The danger of a single story | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Tomorrow and Tuesday I am taking part in a UNISON ERA (Employment Rights Act) refresher training via zoom. 

As part of the preparation for the courses the Tutor from (conel.ac.uk) has asked us to watch beforehand this marvellous video of the writer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Well worth a watch. 

These are the questions we will have to answer tomorrow. 

1.What questions or thoughts did it evoke in you? 

2.What’s our role as trade unionists in the workplace and in society? 

3.How can we ensure that the “whole story” is considered? 

My First Pint in a Pub for a quite a bit (Thank you and all the best Julianne)

Very sad to hear tonight at the first Newham Full Council meeting since the start of Covid19 that our fabulous Cabinet Colleague for Education, Cllr Julianne Marriott, is stepping down from her post.

However, every cloud in life has a silver lining - and many thanks to Julianne for my first pint in a (socially distancing) pub since lock down (with other colleagues).

I will post a more considered post on our Council meeting and Julianne's contribution to the transformation in our borough very soon.

Hat tip photo Charlene M

Newham Free School Uniform competition - cute picture alert!

"Hoorum and Diya wearing their new school uniforms. Their families won a full uniform pack by completing their school applications online. 2020 eAdmissions open 1 Sept. #Newham #BackToSchool2019". Hat tip Cllr Julianne Marriott, Cabinet Member for Education

Hope for our Country - Campaigning in Chingford & Woodford Green

Yesterday, I was out canvassing next door to Newham, in Chingford & Woodford Green with a strong team from West Ham Labour, led by our MP, Lyn Brown. Following the General Election many people now think that this traditional Conservative seat is a marginal and winnable for Labour.

The fact that the sitting MP is the former Tory leader, Iain Duncan Smith, adds to the attraction for many to support local activists, who will be trying to unseat him at the next election.

Saturday was also a Labour Party national campaigning day and the theme was "Hope for our Country".

There was a bit of confusion at the beginning about where was the meeting point but after the traditional photo we split up into several canvass teams.

My team went up one side of a very, very long road then back again. It was made up of mostly houses which were relatively easy to canvass but with some flats above shops which are more difficult to get into and contact anyone.  It was great to have an experienced and competent team leader "running the board" (telling us where to go and to collate our information).

While waiting for someone to answer (or not) the door, after you have knocked, can be very boring, I decided to continue to photo with my phone interesting front door "furniture".

It was a very positive canvass for Labour. It did not feel like a safe Conservative seat either. There was clearly people who were against Labour but they were (bar one) polite and reasonable.

I met one mother with toddlers running around her home, who was so, so angry with inadequate resources for education. She demanded that I feed back her concerns. She told me that her employer has loads of job applications from qualified teachers who want to leave education.

The most interesting conversation was with someone who described herself as a life long Tory who now thinks that this government is just cruel and uncaring to the needy. She is thinking hard about voting Labour next time but said it was very difficult to change your lifelong beliefs.

I asked one man if he was voting Labour and he said "Of course, my Mum would kill me otherwise".

I was not in the canvass team with Lyn Brown MP, which met up with a street stall being run by Iain Duncan Smith (bottom left of photo) but that must have been fun!

School Cuts (92% of schools will have their funding cut in England); Book Launch & Demo

Check out the http://www.schoolcuts.org.uk website and enter your postcode and you will see the schools around you that face savage Government cuts in funding. Incredibly 92% of schools face cuts, an average primary school will face £96,000 cut and average Secondary £290,000.

Locally there is a Newham bookshop/NUT book launch this Thursday called "Standing up for Education".

with Christine Blower, Louise Regan,
Victoria Baskerville and Mark Holding

“There is a crisis in our schools now. Children are facing rising class sizes,
there is a shortage of teachers and parents already face a crisis in finding school places.”
— Jeremy Corbyn at the National Union of Teachers Conference 2016.

What is education for? What should be taught? Who should control schools? How should educational progress be measured? What are the real barriers to learning? How much testing is too much testing? Are schools being privatised? Should schools be privatised? Do academy schools work?

These are just a few of the questions at the heart of a major debate over the future of education and schools. Many of the issues in this debate are long-standing concerns that have found new relevance in new circumstances. Some of the issues are new but demand an urgent and forceful answer.

Standing Up for Education offers a wide-ranging intervention into the education debate with contributions from teachers, politicians and students themselves. Its overall message is clear: current government policy is not fit for purpose and is failing teachers and students alike.

There are alternatives to over-testing, teacher shortages, demoralisation and privatisation. Standing Up for Education shows the way.

The panel

Christine Blower is international secretary of the National Union of Teachers (NUT) after being general secretary from 2009 to 2016; Louise Reganis senior vice-president of the NUT; Victoria Baskerville is a parent and is active in the Redbridge Against Academisation campaign; and Mark Holding is an assistant general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL), and is a founder member of Our Community – Our Schools and a parent governor.

and to continue the "Education, Education, Education" theme there will be (supported by UNISON)  Saturday 19 November the NUS and UCU have called a national demonstration under the banner of ‘United for Education’. It looks set to be the biggest demonstration in defence of education in many years. Students and staff will march together through central London, assembling at Park Lane at 12 noon.

"Education not Segregation" - West Ham Labour Party Street Stall: Barking Rd, 11.30am, Saturday 8 October

"Despite the rain we had a great turnout last week - so we'd thought we'd do it again.

Please join local members at a street stall on Saturday. And some of us will also knock on doors of nearby homes to talk to voters there too. Don't worry if you've not done it before, everyone has a first time...

Where: Near John Bennet newsagent/Moka cafe, Barking Rd, E16 1EN (nr Canning Town stn)
When:11.30am, Sat, 8 October
What: Talking to local people about education and what Labour stands for. We'll have a street stall with leaflets about Theresa May's grammar school policy and we'll knock on some doors locally.
Please let me know if you can join us by emailing westhamlabour@gmail.org or calling Shabs on the day.

And for anyone listening to Theresa May today - you might find this rebuttal, No Answers, No Change, by Labour interesting/useful.

Hope to see you Saturday.

Best
Julianne

Julianne Marriott
Vice Chair (Campaigns and Comms) West Ham CLP

t: @westhamlabour
e: westhamlabour@gmail.com
w: westhamlabour.org

(Hat tip picture James Beckles)

Parents Defending Education: Meeting 23 April 2016

It is shocking that for bigoted political dogma the Tories are going to attack top performing Local Authority schools. Check out Anti Academies Alliance. Hat tip NUT Bob Archer.

Ed & Education, Education, Education

On Thursday lunchtime I went to see Labour leader Ed Miliband at a policy launch on Education which took place at Haverstock school in Camden, North London. This state run comprehensive was where Ed and his brother David were educated.

While waiting for the event to begin I had a chat to a women sitting next to and by coincidence she was a retired former teacher of Ed at this school. Her name was Kate Myers and she was his form teacher and later head of house.

Of course I asked whether she had any juicy gossip about Ed when he was in the school and she shook her head and said "No, he was absolutely lovely".

Graham Lane, former Newham Council Chair of Education, was there and we had a chat about local issues. I must get around to reviewing Graham's excellent book "Local Government and Democracy - an insider's view" which is actually a first hand account of the massive changes in education policy in in recent decades. It has not always been a pretty tale.

The current head teacher of Haverstock, John Dowd, (who has a magnificent trimmed beard) introduced Ed to the audience and said the school always welcomes former pupils, including future Prime Ministers. 

Ed spoke about how important the school and its "extraordinary teachers" had been to him. A good education is imperative not only for pupils but also nations. He announced plans for a future Labour Government to increase spending on Education at least in line with inflation and limit primary school classes to 30. He also wanted parity of esteem for technical and academic qualifications.

In the Q&A the media present ignored education and failed to ask Ed a single question about it and instead only asked about the row between Ed and the Treasurer of the Conservative Party about tax avoidance. While this is an important subject the event was supposed to be about "Education". It goes to show how shallow and irreverent traditional UK media is making itself. I suppose if Ed had talked about changes to private school education they would have shown more interest.

I wasn't picked for the Q&A which was a shame since I was going to welcome his comments about the importance of paying teachers well with making sure that school support staff are also recognised as being vital to a great education and who equally deserve decent pay.

At the end I said to Ed's former teacher Kate that she must be very proud of Ed and what she has helped to achieve. She replied very softly but firmly "Yes, I am".

So there you go all you undecided and floating voters. Vote Ed for Prime Minister. Teacher knows best.

West Ham GC Open Meeting - Professor Ken Spours Institute of Education.

On Thursday we had Professor Ken Spours as our guest speaker for our West Ham CLP General Committee meeting which was open to all members.

After his presentation we had a community Iftar (breaking of the fast during Ramadan) event which I will post upon next.


Due to a work commitment I came in a little late but as I came in I heard Ken extolling the education system found in the "Nordic arc of prosperity" as well as parts of Canada. He wants to reverse some of the extreme Anglo Saxon education models such as the "Grove Revolution" in the UK.  Michael Gove's privatisation has led to one of the most centralised and politicised education systems in the world.

The emphasis on early assessment leads to young people being labelled and not assessed. Ken gave an example of a bright 6 year son of one of his neighbours whose assessment report was next to useless but labelled him as below average with no real evidence.

Ken admitted that he use to be a member of the Communist Party for many years, mind you, he was  "a Euro-communist not a Stalinist".

 Ken believes that you must always accentuate the positive. We need a climbing frame concept of eduction. Educators should not lead from the front or be behind but by their students side. Help people to discover their own talents. This "helping hand" approach he first found in Tanzania.

Unemployment may be going down from a very high level but the young are losing out and are now the new poor. We need inter-generational justice. The Tories prefer inter-generational war. He would prefer class war. But not a Marxist class war (despite still being a Marxist).

As well as a New Education system we need a new type of economy and politics. In one way he liked Gove more than Ed Balls. When Balls was the Secretary of State for Education it was the "peace of the grave yard" and there was no debate. The mass raving debates on education under Grove is much better.

Labour did many good things but Labour cannot just tell teachers what to do. Tristram Hunt MP gets this bottom up approach. We need new values.  Education is too important to be left to politicians. We need an independent Council for Education. Other countries plan ahead for 10 years rather than our 3 year political cycles.

Education should not humiliate kids at schools and should stop damaging them. The future is about being creative. Ken sees top Chinese students at his university who fall apart when asked to work by themselves. Values are the glue of system. The more people understand what to do the less we have to tell them.

He once had to sit next at a dinner to Gove and listen to him say that the most important thing a young person should know is facts such as "where is Belgian?". While Ken accepts that young people have to know certain things. You really need to put them in different and difficult circumstances and not just enter them for a 12th GCSE. What is the use? We live in a problem world not a subject world.

We need a baccalaureate system and hopefully we will have one soon . Students will have to undertake a research project as well as voluntary work.

Ken believed that the Tory attitudes over the schools in Birmingham which are claimed to face an Islamic takeover is hypocritical since they had removed the powers of local authorities to properly  supervise schools.

All schools should be in the same "family of schools". Schools should be accountable to each other and parents. A new settlement would give autonomy and collaboration.

Schools are not an island. We need more confident teachers. We now recruit probably the best we ever had. But they tend to be technically good but cultural poor. The current system gives them the incentive to cheat. All teachers should take a Hippocratic oath. To do no harm but fight for better education. Get a discussion of values and why they are here.

Finally, Education must fully integrated communities. It use to be said that school is bad but better than work. We need to have confident workers who have control. A hall mark of a fully comprehensive system is true life long learning. If we get this then we can have our 1948 moment.

In the Q&A there were many questions. In mine I said that I agreed with much of what he said but felt there was a danger of romanticising comprehensive schools. I went to a former secondary modern turned comprehensive in the late 1970s. While there was a handful of excellent and dedicated teachers who helped me, for many working class kids, comprehensive schools failed them. I was lucky and got a decent eduction but most of my contemporaries did not.

Ken agreed that there were some very poor comprehensive schools were some teachers just gave up. But the problem was not that they were comprehensive but that its values were not fully implemented. There was also the economic crisis's of the 1970s and for many the education they got in a comprehensive was still better than they would have got beforehand.

He compared the criticism he use get as a member of the Communist Party because of the actions of the Soviet Union. People would ask him how could be a communist and he would counter by saying that the Soviet Union was never a socialist state. (I take his point but I am not totally convinced)

It was an excellent and well attended debate and when large CLPs moan about the lack of attendance at GC meetings then they should think of similar ways to encourage members to attend.

Hat tip Julianne Marriott for photo.

What should the next Labour Government do about Education? Newham Compass & Fabians

The next Great debate by Newham Compass and Fabians will be on Education and will take place on Tuesday 1 April (no comment) at the West Ham Supporters' Club Castle St, London, East Ham E6 1PP.

West Ham Labour Education Debate

Check on this report on last week's West Ham Labour Party debate on Education. This was hosted by the Women's Forum and took place at the Old Town Hall in Stratford.

The author, Rania Ramli is a student and Young Labour member of West Ham ward.

"The speakers were Lord Andrew Adonis (the driver of the Academy program in the UK), Sharon Hodgson MP (Shadow Minister for Women and Equalities and Former Minister for Children and Families), Professor Becky Francis (Professor of Education and Social justice at Kings College University), and Dianne Walls (who has taught in the East end for over 40 years and who is currently a school governor for Chobham Academy). 

The main objective of the event was to reflect on Labour’s legacy with regards to education, and discuss the stance that the party should take in developing a new policy".  Chaired by
CLP Women Officer, Seyi Akiwowo (also West Ham ward).

Also bookmark our West Ham Labour blog here. 

West Ham Women Forum: Education Debate 16 Jan Stratford Town Hall

"On Thursday 16th Jan at 7pm, West Ham CLP Women’s Forum, are hosting an education debate.
Our confirmed speakers on the panel are:

• Lord Andrew Adonis the driver of the Academy programme in the UK.
• Sharon Hodgson MP who is the Shadow Minster for Women and Equalities and former Shadow Minster for Children and Families
• Professor Becky Francis from King’s College University who is best known for work on gender and achievement.
• Diane Walls who has taught in the East End of London for over 40 years, a school governor at Chobham Academy and was a Newham Councillor for 18 years.

During the debate we will address questions on what is Labour’s 13 year legacy on education policy, standards and achievement, methods to improve standards of schools in Newham and the UK and what Labour’s policy on education should be.

There of course will be plenty of opportunities for you as the audience to ask questions and share your thoughts.

This is an open event so please feel free to invite family, friends, teachers and governors to what will be very interesting education debate!

Here is the Facebook link for members who are social media savvy: https://www.facebook.com/events/164686817075417/

Seyi Akiwowo
West Ham Women’s Officer
@SeyiAkiwowo"

(hat tip West Ham Labour Party blog)

Teaching assistants - A Class Act!

"UNISON is celebrating teaching and classroom assistants this Friday, 29 November.

Teaching assistants (TAs) and classroom assistants (CAs) carry out a huge variety of tasks, working with teachers to help our children learn and develop to be the best they can be.

They provide one-to-one support for children who need additional help, which cannot always be provided by a teacher delivering a lesson to a full class. With the right training, they even deliver lessons to whole classes under the direction of a qualified teacher.

TAs adapt resources for disabled students and support children with special health, medical and learning needs. They supervise classes for absent teachers, manage other classroom support staff and prepare learning materials. They support pupils’ social and emotional wellbeing; and monitor, assess and record pupil data, working with outside agencies when necessary.

TAs also supervise children on out-of-school activities, run breakfast and after-school clubs, invigilate exams and supervise lunch and play times.

Imagine a School Without Teaching and Classroom Assistants.

Yet the role of teaching assistants and classroom assistants is being undermined. Earlier this year, it was reported that the government asked the teachers review body to look at teachers' contracts - with a view to them taking on duties currently performed by teaching assistants. Recently, an influential think tank report questioned the value of teaching assistants.

To find out just how important TAs are to our schools, UNISON spoke to staff at Pakeman Primary School. Watch the video here, and see what they had to say.

A Girl With a Book

Sign the petition and stand with Malala Yousafzai for teachers, schools and books.

Newham Compass: What is Education for? 15 June 2011

"The future of our schools" TUC conference Sat 27 Nov

The TUC are putting on this special conference on the future of schools and "debating the Government's reform agenda".

"What do government policies on schools mean for our children and communities?

What are the long-term implications of giving more schools greater autonomy - improved schooling for all or a two-tier system?

Does the focus on parental choice empower the majority of families?

What do academies and free schools mean for teachers and other education professionals?

This conference will consider these questions and hear a range of views on the future of our schools.

The event is based around panel discussions and workshops so that participants can share their experiences and opinions with others.

The event is for everyone with an interest in the future of our schools, including parents, pupils, school governors, school staff, trade unionists, local authority officials, academics and policy advisors.

To register for this free event please complete this online form: www.tuc.org.uk/futureschoolsreg
Let your friends and colleagues know you are attending this event: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=160098134017914"

Will you stand up for Education?

Fund our Future: National March & Rally 10 November 2010.

UNISON Leadership School: Stoke Rochford 2009

This week I am taking part in the UNISON Leadership School course which is taking place in Stoke Rochford, Grantham.

There are about 50 of us participating in the course. Lay activists from all over the union as well as UNISON employed staff (regional and Head office). This is the first such course ever run by UNISON (and I have not heard of any other union in the UK running anything similar). It is being delivered by (enthusiastic) UNISON national learning and organising team with the help of NEC members. I think this is a hugely positive and forward thinking initiative by UNISON..

So far there has been a mixture of presentations followed by discussions in small working groups. Our first speaker yesterday was Helen Black the Regional Secretary for East Midlands. She explained the economic and political context; national trade union trends and what lies in the future. One quotation she referred to was “The quality of leadership, more than any other single factor determines the success or failure of an organisation” Fiedler and Charmers.

Since then we have been grappling with different explanations and methods of leadership. Transformational, transactional, intuitive or shared/collective. The course is also being accredited by Ruskin College (to level 3 and 4).

Stoke Rochford itself is an old manor house owned by the National Union of Teachers (NUT) and used as a education and training centre. It is set in a stunningly beautiful countryside location.

On Thursday Ed Miliband MP is also coming to speak to us. If I get the time I’ll try and post further updates.

Things have got better – The Myth of a “Golden Age” of Education

It must really stick in the gullet of everyone who got their results recently to see the nonsense being put about over so-called “easy exams” and falling standards in education.

I think that this carping every August has gone on for too long. In recent years it seems to have become increasingly nasty and snobbish. It is also used as shorthand for an attack on comprehensive education by those who support academic selection and privilege.

Personally, I think that while there are still many problems to be overcome we have the best education system for the majority that we have ever had in this country.

An anonymous (naturally) commentator in this post claims “…GSC pass rate is an improbable 98.4%. Trying to suggest that this is the result of hardwork and excellent teaching is equally improbable. Most knowledgeable commentators working in education know this to be true. This is not to detract from the effort of many students but the sad fact is that the examinations have become a lot more predictable and therefore easier. Whereas 20 years ago in a modern history exam you had to study 200 years of history and could be asked questions across a wide range..now you know that there will always be a question on the origin of the First world war etc - makes the revision easier to target and the result predictable".

Right, let’s take this statement apart. I went to a large secondary modern turned comprehensive (Elfed High School) and took my “O” levels, CSEs (now combined as GCSEs) and "A" levels in the early 1980s. Which were apparently some sort of long lost halcyon days of high exam standards?

What rubbish, there has always been a very high “pass” rate for O/CSE/GCSEs, that is if you consider a grade D and E to be a “pass”. Rightly or wrongly, most employers don’t. In my day it was very rare for anyone to get a fail (or “unclassified”) since if you were expected to do that badly then you were not entered or didn’t turn up. I expect this is still true today.

Don’t for one moment fool yourself that we didn’t spend at least the last 2 terms before our exams going through old exam papers. You could predict questions in the same way then as today. Take history, you always knew you would get some version of “was the American War of Independence inevitable” or “was the industrial revolution really a revolution”. My British Constitution teacher “guaranteed” everyone on the course, if they were not an idiot, turned up for class, did the home work and concentrated on the questions he thought would be on the paper – we would get at least a “C”. He was right.

The quality of teaching is nowadays is superior to the 1980s. That is not to say that there were not inspirational teachers at my school then, there were, but we now have a graduate teaching staff. Pay has also risen. Since 1997 we have 172,000 more teaching assistants, many of whom are now trained. Staff also now have ongoing professional training and assessments.
During the last 10 years under Labour funding for pupils has doubled, over 36,000 more teachers in England alone; 274,000 more support staff/teaching assistants; over 1,100 new schools and over 1,300 Sure Start children's centres. This has made a huge difference.

But to me the greatest improvement in education in this country is still comprehensive schools. That nowadays it is not the norm to write off working class kids and let them leave school at 16 with little or no qualifications. My high school was in a largely working class area. There was on one level still an unspoken expectation that the best you could get in school is to leave at 16 and get a “good” apprenticeship if you were a boy or a secretarial job is you were a girl. This was a hangover of the secondary modern days. I can remember career teachers droning on about apprenticeships at the local steelworks or textile factories. I was always completely useless and kack handed at either metal work or woodwork so from an early age I realized that I had to find an alternative. Very luckily I had supportive parents who didn’t expect me to leave school as soon as possible, find work and hand over my wages to them to help support the family. This is what happened to them at that age.

At 16 I was astonished at the number of pupils who I knew to be far cleverer than me who left school and did not go on to further education.

It’s topical at the moment to muse upon the selection by Barack Obama of Joe Biden as his vice presidential candidate. Joe’s own chance of standing for the Presidency in 1988 was scuppered when he supposedly plagiarized Neil Kinnock’s famous speech to the Welsh Labour Party conference in 1987

"Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Was it because our predecessors were thick? Does anybody really think that they didn't get what we had because they didn't have the talent or the strength or the endurance or the commitment?

While the talented miner’s son in the 1950s was able to use the Grammar School path to go to University, Neil would be the first to admit that he was one of the very lucky ones of his generation.

At the end of my primary school I had a pretty poor assessment and I am sure that I would have failed the 11 plus if there was still selection. If that had been the case I would not have been the first in my family to go to university.

The BBC has an excellent article by Mike Baker where he examines the results from a survey of 17,000 children born in 1958 that have been tracked ever since. This survey found that class sizes for these children were very large (37) and by age of 33 only 14% of males and 11% of females had obtained a degree. Graduates would earn on average £332,000 more over their lifetime than their peers who left school with no qualifications.

Nowadays the great majority of kids stay on at school until aged 18 and 40% go on to university.
Mike also reminds us that there was no such thing as a “golden age” of apprenticeships. Only 15% of those left school to take one up (nearly all male) and a third failed to complete. This generation also had poor basic skills. Aged 37, a sample tested revealed almost half had 'very poor' numeracy skills and 6% had difficulty with reading. So much for the CBI constantly moaning about the poor basic skills of the current generation of job seekers.

Okay, I fully accept that a relatively small number of our schools are failing their communities and a minority failing badly. Action does need to be taken. Despite being in a knowledge based economy, there does need to be a greater vocational emphasis on education and training. But we need to make decisions on future improvement based on facts not make believe or nostalgia.

Mike sums it up very well by saying what we do not want is to “return to a past system which served the few very well and the majority poorly”.

Caption is of circular 10/65 which marked the end of many Grammar Schools and Secondary Moderns.