Page 5

Save Our Schools

Continued from page 4.

NUT – the union for teachers in academies

The NUT will support you every step of the way if your school decides to become an academy. Speak to your NUT school representative in the first instance. (If there is no rep in your school, get fellow NUT members together to elect one.) Working as an NUT group, and alongside the support staff and any other teaching unions at your school, is the best way to protect the terms and conditions of staff.

Whatever the NUT’s misgivings about academies and free schools, we are the union for all teachers in every type of school. Be assured that you can count on our unrivalled support wherever you work.

Standing together to save our schools

Many thanks to all the NUT members who attended the Save Our Schools rally and lobby of Parliament on 19 July. It is always uplifting to see the education unions working together in common cause, and hundreds of teachers, parents, pupils and governors joined the protest against the Government’s cuts to the Building Schools for the Future programme and to highlight concerns about academies and free schools. Together the protesters lobbied about half of all English MPs at Westminster, and met many more in their constituencies.

The NUT advocates professional unity – with the eventual aim of having one union for all teachers – and our work with other unions continues. At the Liberal Democrat, Labour and Conservative party conferences, the NUT, ATL and NASUWT, will be hosting joint fringe meetings on the theme ‘England’s schools: a free for all?’. With speakers such as Michael Gove at the Conservative conference, these promise to be lively events.

Also at the Conservative conference, the NUT and ATL will host a meeting on assessment to publicise our recently launched report Make Assessment Measure Up, which puts forward alternatives to SATs and league tables. Download it from www.teachers.org.uk/assessment.

The NUT will be supporting a TUC-organised lobby of Parliament on 19 October – the day before publication of the Government’s Comprehensive Spending Review. The Union also continues to play an active role in the TUC’s Public Services Liaison Group, and this November will host a conference involving all the affi liated public sector unions.

With teachers and other public sector workers facing massive funding cuts, a pay freeze and attacks on their pensions, there has never been a more important time for us to stand together and fight for the rights of all our members. Please support us in any way you can.

Read about our campaign for assessment reform on pages 7 and 14.

Find out more about the Government’s attacks on teachers’ pay and pensions on pages 26 and 27.

Uncomfortable truths

• In June, Michael Gove told Parliament “more than 1,100 schools have applied for academy freedoms“. In fact by 1 September only 153 schools – out of more than 20,000 in England – had applied to change status.

• Despite the Academies Bill being railroaded through Parliament, only 32 of these schools opened as academies at the start of this term.

• Michael Gove also told Parliament in June: “More than 700 expressions of interest in opening new free schools have been received.“ No free schools opened in September 2010, and the Education Secretary recently admitted on the BBC's Andrew Marr Show that just 16 are likely to open in the next year.

• NUT General Secretary Christine Blower said: “For a policy that was supposed to be a fl agship change for education, it is something of a failure to have so few schools opening at this stage.“ She urged the Government to “return to the aim of achieving a good local school for every child, operating within the local authority family of schools”.