On strike

Long incoherent ranting, be warned...

It’s naïve I know, but I found the press coverage for the strike depressingly negative.

Greedy teachers, moany teachers, poor patient police and nurses who can’t or won’t strike… Even the other union is being wishy-washy about it, claiming that actually we’re not that badly off in terms of pay, mustn’t grumble… (though they wouldn’t turn down any rises in salary gained by strike action, you bet.)

Logic was never my strong suit, but tell me, is it logical to say ‘Other people are paid worse’ and consider your argument won? I don’t want the nurses and the police to be badly paid – how is my not striking going to help them? If we all striked (struck?) together, which is what the NUT was hoping for, a General Strike, imagine that, how much more powerful would it be? That’s why they call them unions – you know, people being UNITED, showing their strength in numbers.

The dishonesty of spin never ceases to amaze me. One of the old-school Marxist firebrand teachers I saw at a union meeting nailed it for me. She said the real determinant factor in a child’s experience of education was poverty. Rich kids do well, poor kids struggle, simple as that.

The strike is against poverty, it’s not just for us soft bourgeois middle-class moaners, but in solidarity with members of Unison, for example, the support staff, who do an immensely vital job for a shockingly poor salary. People working in public sector jobs have kids, families, mortgages, bills and rent to pay - but they're expected to do this essential work and be poor and dedicated and keep their mouths shut.

("What I really can't believe is that, when private sector pay rises are 4 per cent, a rise of 2.5 per cent for the public sector is inflationary" Martin Weale, director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research.)

Time was when the teaching assistants would put up displays, sort out your stock and sharpen pencils – now they are given more and more work - they are being asked to teach, they have sneaked in teaching responsibilities by the back door, but they’re not being paid at all for it.

This government (and I suspect, all governments) pay lip service to the importance of education, but they don’t really really really believe in it. (Why else would they cut the budget for special needs? Couldn't they like, save a few pennies by laying off a few hundred spin doctors? What is more essential?) They think you can run schools like any other business, but education doesn’t work like that.

It’s not a simple case of input/output, of watching your bottom line, of slavishly following your stats. Like everyone, I have a phenomenal amount of paperwork, phenomenal. All the data I have to enter every term gets sent to the borough. The borough sends it to the government. The government publishes it as evidence of how schools are doing.

But I know in fact it’s all cock, because the statistics I enter don’t tell anything like the whole story. So what can they prove?

Like so much in politics, it’s what they are being seen to do and not what they are actually doing that matters to them – I give you league tables, SATS, etc. Raising expectations is not the same as raising standards, setting the bar too high for children is setting up a culture of failure.

Someone I know asked what their son’s Level 3 meant on a SATS test – well, precisely. What does it mean?

They changed the objectives in the National Numeracy Strategy so that my 5 and 6 years olds are now expected to know things that last year were not introduced until 7 and 8 years old – why? They’re not ready for it. Who does it benefit? Why do they want to make them run before they can walk? So that they can compete with other schools in other countries?

(One of the objectives was about making quarter turns clockwise and anti-clockwise, and knowing left and right. I took them into the hall to try it out. You should have seen the chaos that ensued. It was hilarious, but revelatory.)

They’re pushing them too hard too early to achieve a level in the tests, so that they can publish stories about how well our children are doing in their SATS, and therefore what a great handle this government has on education come election time. Is that about education, or about winning elections? When a visiting Norwegian teacher observed the 7 year olds doing SATS test, she said ‘In Norway, we’d consider this child cruelty.’

'A strike will only serve to disrupt children's learning, inconvenience parents and place a burden on fellow teachers.' A DCSF spin doctor.

Um, had the concept of 'striking' been fully explained to this person?

Anyway, onto business. What should our banner say?

'Pay peanuts, get monkeys'?


Oy, I'm no good at this. Help me out here.