Labour needs to sit up and pay attention to teachers

Last week, teachers in England and Wales set off from their constituencies to lobby their elected representatives in the Commons on the issue of education. After four years of tumultuous education reform, national industrial action and less than a year from the General Election, they are hopeful that Westminster will begin to listen to the people that parents put their trust in every day to nurture their children.

My union, the National Union of Teachers (NUT) has led the vanguard against the coalition government’s austerity programme and the subsequent ideological interference of the Secretary of State on the education of our children and young people. From wholesale privatisation of education, through the academies and free schools programme, to the narrowing of curriculum and exam reforms, Michael Gove has turned the clock back on decades of progress.

Across the profession, people are worn out. Head teachers are exasperated by the pace of change, 40% of young teachers are abandoning the classroom in their first five years and a recent survey by the Department for Education has revealed that some teachers are working up to 60 hours per week and beyond. Morale is at an all time low.

Much of our early campaign in this parliament was focused on the issue of pay and pension cuts. As a matter of justice we must continue to fight for nationally agreed pay and conditions. But we’ve also moved beyond this to ask much more fundamental questions about how we will do education in 2015 and beyond. We have broadened our strategy to engage the public through street stalls and online engagement in our Stand Up For Education campaign. The parents I’ve spoken to on the street support NUT policies. Which parent doesn’t want to see their children taught in new schools by qualified teachers who are fit, healthy and have the time and resources to plan great lessons?

We want to see councils given new powers to build schools to deal with the school places crisis. We also want to see qualified teachers in every classroom. While qualified teacher status isn’t a lifetime guarantee, it’s a good starting point that raises the status of the profession described as ‘the Blob’ by the Education Secretary, the very man who should be championing our cause. We know that it isn’t right to put pressure on young children and that testing at a very early age is wrong. Free schools and academies are divisive and can often take funding from other schools and we want to restore local authority oversight so that governors are democratically accountable.

This isn’t a moaner’s manifesto as many of Gove’s friends in the media would have us think. It’s a vision for education in line with the broader thinking of Ed Miliband and Jon Cruddas, which recognises the limits of the markets and that provision of public goods requires a healthy balance between the State and local democracy. We only need to look north of the border to see the traction that fair, state-funded university education has with young voters.

The colleagues in my staff room aren’t yet convinced that the party whose mantra was once  ‘Education, Education, Education’ is the right one for them. In electoral terms, over a million people in England and Wales are employed in the education sector, each of whom will have a say in 2015. If this is about winning the General Election then I suggest we engage with them. If Labour is to become the party of education, then we need to listen to the people that we trust to educate our young day-in, day-out.

Chris McHugh is a schoolteacher and a member of the NUT