Failed, failed, failed

Blair said his priorities were education, education, education. But Labour billions did nothing to raise standards, says report

BILLIONS of pounds poured into education under Labour resulted in ‘no improvements’ in standards, a major report revealed yesterday.

Despite Tony Blair declaring his priorities as ‘education, education, education’ when he swept to power in 1997, a huge increase in spending on schools led to ‘ no improvement in student learning outcomes,’ the report found.

In fact, the UK’s teenagers have slipped down world league tables in crucial subjects while the country’s schools have become among the most socially segregated across the world.

Britain’s immigrant children are clustered in the most disadvantaged schools, the report found.

Eighty per cent of students with an immigrant background attend schools

Damning indictment

with a ‘ high concentration’ of children from similar families. Only Mexico, Estonia and Finland have higher levels, a study of 34 countries by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found.

Primary school class sizes are bigger only in Turkey, Korea, Japan, Israel and Chile and rising numbers of young people have become Neets, ‘ not in education, employment or training’.

The findings are a damning indictment of the former Labour government, suggesting their education policies have had little impact and taxpayers have failed to get value for money.

They come just a day after the National Union of Teachers and the NASUWT announced a ‘work to rule’, with staff sticking rigidly to a six- and- a- half hour days, refusing all non-teaching duties and threatening strikes. The OECD study – Education at a Glance – found that expenditure on UK primary and secondary schools and colleges as a percentage of GDP increased from 3.6 per cent in 1995 to 4.5 per cent in 2009, higher than the OECD average of 4.0 per cent. At the same time, there has been ‘ no improvement in student learning outcomes’, the report says.

Andreas Schleicher, deputy director for education at the OECD, said: ‘Spending in the UK has gone up really a lot and has not been reflected in changes to [exam] scores. You have seen huge effort on the part of Government and at the same time outcomes have been flat.’

Separate figures released by the Office for National Statistics have shown that Labour’s spending on education rose from £35.3billion in 2000 to £63.9billion in 2009.

The OECD monitors standards by administering its own tests in reading, maths and science for hundreds of thousands of 15-yearolds in up to 70 countries every three years.

The most recent results in 2010 revealed that the UK fell from

‘Significant challenges’

24th to 28th position in maths, 14th to 16th in science and 17th to 25th in reading.

The average class size in primary schools in 2010 was 25.8 pupils –above the OECD average of 21.3. Meanwhile, the social make- up of UK schools poses ‘significant challenges’ for immigrant students and those from disadvantaged backgrounds, according to the OECD.

Some 79.8 per cent of immigrant students whose mothers are poorly educated – not achieving any qualifications beyond GCSE level – are concentrated in disadvantaged schools.

This is a higher proportion than any other OECD country, amid an average level of 55.9 per cent.

However, the situation is not limited to children with poorly educated mothers.

Some 42.5 per cent of immigrant students born to highly educated mothers – those who have a degree – are in disadvantaged schools.

This is also a higher proportion than any other country examined by researchers, with the average being 26.1 per cent. These figures relate to 2009.

Tory MP Chris Skidmore said yesterday: ‘ Labour’s answer to falling educational standards was to throw more and more money at the problem.

‘This evidence demolishes that approach once and for all. It’s not how much you spend that counts, but what you spend it on.’

TALK about coming back down to earth with a bump! The ecstatic cheers from the Olympic crowds had not died away before the teaching unions declared they were taking industrial action.

So it’s business as usual in bolshy, backward- looking Britain.

As the TUC annual conference ushers in the new political season, the sound of Britain’s neanderthal tendency downing tools is as predictable as the leaves now gently falling from the trees.

The National Union of Teachers and its sister teaching union the NASUWT have issued an unedifying 18-page document entitled National Action Autumn Term.

This instructs teachers to refuse to undertake a wide range of ‘ non-teaching duties’ in a dispute over their pensions, jobs and pay.

Petulant

I hope you are sitting down while reading this.

For the restrictions these unions are placing on teachers’ duties — listed, if you please, under the union’s slogan which declares ‘protecting teachers, defending education’ — are as small- minded as they are deliberately designed to make as much trouble as possible.

Refusing, for example, to supervise pupils during the lunch break. Refusing to cover for absent colleagues.

Refusing to invigilate any public examination or SATS. Refusing to collect money from pupils and parents, investigate a pupil’s absence, or even set up and take down classroom displays.

Refusing to provide more than one written report annually to parents. Refusing to undertake extra- curricular activities unless teachers have ‘volunteered freely’ to do so.

So much for the Olympic spirit of pulling out all the stops to encourage children to develop their sporting skills.

And more stupefyingly obtuse still, teachers are being told to defy ministers’ plans to lift the limit of three hours for the amount of time that can be spent in a year on ‘classroom observation’ — when teachers are checked to see if they are performing properly.

Eh? Why should ‘classroom observation’ be limited to three hours per year? It seems that such observation is required when Ofsted classifies a school as ‘failing’. Well surely such observation becomes even more necessary in those circumstances?

Frankly, it’s these unions who are behaving as if they are in the playground. It’s hard to believe that any grown- ups could be quite so footstampingly petulant.

This is surely the National Union of Violet Elizabeth Botts, threatening to ‘thcream and thcream’ until they make not themselves but everyone else ‘thick’. For who is going to suffer from this selfish and irresponsible juvenilia? Why, the pupils, of course, and their parents.

With breathtaking hypocrisy, the union document claims that this action is ‘ parent, pupil and public friendly’. But how can the chaos to which it aims to reduce schools possibly be ‘ friendly’ to parents or the public?

How can refusing to put up children’s artwork on the classroom wall, for heaven’s sake, possibly be ‘friendly’ to pupils? How can frustrating the ability of headteachers to manage their own schools properly be anything other than harmful to children and the public interest?

This mean- spirited and destructive action is entirely about the interests of teachers rather than the pupils in their care. Whatever happened to teaching being a vocation?

Failure

Of course, most teachers are entirely mindful of their overriding duty to their pupils. They think of themselves first and foremost as educationalists, and dedicate themselves selflessly to that crucial role.

Indeed, the number of teachers who actually voted for this action was very small. Almost three-quarters of the membership of the National Union of Teachers failed to vote at all.

But then, isn’t that just all too typical of much union disruption, where tiny numbers of activists effectively hijack the passive majority who then find themselves dragooned into industrial action they would rather not take?

The fact is that the teachers’ work-to-rule reflects a general union militancy currently in the air.

The TUC has suggested it may co-ordinate strike action by public sector workers over pay; the prison officers are leading wild talk of a general strike; and a mass TUC demonstration is planned for next month.

There is no public sympathy for any of this; indeed, the vast majority of people take a very dim view indeed of such antisocial behaviour.

All too aware of this, the two Labour Eds, Miliband and Balls, are desperately trying to distance themselves from such talk.

But then, the teaching unions have form as long as your arm when it comes to damaging the interests of school children — in ways that go far beyond the normal trade union preoccupations with pay and working conditions.

It was the teaching unions which promoted the use of every destructive, ideological and anti-education fad that has gripped the entire education world for decades and abandoned countless thousands of children to illiteracy, innumeracy and ignorance.

It was the teaching unions which implacably denied the patently obvious fact that there were thousands of wholly inadequate teachers who, because it was well- nigh impossible to sack them, were continuing to destroy the lifechances of so many pupils.

It was the teaching unions, too, which fought tooth and nail to frustrate and undermine every single government reform aimed at stamping out such shoddy practices.

Faced with the evidence of mass teaching failure, these unions put the interests of their members first and the education of children last.

In similar vein, this latest call to militancy is also an attempt to avoid poor teachers being held to account. Take for example the instruction to refuse to submit teachers’ lesson plans for inspection by senior school managers — presumably department heads or head teachers.

In a typically opaque bit of gobbledygook, the union document asserts that teachers are to be held accountable only ‘through their use of suitable approaches to teaching and learning’, not for the way in which they plan ‘ learning activities and experiences’ ( known to the rest of us as teaching).

Consequently, they huff, lesson plans are to be used purely to support teachers rather than as a means to hold them to account for their work. What astonishing arrogance! The importance of lesson plans is that they show whether teachers are organising their lessons properly. Yet the unions are saying that these plans should not be scrutinised by senior staff.

Extraordinary! Imagine the uproar if police officers, say, or nurses — or indeed employees in any place of work — were to assert that aspects of their performance were off-limits for senior managers!

Betrayed

Yet the teachers are saying that they alone should be given carte blanche. This is all of a piece with the attitude that has helped bring Britain’s education system to its knees — the belief that only the teaching profession knows the answers.

As a result, parents have found over and over again that, while they may observe that their child is failing to thrive at school or learn very much, it is virtually impossible to get to the bottom of the problem because so much of teaching is deliberately kept a mystery.

It is this attitude more than anything else which has ensured that mass teaching failure has gone largely uncorrected, and that generations of children have been betrayed by an education system that has veered wildly out of control.

It is more than disappointing that, after a summer of such outstanding co-operation and goodwill celebrating the very best in people, we should now be subjected to such a display of selfish, antisocial and indeed positively nihilistic behaviour.

It is even more dismaying that it is once again vulnerable pupils who will be paying the price of a teaching profession that has forgotten what it is for.