Now is the time to break the stranglehold of the teaching unions over British education

By Kathy Gyngell for The Daily Mail

Published: 17:57 GMT, 29 May 2012 | Updated: 17:02 GMT, 30 May 2012

NASUWT and NUT have declared war. They have thrown down the gauntlet and Michael Gove has no option but to pick it up - and take them on. Mrs Thatcher did it with miners; Rupert Murdoch did it with the Print Unions and Bruce Gyngell did it with the TV Technicians. The Secretary of State for Education must follow in their footsteps and make breaking the Teachers' Unions his cause celebre.

He can leave one lasting legacy his Government could be proud of.

He knows better than anyone the education crisis our country is in. He knows that the teaching unions behind it have to be faced down sooner or later. Their inflexibility, self interest, hidebound ideology and political correctness have kept British education in a stranglehold for decades.

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Problem: Education Secretary Michael Gove is acutely aware of the growing education crisis our country is facing

Now they are standing in the way of the reforms essential to its rescue; in the way of the man behind them on whom the nation is pinning its hopes.

We should be under no illusion about the scale of the problem Michael Gove faces – sometimes, it must seem to him, alone.

We are amongst the most advanced of Western economies yet half our working population is barely numerate.

More than a quarter of British children cannot add £2.36 and £1.49 to get £3.85. A quarter of 10 -12 year olds do not know their times tables.

Their English is no better.  22 per cent cannot use the correct version of 'they’re, there or their' in a sentence a recent survey tells us. Nearly a third cannot use an apostrophe correctly in a simple sentence. Nearly a half cannot spell ‘secretaries’ correctly.

Number crunching: A quarter of 10-12 year olds do not know their times tables

In fact 20 per cent of children entering secondary school are not functionally literate at all (that means they have a reading age of less than 9 years and 6 months). One in ten cannot find the UK on a map. 40 per cent do not even know that the UK is in Europe.

Perhaps the most shattering indictment of all is that in London – the motor of the economy – there are one million adults who cannot read.

Now, after a decade of denial, the truth about exam dumbing down has been owned up to. Yes, GCSE’s have got easier.  Ever ‘improving’ results were little less than a lie sold to parents and public for a decade under Labour. Now we have it - an A grade GCSE in the UK is only worth a C in Hong Kong.

Persistent grade inflation that the sceptics always assumed is just that.  Glenys Stacey the new head of OffQual – the exams watchdog - says is impossible to justify. The DfE has been forced now to admit evidence of a decline in standards. 

But it has taken a group of high achieving pupils, not the NUT mind you, to ask for an exam more rigorous than the rudimentary ‘citizen science’ currently studied in schools.

On most counts British teenagers are lagging behind their peers in other countries. Illiteracy is a personal tragedy and a social disaster. But so too is having the majority of our teenage population living in cloud cuckoo land about their abilities and what life owes them work wise as a result. They are in for bitter disappointment.  As is the UK as far as its global competitiveness is concerned.

These are the standards that poor schools and poor teacher practice produce. These are the schools and teachers that the so called progressive education movement - that our educational establishment and teaching unions so embraced - has moulded.

This is what happens when teachers ‘facilitate’ but don’t teach; when a child is never required to memorise or learn anything; where GCSEs and A levels have been stripped of their core academic content; where a ‘reading war’ over the reintroduction of phonics has been waged by teachers with a Taliban style zealotry.

And where exactly have the teachers unions stood in all this?

Schools are facing a wave of teacher walkouts in the autumn after the two biggest classroom unions joined forces to fight Coalition reforms

What concern have they expressed over nationally declining standards? When have they reflected on their role in this process? 

Christine Blower’s and Chris Keates’s ‘Joint Declaration of Intent’ gives the answer.

Not at all.

Rather it is an unashamedly ideologically driven manifesto against reform. They do not disguise their loathing of the academies programme. Chris Keates, the head of the NASUWAT, is blatantly hostile to private education. 

Since Michael Gove took over they have done nothing but carp, complain and criticise – whether about unannounced Ofsted inspections, toughening inspection ratings, or the introduction of more meaningful reading tests.

Now, with an unimaginable hubris, they have declared war on him. Their manifesto of complaints from unacceptable and excessive work load pressures, making teachers work to 68 to get their full pension, to ‘unfair pension contribution increases and to threats to jobs arising from curriculum reforms, is one of pure and blatant self interest.

On this they threaten to hold the country to ransom by withholding our children’s’ education. It is a bad move.

Issues: NUT general secretary Christine Blower has said that Mr Gove is 'one of the least popular secretaries of state we've ever had'

It puts them on a par with the greedy TV Technicians Unions of the past who held their companies to ransom with huge demands for overtime and weekend working. If the unions made a demand, ITV would do what the Unions said; if not then it was Industrial Action

But the lesson from history that Ms Blower and Ms Keates should learn is unions get defeated when right is not on their side.

When, back in 1987 at TV-am Bruce Gyngell got wind of the fact that technical staff at the station (the ACCT) were planning an unannounced a 24-hour strike he got in first. He locked out the strikers but kept the programme on air – staffed by a management team of 17.  After months of the journalists and the presenters crossing the picket line, as ratings went up and as the programme became even more popular,  Bruce, his Board and his management team took the decision to fire all of the strikers. He replaced them with non-unionised labour from around the world.

As Murdoch and Margaret Thatcher showed before him, Bruce demonstrated that you could take the unions on and win.  Not just TV-am, until the end of its franchise,  but ITV too, who had suffered a decade long winter of discontent from the ACCT, went on to live another day.

It should be a salutary lesson for the teachers. There have been no ITV strikes since.  A merged and reduced technicians union with less than half its previous membership only survived.

'£2million of equipment lying unused? Good, that’s a victory for us.' Alan Sapper, General Secretary of the ACTT, had said in the throes of the strike.

But he got his comeuppance.  So too may Christine Blower and Chris Keates if they close schools across the country with their millions of pounds of equipment unavailable to our children.

A leaked briefing from Gove's chief strategist, Dominic Cummings, which lambasts the unions for their 'refusal to face reality over grade inflation and the dumbing down of exams', suggests they understand this.

The teachers' unions are ripe for challenging. The ineffective teachers these two unions represent fear accountability. Like the technicians unions they do not want their routine practices exposed.

There will be little sympathy for them. Parents lost faith with the NUT years ago.  So I suspect have the thousands of principled and professionally minded teachers who simply want to be able to get on a teach children properly and behave professionally.

Right is on Michael Gove’s side.  There is no way he should concede to talks on these terms. Rather he should be prepared for a negative ballot and be ready to act.

His objective should be that no school closes as a result of strike action. No child should lose a day’s education.  He should show that teachers who strike can be dispensed with.

It will take guts and advance planning.  But no one has sympathy for special case pension demands. No one believes that teachers have some prior right to be absolved from economic measures that affect everyone.

So Michael and Dominic, bring it on! The moment could not be better.  You have surplus of newly qualified teachers ready to step into the strikers shoes. You have the summer holidays to plan and to recruit a back up army of retired teachers! They stepped up to plate in the war. Why not now?

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