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FEATURE


Months of relentless cuts and reform

Teachers are facing attacks on all aspects of their working lives.


• Two-year pay freeze to begin from September 2011, which, given the rise in VAT, National Insurance and the cost of living, amounts to a pay cut.
• New barriers introduced to limit teachers’ pay progression on UPS.
• Pension changes – proposals to increase contributions, raise the retirement age and end final salary schemes.
• Reducing the value of pensions of serving and retired teachers by deciding to change the indexing from RPI to CPI.
• Deep cuts to school budgets, causing job loss and job insecurity.
• Abandoning national negotiating forums on pay and conditions of service.
• Weakening and undermining the national pay and conditions framework and entitlements.
• Savage cuts to local authority budgets, removing or reducing vital services such as behaviour and special needs support on which schools depend.
• New performance management arrangements, stripping out all safeguards for teachers, including the limit on classroom observation.
• Merging performance management and capability procedures, putting teachers on permanent competence procedures.
• Introducing new professional standards, which are vague and open to wide interpretation and against which teachers’ performance will be judged.
• Announcing the EBac without consultation, resulting in downgrading and loss of teaching time and jobs in other subjects such as RE, music, art design, drama, IT, PE, PSHE and citizenship.
• Imposing synthetic phonics as the only method of teaching reading.
• Introducing no-notice inspections, putting schools on a permanent war footing.
• Increasing the focus of inspection onto the classroom teacher.
• Retrospective amendment of performance league tables to include EBac subjects, making them even more punitive.
• Denigrating the work of teachers and schools by misusing international data.
• Requiring publication, on a school-by-school basis, of staff personal data, including salary, contract and attendance details.
• Forcing or bribing schools into academy status without any evidence that this will raise standards, and threatening pay and working conditions of staff.
• Privatising the education service to enable chains of private providers to run schools and to make a profit.
• Removing, without consultation, a range of good practice guidance, which protects staff and pupils. and assessment.
• Excessive workload and working hours.
• Undermining professional status by removing the requirement for QTS in some schools and changing the regulatory provisions for the profession.
• Scrapping school rebuilds and enabling schools to be set up in disused office blocks and derelict buildings.
• Reducing equality rights, including compensation for discrimination.
• Changing employment law to reduce rights and entitlements.