest at NUT Conference, having once, as shadow education secretary, been forced to seek refuge in a cupboard from aggressive far left delegates, who jostled him as he went to speak. Ironically, his Cardiff speech in 2001 included a plea for the NUT to work closely with whoever replaced him as Education Secretary – the eventual replacement, of course, was Charles Clarke and as a result of the heckles Blunkett had received, Clarke refused to attend NUT Conference ever again.

From that moment on the public relationship between our Labour government and the NUT never really recovered; the government threw – or the NUT stormed out of (it rather depends who you ask) – the Social Partnership that governs relations between teachers and the state, leaving the NUT unable to actively negotiate pay or working conditions at a national level. This public distancing spread to the respective memberships of the party and the union: most Labour members I know think of the NUT as a bunch of work-shy teachers suffering from a full-scale Trot-infestation, whilst most of my fellow NUT members regard the government with so much suspicion that when Ed Balls announced the abolition of the detested Key Stage 3 SATs, their immediate response was to demand to know what new horror would replace them.

I lead you all through this very potted history of the NUT-Labour government relationship because, although I think it has some validity to it, it is not the whole story, and it should not be the end of the story: regardless of their legitimate differences, the fundamental vision of education as an enabling and liberating force, in Britain and around the world and especially for the poorest communities, continues to animate both the Labour Party and the National Union of Teachers. These two really could be, and should be, partners in the transformation of education.

This may seem like a hard sell: the reports of this year’s NUT Conference in Cardiff have been full of the crude dividing lines between the government and the largest teaching union in this country. The NUT has demanded a 10% pay rise; the NUT has denounced the use of bouncers in classrooms in place of qualified teachers; the NUT has vowed to boycott the remaining SATs, and the outgoing President of the union has denounced these tests as “child abuse”. To all these the government have responded bluntly: teacher pay has massively increased since 1997, the use of non-teaching cover supervisors (some of whom are indeed bouncers) in schools is a pragmatic move to fulfil teachers’ long-held desire to be freed from covering the lessons of absent colleagues; and the SATs are crucial to the assessment and accountability of schools and teachers. It might seem that there is no shared ground, no room for compromise, no way forward.

But that would be misleading. Earlier I said that Clarke’s refusal to attend NUT Conference just to be bellowed at by the leading lights of the Socialist Workers Party had damaged the public relationship between the government and the union. I chose my words carefully: the private relationship between the NUT’s leadership and Labour ministers remained in place. When the NUT very sadly and shockingly lost our outstanding General Secretary Steve Sinnott a week after last year’s conference, one of the most moving tributes to him at the memorial service held for NUT members was delivered by Jim Knight, then minister for schools. Steve had always sought to maintain firm friendships with government ministers behind the scenes even when they very publicly disagreed. He was able to do that because, as Jim Knight acknowledged in that tribute, he and the Labour members of the Department for Education (or, as Knight put it, “whatever it is calling itself now”) shared a vision of education as liberating and transformative for those in society whom economic and social pressures had disadvantaged. Steve knew, as others leading the NUT still know, that our union will always find more friends on the Labour benches of the House of Commons, than amongst the public schoolboys and inveterate teacher-haters of the Tory Party; and will always find firmer and more constant friends in Labour than amongst the opportunists and U-turners of the Liberal Democrats.

And despite all too much far left rhetoric dominating NUT Conference last weekend (whatever was wrong, it was the bankers, or possibly the Israelis, that did it), the union made significant moves towards Labour’s position this year: take the story that has been reported as “bouncers in classrooms”. This stemmed from a debate in which the NUT, for the first time, accepted the existence of Cover Supervisors (staff who are not qualified teachers, who are permanently employed in schools to cover teacher absence) and put out feelers for a discussion with government about limiting the time these people can be used before a qualified teacher for a class must be found. The government only ever intended for Cover Supervisors to be used for short periods of time, which is what the union is now demanding.

This is good policy from a Labour point of view: no disadvantaged student is going to be able to learn in an environment where every week the face at the front of the class is different, or where – in the long run – the person leading the class is not qualified to actually transmit knowledge and understanding. With the union now clearly ready to talk about this in a grown up fashion, the government should be willing to come to the table. There is a common vision here, which should lead to a proper negotiation and a valid outcome for all sides: ministers, teachers, parents, cover supervisors, and especially the children whose education is fundamentally both Labour and the NUT’s real concern.

Where there is disagreement, the government would do well to consider why. The greatest ruction is, of course, over SATs – taken at face value, that “child abuse” claim is one that stings: stings the government for enforcing the tests, teachers for teaching to them, and parents for sending their children into schools to suffer them. It stings me especially because I live in Haringey, a part of the world where we have seen vividly and horrifically what “child abuse” can mean, and what happens when authorities fails to ensure that children are protected: Baby P suffered child abuse; it was stomach-churningly hideous and it is phrase never to be used lightly.

So I would not have used those words, but I will say two things about their appearance at NUT Conference – firstly, they were used by our outgoing President, claiming the right of all retiring national officers to fire off a few rhetorical salvoes in his last, untimed speech to conference: in short, it is one man’s view, not union policy. Secondly, I will say that although I was uncomfortable with the use of those words, and I know some primary teachers were too, no one walking away from the NUT Conference debate can be in any doubt that SATs do damage children’s education. We heard story after story of weeping children, reduced to little more than a number, abandoned because they are not sufficiently borderline to be worth working with; we heard of a whole year of primary school where fun and creativity and real learning were abandoned for the sake of endless drills in test papers. Labour members who are not teachers might well respond that all this is the teachers’ fault for abandoning their duties in order to fiddle test results – perhaps that’s true, but who amongst you, faced with tests where the stakes were so high that one slip, one child suffering an off-day, or the unexpected arrival of one non-English speaking refugee student in your class, could destroy your career (and I do mean destroy – “failure” in SATs can result in merciless persecution), would not do all you could to survive?

Perhaps it could all be justified if the SATs could be shown to work – that if focus on the SATs really improved students’ outcomes, and the publication of the results really allowed parents to know which schools were best, then teachers would just have to suck it up. Sadly, neither of these things are true: OECD figures, providing comparable data for children from across the world, illustrate that despite SATs results getting better, the level of useful reading and writing skills amongst our children has barely improved in the past ten years – making SATs so incredibly high stakes has resulted in an excellent education in how to pass SATs but only a narrow and incidental education in how to read and write. More, even if the SATs usefully assessed students’ skills in these areas, the test error on the papers means that at least some children in every school – and in small schools (which many primaries are) sometimes as many as half the children – will receive the wrong level. This is not an unacceptable level of test error (at least for English and Science – the government will not release the Maths paper test error, which suggests it may be less acceptable) but it does mean the government cannot treat as Gospel-truth these results – on a different day, on a different paper, many children would have had quite different results. Yet, with no caveats, these results are loaded into tables for public consumption in order for parents to differentiate schools.

I want to be clear here – I am not arguing, and the NUT is not arguing, for the return to the days of the secret garden, where parents and government were told to take what they got from schools and like it. Teachers are public servants, we are publicly accountable, and the NUT does not deny it – despite some calls from the far left at this Conference, we will never deny the right of the people of this country to know how well their National Education Service (as our incoming President called it) is operating. But, a crucial but, the tools of accountability actually have to work, and these ones do not.

The union has put forward suggestions for SATs replacements which do work: teacher assessment with local moderation, backed by national banks of pre-moderated work to maintain standards matched with cohort sampling; or a national bank of tests taken when teachers think students are ready, as in Scotland. The leadership of the union is prepared to negotiate on other alternatives.

As well as their normal (although not invalid) complaints that SATs overstress teachers, this year the union is also giving their expert opinion (and the expert opinion of academic statisticians) that SATs don’t work to achieve the goals that the government and the union share. Both want primary children to succeed, both want teachers to be accountable, both want to work to ensure that disadvantaged children do not stay that way – SATs do not achieve any of these ends.

The government should heed the union’s voice on SATs, and ask the union back to the negotiating table on pay and conditions. At the same time, Labour members in the NUT should be more willing to make the case for the Labour government’s successes on teachers’ pay, on school rebuilding and – whatever our differences about how to go about it – on the Labour government’s commitment to the education of the most disadvantaged. Together, recognising their different areas of expertise and responsibility, and retaining the right to cordially disagree, the NUT and the Labour Party should go forward as allies for the transformation of education.