This is a timely and incredibly useful new publication. With the fight now on to defend all our schools from wholesale privatisation we need the ideas in this book to consider what is wrong with the “exam factory” model of education, what the alternative would look like and why it is worth fighting for.
Further Education lecturers in Scotland won a stunning victory in March after just one day of planned all-out strike action. Lecturers' union activists Donny Gluckstein and Penny Gower draw out the lessons we can all learn from their methods of organising.
In October 2014 the Further Education Lecturers’ Association (FELA), a semi-autonomous section of the EIS teachers’ union in Scotland, called for national bargaining to bring equal pay to the level of the highest paid college. In March 2016 strike action began and after just one day these demands were won, along with a pay rise for all and no deduction for striking. By 2019 wages will have risen by 11 percent on average, with the lowest paid lecturers seeing an increase of at least 33 percent. We need to learn the lessons.
There is a growing rejection among parents and teachers of the narrow rote learning advocated by the Tories. Jacqui Freeman looks at alternative approaches focused on engaging children.
In February Tory prime minister David Cameron and secretary of state for education Nicky Morgan declared war “on mediocrity” and “on illiteracy and innumeracy”. Bold words for a government whose flagship Academy and Free School programmes have been shown not to improve standards more than comprehensive schools and which has presided over a 25 percent increase in the number of teachers leaving the profession.
Julie Sherry draws out the wider lessons of the spate of local disputes.
There is a frustrating contrast between the intensifying assault on workers by the government and employers and the lack of coordinated national resistance led by the unions. Yet in recent months we have seen a spate of militant and determined local strikes - some of which have won serious victories - that point to the potential for a wider fightback.
The successful strike by Hovis workers in Wigan last September, which defeated an attempt by bosses to introduce zero hours contracts, has not been an isolated example.
The current spate of local disputes provides a glimpse of the potential for a fightback. Donny Gluckstein reports on the successful strike at Edinburgh College.
The strike of further education lecturers at Edinburgh College has been described as "a classic example of how to conduct a strike" by the executive of the EIS, the Scottish education union. The bare outlines of what happened make impressive reading.
The strike at STEM6 Academy in north London against zero hours contracts and for union recognition shows that if you get organised and fight hard you can win.
Early in October 2013 a message arrived at the Islington NUT office from a teacher at the newly opened STEM6 Academy telling us that she had never been a union rep before and asking for our support in negotiating teachers' terms and conditions.
The three months which followed saw her lead an often bitter fight which, although taking place in a small workplace, has won a big victory with major implications for other free schools, as well as important lessons for workers facing nasty anti-union employers.
The government's plans to privatise education are mired in financial scandal and under pressure from campaigns by teaching staff, parents and local authorities.
Michael Gove has put the Academies and free schools at the heart of his education strategy. A programme started under the last Labour government, and opposed by all trade unions and by many parents and communities, has expanded so that now half of all secondary schools are Academies and primaries are converting at a worrying pace.
But Gove has met much more resistance to the project than he expected from parents and increasingly from local authorities, heads, teachers, support staff and school governors.
Tory education secretary Michael Gove has set out to destroy progressive education. But he is meeting increasing resistance, and even falling out with some of his friends.
On 3 February this year Michael Gove gave a speech about his vision for education at the London Academy of Excellence. Gove painted himself and his project as a historic crusade against "failing schools".
Gove and his government have been reforming education at breakneck speed. From the break up of the state system in the form of Free Schools and Academies to the overhaul of the curriculum, Gove has left no aspect untouched.
Schools OUT was founded 40 years ago to campaign on lesbian, gay and bisexual issues in education. Sue Caldwell spoke to Tony Fenwick, a co-founder, about the fight against homophobia and transphobia.
Can you tell us about the circumstances in which Schools OUT was launched in 1974 and the challenges you faced?
Schools OUT started as the Gay Teachers' Group after John Warburton was sacked from his school and banned from working for the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) for telling the truth.
Some students in his class had seen him coming out of a gay bar and they asked him if he was gay. He said that he was. That was it. It was enough to finish his teaching career in London.
The last few weeks of the autumn term at universities saw a rise in student protest and resistance to austerity, prompting a draconian crackdown by university managements and the police.
The driving force behind the protests is a growing opposition to the privatisation of higher education, part of wider Tory attacks on the whole public sector.
