News Briefs
British teachers fight the barely liberal Labour government
Apr 10, 2008 3:38 PM
The 255,000 members of Britain’s National Union of Teachers (NUT), the largest of the United Kingdom educator unions, are threatening to strike after the Labour government offered wage increases to all public employees that were well below the UK’s 4 percent inflation rate. The government is also refusing to address class size issues and other classroom demands raised by the teachers.
The union calls the government pay offer — a 2.45 percent increase this year with an additional 2.3 percent annual increase in 2009 and 2010 — a pay cut in real dollars. It also wants class sizes limited by law to no more than 20 pupils per class (to be phased in by 2020) and a moratorium on school closings. It plans a one-day strike, tentatively set for April 24, with additional job actions that could include other unions to follow. The action would be the first national walkout by teachers in more than 20 years.
(Steve Sinott, leader of the union, died on April 5 and the teachers said a one-day strike would also be a way of honoring him.)
The teachers are drawing support from a public increasingly frustrated by the government’s failure to raise achievement levels. In words that could describe U.S. education, one critic charged that “real learning has been fatally abandoned for the sake of some very minor improvements in test results. Teachers are so preoccupied with telling pupils the answers they need for their exams that they can rarely respond to children’s curiosity, arouse their interest, or find out what they think.”
In February, Cambridge University’s Primary Review concluded that government micromanagement of classrooms was to blame. Teachers lost much of their autonomy and discretion, and were obliged to follow prescribed lesson plans rather than engaging with the children. It also found “a decrease in the overall quality of primary education, because of the narrowing of the curriculum and the intensity of test preparation,” concluding that “it is difficult to avoid a sense of children in flight from an experience of learning that they found unsatisfactory, unmotivating and uncomfortable.”
Guardian, March 22, 26
Times Educational Supplement, March 28
Education Week, March 25
