Review by Diana Young

Do the PM’s plans add up?

The new year’s conversation started with a bang following Rishi Sunak’s plan to ensure all school pupils in England study maths until the age of 18, to equip young people “with the quantitative and statistical skills … including finding the best mortgage deal or savings rate.”

Critics launched into a tirade, led by Simon Pegg’s furious, expletive-filled outburst in a video on Instagram. As a survey of over 7,500 teachers by Teacher Tapp revealed that 34 per cent strongly disagreed with the PM’s ambition, one tweet by a teacher more politely and more succinctly voiced the concerns of many.

Meanwhile, co-head and director of curriculum innovation, Therese Andrews shared a blog with a more balanced view of the PM’s proposals, taking curriculum reform, recruitment, retention, and the purpose of education into consideration.

Governors strive for higher standards of educational achievement. Therefore, we welcome strategies that boost young people’s potential. As such, I am certainly in favour of children being taught life skills such as money management, budgeting and financial analysis. The internet is full of resources to help teachers deliver that, and I look forward to the PM outlining his plans for how he will support them to accomplish his ambition.

Is it time to pay up?

The threat of impending teacher strikes is highly concerning for school governors. Having personally experienced the impact of Girls’ Day School Trust NEU members striking in February 2022 to protect their pensions, I am almost certain that nationwide strikes will have a detrimental effect on educational standards, further exacerbated for disadvantaged children. That said, the government’s new anti-strike laws are likely to further diminish the sector’s propensity to recruit and retain teachers, now and in the long term.

But as anonymous Twitter user, Secret TA says, there are bigger problems than pay alone.

In that context, the PM’s new year’s resolution for maths teaching seems all the more unlikely. As the Higher Education Policy Institute put it in a tweet promoting a new blog on their site by chief executive of Million Plus, Pam Tamlow: “If you’re going to compel the growing number of young people to do Maths until the age of 18, you’re going to need a lot of new Maths teachers.”

Meanwhile, guidance published by the department for education in 2016 remains relevant and offers a useful resource on how school leaders can minimise strike disruption, along with links to further sources of information.

Online misogyny: Is the game up?

Following the arrest of online influencer and self-titled ‘misogynist’, Andrew Tate, educators have called for resources that counter his anti-feminist arguments. The Safe Schools Alliance quite rightly highlight that Andrew Tate’s harmful content is not unique. Indeed, Twitter user, justanotherfemale makes the point forcefully that misogyny is pervasive in the culture young people consume.

From a governance perspective, we have a duty to ensure that teachers are well equipped to challenge discussion. However, I am concerned that our response should avoid aggrandising Tate’s discourse, thereby amplifying misinformation and spreading anti-feminist rhetoric. To that end, I’m looking forward to next week’s misogynistic online influencers webinar organised by community-interest company, Men At Work.

Can all teachers look up?

Finally, following an article by a BBC young reporter who asked ‘why don’t more teachers look like me?’, UCL IOE’s professor Alice Bradbury hit the airwaves, revisiting her and her colleagues’ 2021research showing that that minority teachers felt there was a glass ceiling inhibiting retention and paths to leadership.

Further confirmed last year by NFER research on racial equality in the teacher workforce, it’s good to see that diversity in educational leadership is hitting headlines. It’s particularly important that the headteacher of the school I govern is a Black woman, reflective of the school’s culturally diverse cohort. Governors have a duty to ensure children are educated in inclusive and representative environments and must hold their schools to account for establishing diverse teams.