Download and share our latest leaflet

We've had a tremendous response to our call for help in distributing leaflets and building our campaign. We've leafleted in the market square alongside colleagues in the NUT for the last two Saturdays, handed out hundreds of leaflets and got more signatures for our petition. But most overwhelming has been the steady stream of people volunteering to put our leaflet through their doors or hand them to parents at their school gates. We're working hard to make sure that everyone who has volunteered gets a batch of leaflets but bear with us if it takes a few days!

If you can help us by downloading or sharing our leaflet via email networks of social media, please do so. You can find our latest leaflet here.

Why is this so important?

We've achieved a massive amount in a short space of time and become a major progressive voice for education in our borough.

We've raised the profile of the issues of Free Schools, academies and of the government's wider attacks on our education system - and on teachers.

We've also worked hard to support our community schools and counter some of the misconceptions and myths that circulate around them, thanks in part to government propaganda. But to support and encourage our community schools we need to become bigger and extend our reach.

Everything we do is down to volunteers giving up time, however small, to support our schools.

Please help us by making sure this leaflet gets out as far as possible.

If you know anyone who hasn't yet signed our petition, ask them to sign online here.

Why should parents support the teachers’ strike?

This blog post was written by Kiri Tunks, local parent in Waltham Forest and teacher in Tower Hamlets:

***

Teachers know that any strike by teachers is a major headache for parents. We realise that many parents will have to work at home, find emergency childcare, or take a day’s leave. Believe me when I tell you that no teacher takes this strike lightly, and it is precisely because of the concerns we have for education and young people that we do it.

Officially, the strike has been called over excessive workload and bureaucracy, the introduction of Performance related pay and the raising of the retirement age to 68. These are the kind of industrial questions that we are allowed to take action on by law and, if they are imposed, will cause a crisis in our schools.

But I can tell you that what is also motivating teachers to walk out is that they are sick of their professionalism and expertise being undermined; sick of being ignored and dismissed by an arrogant Department of Education; and deeply concerned about what this government’s changes are doing to education and to young people.

Here are a few things we think are wrong:

- This government is handing community schools, land and resources to private companies, including closing down LA schools against the wishes of the parents.

- This government thinks your child doesn’t need a qualified teacher.

- This government thinks that if your teacher’s morale is low that that is good for your child’s education.

- The government thinks it’s more important to invite the free market into education than provide school places for children where they are needed.

We think this is madness, which is why we have been engaged in a community campaign to ‘Stand Up For Education’. We don’t think this government wants to discuss these changes publically because we think parents will share our alarm.

- We think schools are run best by local authorities in the local communities they serve.

- We think every child deserves a qualified teacher.

- We think any changes to exams, curricula and policy should be thought out and properly consulted on in a realistic timescale.

- We think it is immoral to hand over public funds to private individuals & companies without any public redress or accountability.

We can’t strike on these questions but they matter every bit as much to us and we will campaign just as hard on them.

So why should you care about teachers’ workload, pay and pension rights?

Workload & Bureaucracy

Despite what you hear, teachers do not roll into school at 9am and swagger home at 3pm. A teacher’s working day will typically start much, much earlier and continue into the evenings, over the weekend and through the much-lauded holidays.  The Department of Education was recently forced by an NUT campaign to publish its much overdue workload survey which showed how workload has risen under Gove.

The workload survey disclosed that primary teachers are routinely working nearly 60 hours a week; secondary teachers are working 55 hours a week.  This kind of workload is ridiculous in any job, but in one that is so physically & emotionally draining it is utterly stupid. It is bad for teachers but it is bad for children too.

Worse, much of the work teachers are being asked to do is not directly associated with teaching and learning: far too much of the work is unnecessary bureaucracy that actively prevents us spending time on the more important job of planning resources and lessons, doing research or giving feedback to our students. Perhaps this is why 40% of teachers leave within the first 5 years of teaching.

Quite simply, this workload is making qualified teachers leave, exhausting those who stay and putting off those who might once have considered teaching as a career.

Performance Related Pay

It doesn’t work in teaching. Every study, every piece of research, has failed to show that judging individuals in a competitive systems simply doesn’t work in a school or college context which relies on collaboration and co-operation between staff and students. It assumes that children learn in neat little percentiles and that it is possible to apportion every little bit of progress made to a particular individual.

But it just doesn’t work like that. Children make progress for a number of reasons, and because of a range of people who have helped them. Bringing competition between teachers into the education of your child won’t benefit them. It will simply narrow what they are taught, because when you are being judged on what a child’s progress is, you will only want to teach what can be measured.

Unfair Pension Changes

Our pension fund is self-funded: all the money in the teachers’ fund was paid in by teachers. In fact, we have paid in £46 billion more than we have taken out.

Where is it?

We have asked the government to do a valuation of the pension scheme and prove that changes are necessary. They have refused.

Over the years, teachers have accepted a lower salary in lieu of a decent pension. We are now paying more in, and getting less, at the same time as working longer hours. Now the government wants us to work these crazy hours until we are 68.

Ask any teacher if they think they can work full time in a classroom (on a 55+hour week) until they are 68 and they will laugh in your face.

We want a teaching profession which has teachers with the energy & enthusiasm to help all children develop and progress in creative and dynamic ways.

This government’s policies are having the opposite effect.

This is why we strike.

Our Community, Our Schools, supporting our schools and our teachers

Although one Free School has been delayed and another spectacularly collapsed recently, and in spite of the national media attention on the failings of Free Schools, Tauheedul’s ‘Walthamstow Leadership Academy’ is still intending to open in September 2014. That means that our community schools need our support more than ever.

We have three main aims.

Firstly, to build support for our community schools. With competition from at least one ‘Free School’, they will need our support and our involvement more than ever. We’ll be running regular items on our blogsite on how you can get involved in supporting your local community schools.

Secondly, to raise awareness of the dangers posed by the planned Free Schools and to give a voice to everyone who wants our children to be provided for within the local authority, comprehensive community school sector.

Third, to build our own campaign and extend our reach.

As part of this campaigning, we will be out leafleting alongside the NUT on the next two Saturdays of this month. On March 26^th, the NUT, will be taking strike action against attacks on their pay, conditions of service and pensions. Ahead of this, they have also launched the ‘Stand up for Education’. This campaign draws together the various government attacks on teachers and on our schools and seeks to unite parents and teachers around basic demands and principles that should underpin a good education system. You can read more about this campaign here.

Local teachers who are NUT members will be out leafleting in support of this campaign in Walthamstow in the market square at 11am on Saturday 15 March and Saturday 22 March and OCOS supporters will be joining them with our own new leaflet, which you can see here.

Can you help us by joining our supporters for an hour this Saturday or next Saturday?

Would you be prepared to help by leafleting your neighbourhood and making sure that everyone gets one of our leaflets through their door?

If so, please email wfdefendstateschools@gmail.com

Academies and Free Schools in the national press - the policy continues to unravel

The government's shock therapy attack on the schools system has continued to feature in the national press. A succession of stories have highlighted the nakedly ideological nature of the government’s programme and the risks involved in creating supposedly autonomous schools. Firstly, the New Statesman carried a story about the fate of the Sulivan primary school in Hammersmith and Fulham within the top 2% of schools in the country, which faces closure to make way for a Church of England Free School with close connections in the local Tory-run council.

Hot on the heels of the police getting involved in the King’s Science Academy investigation in Bradford, comes the news that an Academy school in County Durham is under investigation in connection with the disappearance of £162,000 of academy resources. As the ever excellent Janet Downs at the Local Schools Network points out, this sort of thing is more likely to happen in academies and Free Schools because they are less publicly accountable for the money they spend than community schools.

Last week also saw news that United Learning Trust who want to open a primary Free School in Waltham Forest, are trying to cut 30 jobs at their Salford City Academy. The suspicion is that this is part of moves by academy chains to use their freedoms to alter the pay rates and terms and conditions of their staff to cut costs.

Another example of this can be seen in the recent decision of the AET academies chain to privatise its entire support staff across its chain of 79 schools. As education expert Laura McInerny noted in last week’s Guardian, this exercise, undertaken in the name of ‘efficiency’ also enables them to create bigger surpluses (they can’t legally create profits or pay dividends at the moment) which can be used to pay obscene executive salaries, and, presumably certain other management charges. 

But perhaps the biggest news of the week and the most damning for the government’s programme to smash up the comprehensive community school sector, was the revelation that a major academy chain was to be stripped of 10 of its schools. E-Act is one of the biggest academy chains in the country and until today ran 34 academies. Last year it ran into trouble when it was accused of paying lavish expenses to its board and the Education Funding Agency raised concerns about its financial management. Now, following a number of problematic Ofsted reviews, E-Act is to hand 10 schools back to the government. The Department for Education will presumably try to find another academy sponsor, but this decision shows how chaotic a marketised education system dominated by chains like Oasis and Tauheedul will be. Chains are currently being inadequately monitored, as the Labour Party has argued. But even if problems are exposed in chains, rather than schools working collaboratively in their communities to raise standards, the chains and the DfE will simply look to ‘re-tender’ the management of the schools. The chains won’t want their overall results dragged down by difficult schools and the government will want to hand them to someone else to fix as soon as possible. All of which spells chaos for children, parents and teachers.

The collapse of Oasis’s Free School proposal – what does it mean for Waltham Forest?

There is still very little information about what led to Oasis‘agreeing’ with the DfE to withdraw its application. Our Community, Our Schools is trying to find out more at the time of writing as there are many unanswered questions and we believe that people in Waltham Forest deserve to know the truth.

One key question regards the DfE’s statement that they looked at the admissions figures and decided that there is no need for a new secondary school until 2018. We – and the Local Authority – could have told them that months ago. The figures have been in circulation since late spring last year. The idea that the DfE has just discovered this stretches credibility.

It could be that the government is on the defensive nationally over Free Schools in the wake of a damaging National AuditOffice report that accused them of pushing to open schools more or less regardless of public value for money. Perhaps they have decided to pay more attention to local need.

It’s also possible that the proposed Oasis school was in trouble with its admissions. At the moment, we can only be speculate. The Oasis chain is struggling with the results in its academies, which are significantly below the national average. Perhaps their astronomical growth and high profile was becoming a source of internal concern?

Whatever happened, this sorry story speaks volumes about the craziness of the Free Schools programme. This school opened its admissions process, attempted to recruit a headteacher, announced it was on the verge of signing a deal for a site only to then announce that it was delaying and then its sponsors withdraw their application completely, supposedly because the DfE suddenly realised there was no need for it!

What does this mean for Waltham Forest? For the parents who put months of work into their Free School only for Oasis and the DfE to pull the plug, all this will of course be pretty devastating.

For OCOS it is very welcome. We always argued that this school was neither necessary nor desirable. Waltham Forest’s community-school led secondary expansion can now take place with one fewer Free School to worry about. According to the local authority’s projections, the borough does still need a new school by 2016/17 and their options for addressing this issue are tightly constrained by the ridiculous and spiteful legislation put in place by the Coalition government. We will have to monitor how the council propose to deal with this very closely.

In the meantime, OCOS will be doing two things. Firstly, we will be focusing our attention on Tauheedul’s planned Free School, still forging ahead at the time of writing. More on this soon. Secondly, we will also be campaigning positively for our local community schools. 

Our community schools are improving but they also need our help. They need OCOS supporters to help combat the myths and prejudices current in the community, to help promote their strengths and to get involved. There are many ways in which you can support your local community schools and we will be featuring more on this in the coming months.
We would appeal to everyone, including those local parents who worked so hard to try to get the Oasis Free School set up, to now get behind our community schools.

 

Our evidence to the Education Select Committee

The Education Select Committee, a committee of MPs who are education specialists, is currently conducting an inquiry into aspects of the academies and Free Schools programmes.

Our Community, Our Schools submitted written evidence to this inquiry which was published on the Committee's website in January. Our evidence focused on the process for setting up a Free School.

We argued that the legislation enabling the establishment of Free Schools is deeply flawed and anti-democratic. The process is so thin that there are practically no levers by which communities can influence the establishment of a school, nor is it possible to hold the main actors and agencies to account. We characterise it as enabling and encouraging the establishment of schools at public expense on the back of crude marketing campaigns. You can read our full evidence here.

The rest of the written evidence submitted can be read on the Committee's website.

Oasis withdraw their application to set up a Free School

Local MP Stella Creasy has today passed us a copy of a letter from the Schools Minister, Lord Nash, stating that Oasis Community Learning have withdrawn their application to set up a new school in Walthamstow.

There are very few details in Lord Nash's letter but he does mention that the DfE has looked at the admissions data for the borough and judged that a new secondary school will not be needed until 2018. In view of this, the letter says, Oasis have agreed to withdraw their application to set up a new school in the borough. 

Coming barely more than a week after the news that Oasis were deferring their opening until 2015, this news begs many questions. We will be trying to get more details over the coming weeks. 

In the meantime, Our Community, Our Schools unequivocally welcomes this development. This news is a massive boost to everyone who has championed and supported Waltham Forests's community schools and everyone who has supported our campaign right from its earliest days.

As far as we know, Tauheedul's proposal is still on the table. However, today, we want to take the opportunity to thank everyone who has helped us to campaign on this issue. Today has been a big blow to the people who have been pushing Free Schools on communities across the country. Thank you to everyone for your invaluable support.