David Johnston was the MP for Wantage from 2019 to 2024, and a former minister for children, families and wellbeing.
I suppose we should have predicted it. In scrapping the Freedom of Speech Bill, Labour weren’t just indulging what we know is their instinct, to treat words as having the same power to harm us as weapons, but doing what the main union in the higher education sector wanted.
Far from welcoming the right of all academics to express their opinions, the University and College Union’s (UCU) Director General bizarrely claimed in 2021 that the Bill was being brought in by “this authoritarian government…[as a]…Trojan Horse for increasing its power and control over staff and students”. They’re pleased it’s now been scrapped, even if no-one else is.
The announcement this week that Ofsted’s single-word judgements will also be scrapped is another policy designed by unions. They’d really like Ofsted abolished entirely, something they managed to get into Labour’s manifesto when Jeremy Corbyn was leader, but they’re pleased to have at least achieved what the National Education Union (NEU) described as a “step in the right direction”.
Of course, Ofsted’s central mission is not for teachers but for children and their parents. It’s been an important tool for improving education standards, for disadvantaged children in particular. But no matter, the teaching unions have never been fans.
Labour had nothing to say when it was in opposition besides the promise of free breakfast clubs and VAT on private school fees, a woefully inadequate prescription for our education system.
Knowing what else the unions want should serve as a good guide to what other moves we’ll see from this Government in education – almost all of them bad. Here are some of my guesses.
We can expect the Department for Education’s performance tables which rank schools to be scrapped, probably with the end to some exams entirely; the unions are generally not in favour of either SATs or GCSEs.
In place of exams being used as a way of assessing children and schools we can expect a ‘mixed mode of assessment’, i.e. a lot more of teachers being able to do their own assessments – which led to such hyperinflation in grades during the pandemic.
According to the NASUWT union, scrapping measures like SATs will “protect teachers and school leaders from excessive marking-related workload burdens”. Here was us thinking assessments were to help ensure children made the progress they need to in order to have better futures.
We’ll see the curriculum that the Conservative Government worked so hard to improve diluted again away from knowledge and towards ‘skills’. Labour have already halted the scrapping of low quality BTEC courses that don’t improve people’s life chances, something (it won’t surprise you by now to know) the teaching unions were keen on.
As under the last Labour Government, which left half a million 16-24 year olds not in education, employment or training (NEET), a focus on skills in the curriculum ironically won’t help young people become more employable – quite the opposite.
Low-quality university degrees will be here to stay. When the Conservatives announced a crackdown on rip-off courses that do nothing for your life chances but leave you with a pile of debt, the UCU condemned it and Labour followed suit, saying it was “anti-aspirational”.
In fact, the very people most harmed by being sold low-quality courses are working-class and disadvantaged young people. But it will be yet another area where the interests of the teaching staff and their institutions take precedence over the children and young people they’re there to teach.
The Conservative Government’s emphasis on phonics saw English primary school children judged last year to be the best readers in the Western World. Our school reforms saw us rise in the PISA rankings from 25th, 27th, and 16th in reading, maths and science under Labour to 13th, 11th, and 13th under the Conservatives.
But we’ll see a move away from all the things that enabled this, such as having a more robust curriculum, more robust exams, and schools being given the freedom to make their own decisions.
We’ll fall down the international league tables again. It’s unlikely Labour will mind very much about this, however. Rather than welcome the improvement seen in international rankings, Bridget Phillipson, then Shadow Secretary of State for Education, pooh-poohed it, saying that education “is not a contest between nations, but a shared endeavour in every country and across our world to give children the very best start—not some of our children, but all of them.”
So much for us having a competitive economy under Labour.
In the past two months almost all of the focus has, completely understandably, been on the changes Labour will make to taxation and spending. They’ll be putting up taxes, paying off their union paymasters, and adding regulation and bureaucracy to anything that moves. They’ll fail to cut immigration and their energy policy has all the makings of a disaster.
But it’s still in education where they may well do the most lasting damage.
We saw during the pandemic how quickly progress for children and young people could be undone. It was a period in which Labour simply took the talking points from the unions and read them out in the House of Commons: for example, calling for children to be given laptops to stay at home, rather than lessons to stay in school.
Or not saying a word to challenge the NEU when it said that “teachers should not be teaching a full timetable nor routinely marking work in this period” nor when it teamed up with the other unions to devise a 200-point checklist of demands it wanted to see before schools reopened.
Now, having not bothered to think about education policy in their years of opposition, Labour find themselves in government with a blank page and expectant unions who know exactly what they want to write on it. So far, they’ve unsurprisingly (and unlike everyone else) had nothing but praise for Labour.
In 2007, the then Labour Government renamed the Department for Education the Department for Children, Schools and Families to show clearly who the department was making policy for. How long before this Labour government will need to rename it the Department for the Teaching Unions?
David Johnston was the MP for Wantage from 2019 to 2024, and a former minister for children, families and wellbeing.
I suppose we should have predicted it. In scrapping the Freedom of Speech Bill, Labour weren’t just indulging what we know is their instinct, to treat words as having the same power to harm us as weapons, but doing what the main union in the higher education sector wanted.
Far from welcoming the right of all academics to express their opinions, the University and College Union’s (UCU) Director General bizarrely claimed in 2021 that the Bill was being brought in by “this authoritarian government…[as a]…Trojan Horse for increasing its power and control over staff and students”. They’re pleased it’s now been scrapped, even if no-one else is.
The announcement this week that Ofsted’s single-word judgements will also be scrapped is another policy designed by unions. They’d really like Ofsted abolished entirely, something they managed to get into Labour’s manifesto when Jeremy Corbyn was leader, but they’re pleased to have at least achieved what the National Education Union (NEU) described as a “step in the right direction”.
Of course, Ofsted’s central mission is not for teachers but for children and their parents. It’s been an important tool for improving education standards, for disadvantaged children in particular. But no matter, the teaching unions have never been fans.
Labour had nothing to say when it was in opposition besides the promise of free breakfast clubs and VAT on private school fees, a woefully inadequate prescription for our education system.
Knowing what else the unions want should serve as a good guide to what other moves we’ll see from this Government in education – almost all of them bad. Here are some of my guesses.
We can expect the Department for Education’s performance tables which rank schools to be scrapped, probably with the end to some exams entirely; the unions are generally not in favour of either SATs or GCSEs.
In place of exams being used as a way of assessing children and schools we can expect a ‘mixed mode of assessment’, i.e. a lot more of teachers being able to do their own assessments – which led to such hyperinflation in grades during the pandemic.
According to the NASUWT union, scrapping measures like SATs will “protect teachers and school leaders from excessive marking-related workload burdens”. Here was us thinking assessments were to help ensure children made the progress they need to in order to have better futures.
We’ll see the curriculum that the Conservative Government worked so hard to improve diluted again away from knowledge and towards ‘skills’. Labour have already halted the scrapping of low quality BTEC courses that don’t improve people’s life chances, something (it won’t surprise you by now to know) the teaching unions were keen on.
As under the last Labour Government, which left half a million 16-24 year olds not in education, employment or training (NEET), a focus on skills in the curriculum ironically won’t help young people become more employable – quite the opposite.
Low-quality university degrees will be here to stay. When the Conservatives announced a crackdown on rip-off courses that do nothing for your life chances but leave you with a pile of debt, the UCU condemned it and Labour followed suit, saying it was “anti-aspirational”.
In fact, the very people most harmed by being sold low-quality courses are working-class and disadvantaged young people. But it will be yet another area where the interests of the teaching staff and their institutions take precedence over the children and young people they’re there to teach.
The Conservative Government’s emphasis on phonics saw English primary school children judged last year to be the best readers in the Western World. Our school reforms saw us rise in the PISA rankings from 25th, 27th, and 16th in reading, maths and science under Labour to 13th, 11th, and 13th under the Conservatives.
But we’ll see a move away from all the things that enabled this, such as having a more robust curriculum, more robust exams, and schools being given the freedom to make their own decisions.
We’ll fall down the international league tables again. It’s unlikely Labour will mind very much about this, however. Rather than welcome the improvement seen in international rankings, Bridget Phillipson, then Shadow Secretary of State for Education, pooh-poohed it, saying that education “is not a contest between nations, but a shared endeavour in every country and across our world to give children the very best start—not some of our children, but all of them.”
So much for us having a competitive economy under Labour.
In the past two months almost all of the focus has, completely understandably, been on the changes Labour will make to taxation and spending. They’ll be putting up taxes, paying off their union paymasters, and adding regulation and bureaucracy to anything that moves. They’ll fail to cut immigration and their energy policy has all the makings of a disaster.
But it’s still in education where they may well do the most lasting damage.
We saw during the pandemic how quickly progress for children and young people could be undone. It was a period in which Labour simply took the talking points from the unions and read them out in the House of Commons: for example, calling for children to be given laptops to stay at home, rather than lessons to stay in school.
Or not saying a word to challenge the NEU when it said that “teachers should not be teaching a full timetable nor routinely marking work in this period” nor when it teamed up with the other unions to devise a 200-point checklist of demands it wanted to see before schools reopened.
Now, having not bothered to think about education policy in their years of opposition, Labour find themselves in government with a blank page and expectant unions who know exactly what they want to write on it. So far, they’ve unsurprisingly (and unlike everyone else) had nothing but praise for Labour.
In 2007, the then Labour Government renamed the Department for Education the Department for Children, Schools and Families to show clearly who the department was making policy for. How long before this Labour government will need to rename it the Department for the Teaching Unions?