Opinion

Here’s the Lib Dems’ vision for the school system of the future

15 Apr 2019, 10:25

Teachers are overworked, undervalued and underpaid and we need to resource them better, says Layla Moran, setting out the Lib Dems’ vision for the school system

Some new teachers are barely earning the National Living Wage because they are overworked and underpaid. That was the warning from the NEU’s joint General Secretaries this week.

I was deeply saddened reading this news. But it didn’t surprise me. Because if the Conservatives wanted to deliberately alienate the teaching profession, they’ve done a great job.

Take teachers’ pay, for example.

After almost a decade of pay restraint, teachers were hoping that the ending of the public sector pay cap would mean a fresh start. Maybe, just maybe, they’d be rewarded properly for the hours of overtime they put in.

Our teaching profession should be highly qualified and highly valued

The Government’s pay review body had a new-found freedom. It saw the struggles that schools are facing to recruit new teachers and keep them in the profession. So, it recommended an inflation-busting pay rise of 3.5% for every state school teacher.

How did Damian Hinds respond? For the first time in 27 years, the Government ignored its own pay review body. Rather than offering 3.5% across the board, it restricted these top pay rises to teachers on the main pay scale. The pay of senior and experienced teachers continued to face a real-terms cut: the very people that schools are struggling the most to keep!

Our teaching profession should be highly qualified and highly valued. They’re our most vital asset in education. It’s why Liberal Democrats believe every child deserves to be taught by a trained professional.

And it’s also why an annual pay rise for teachers should be the norm. We should be guaranteeing it for all teachers, at least in line with inflation, every year.

I’m delighted that, today, I’ll be speaking at the NEU’s annual conference, setting out how the Liberal Democrats are fighting for a schools system that is fully funded and gives teachers the freedom and power to do what’s best for students.

We’re fighting so that schools don’t have to rely on crowdfunding and Amazon wishlists just to make ends meet. For pupils and teachers to be liberated from a high-stakes testing regime and a culture of accountability.

If we want teachers to feel valued, we have to give them the right resources

It doesn’t have to be this way. At these local elections, Liberal Democrats are campaigning to stop the school funding emergency, by providing over £2 billion of funding to return budgets back to 2015 levels.

And I have suggestions to get us started on tackling the toxic culture in our schools too.

Scrap Ofsted. Replace it with an inspections system led by teachers, for teachers. Make it focus just as much on the culture of the school and the wellbeing of pupils and staff as much as on academic results.

Ban league tables. Publish a broader range of data so parents get a better feel for the school, like survey feedback or comments from other school leaders on the quality of pastoral care or the breadth of subjects they offer.

And abolish SATs. Stop this obsession with teaching to the test, reduce the pressure on our primary school pupils and give teachers the freedom to teach a broad, diverse curriculum.

But these are fixes for the here and now. We can do even better in the long term.

And I want to put teachers at the heart of that mission.

Last month, I launched an independent Education Commission to develop a vision for the school system of the future.

We’ve got a great team, including Kevin Courtney from the NEU, former Ofsted head Christine Gilbert and ASCL General Secretary Geoff Barton. But I also want you to be involved. We’ll soon be launching a call for evidence to let you have your say.

If we want our teachers to feel valued, we have to give them the right resources – and then let them get on with teaching.

Only then can we deliver a fairer education to propel our children into the future.

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3 Comments

  1. I’m a sometimes Lib-Dem voter and concerned about education, however this post seems to have a lot on what would be scrapped but very little on what would be done. E.g. commitment to maintain Teachers salary in line with inflation no matter what but no discussion of how this is financed; scrapping of SATS but no discussion of how academic standards would be maintained; scrapping of OFSTED for an “Teacher led” surveillance body but with no mention of how Parents voice would be maintained and no mention of how independence of scrutiny would be maintained.

    I’m left with a disappointed “Baby out with bathwater” and mildly frustrated as this is an important topic that needs to be explored and there are changes needed in the current system. Come on Layla, show us some detail.

  2. Jim Thorpe

    Towards an educational policy

    ◊ Support for school and FE teaching during the Blair years, in the early 2000s included appointing regional co-ordinators, and the publication of Malcolm Swan’s Improving Learning in Mathematics, familiarly known as ILIM or ‘The Standards Unit Box’. These resources, and their demise, are worth studying for policy lessons for the future.
    – The UK in times past was internationally famed for its contribution to mathematics teaching but the dead hand of the current government has submerged so much of quality, leading elsewhere to disdain for UK educational practice.
    – Very few people I meet claim confidence in mathematics, but often confide in me that it was ‘’the one subject I didn’t get”: most typically they hide their fear, possibly shamed about their perceived incompetence in such a high-stakes subject. Accordingly, such people incorrectly regard themselves as a minority. I think they’re the majority.

    ◊ Additional teacher pay will have but a transitory effect on teacher recruitment or retention. There’s simply too much work: if one won’t work in the evenings, they can’t be a teacher. One excellent mathematics teacher on Friday nights used to go to the pub, meeting up with a crowd of financial advisors. The teacher soon found out that, unlike her, the financial advisors went to the pub every night. She is now a financial advisor.

    ◊ As well as excessive workload, Gove’s inept meddling with the curriculum has made effective and creative teaching too hard for most. Those mathematics teachers who remain often oversimplify the task of enabling learners to understand, turning themselves into mere instructors of easily forgotten rules, rather than acting as mathematical educators. (Effective teaching might render the BBC Radio 4 programme, ‘More or Less’, redundant.)

    ◊ Political party’s educational teams would do well to be in frequent touch with subject teaching associations. In my own field, mathematics education, two classroom facing organisations are Association of Teachers of Mathematics, and, The Mathematical Association. Sending a Labour education team member to one or more of their annual professional development conferences should in my view be de rigueur.
    ¬– a watching brief on these, and related such organisations, would have revealed that their response to government educational consultations met the deadlines, but these deadlines were so close to government implementation dates as to render it impossible for the submitted responses to be read, let alone judged. Some consultation! Policy by fiat!

    ◊ The early to mid-1980s was a positive era for mathematical education: The 1982 Cockcroft report, Mathematics counts, recommended that
    ‘Mathematics teaching at all levels should include opportunities for:
    • exposition by the teacher;
    • discussion between teacher and pupils and between pupils themselves;
    • appropriate practical work;
    • consolidation and practice of fundamental skills and routines;
    • problem solving, including the application of mathematics to everyday situations;
    • investigational work.’
    Mathematics counts was the report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Teaching of Mathematics in Schools under the Chairmanship of Dr W H Cockcroft
    – Recommendations worth revisiting, I suggest.

    Below is a Guardian article by Prof. Tim Gowers, a Fields medallist.

    Jim Thorpe
    Former school mathematics teacher, currently Associate Lecturer, The Open University.

    Maths isn’t the problem – the way it’s taught is. Tim Gowers. Guardian 11.03-2016

    ‘Mathematics should be a tool for increasing one’s thinking power but for many children it is just a set of rather pointless rules for manipulating symbols. The problem becomes clear if one asks children a question such as the following: a Number 35 bus pulls up at a bus stop and eight passengers get on; what is the age of the bus driver? A large percentage of children, their minds numbed by years of symbol manipulation, will give the answer 43. This is a tragedy: rather than being trained to think, these children have been trained to do the opposite.’

    ‘It is therefore good for the health of a country if its population has high standards of mathematical literacy: without it, people are swayed by incorrect arguments, make bad decisions and are happy to vote for politicians who make bad decisions on their behalf.

    So how might mathematics education be different? The way it is often taught, children are asked to take a huge leap of faith: that the symbol manipulation that seems pointless now will one day be useful to them. But this is true for only a small minority of children, who enjoy the symbol manipulation for its own sake and later find themselves drawn towards STEM subjects, where it is indeed very useful. The rest know perfectly well that they will never reach this promised land. What can be done for them?’

    ‘Of course, some proficiency in calculation and symbol manipulation is important – and it improves one’s conceptual understanding – but it should not be all that is taught. We could also ask children open-ended questions, such as whether it is more dangerous to travel by car or by aeroplane. A question like that is not explicitly mathematical, so it is less likely to trigger the brain’s off switch. And if it doesn’t, the ensuing discussion will convey why we should care about multiplication, division, averages and probabilities, what we can say about them when we do not have exact numbers handed to us on a plate, and how to frame mathematical questions to help make decisions that are of practical interest.

    I am not suggesting that all maths should be introduced this way. But until our mathematics classes encourage people to think, rather than merely play games with marks on paper, the Simon Jenkinses of this world will continue to confuse mathematics with mindless symbol manipulation, attacking the subject itself when their real target should be today’s curriculum.’

    Tim Gowers is a British mathematician. He is a Royal Society research professor at the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics at the University of Cambridge, where he also holds the Rouse Ball chair, and is a fellow of Trinity College.