The Education Bill: You can have any school you like as long as it's an Academy

So, the new Conservative government has unveiled its vision for education reform and it seems to be to settle accounts with comprehensive community education once and for all.

Nicky Morgan may not have Michael Gove’s gift for generating universal animosity but her actions since the Tories won their majority remind us that politics is not just personalities. Morgan’s Education Bill, published last week represents a nakedly partisan attack, not just on comprehensive community schools but on democracy and, ironically, parental choice.

What the Education Bill will do:

The Education Bill creates a new category of ‘coasting schools’, which the Secretary of State will define later in regulations and that will bring a whole new raft of community schools within her existing power to make an academy order by making them Eligible for Intervention. Intervention will include replacing headteachers (operating with a questionable assumption that there is an endless supply of ‘superheads’ ready to take their places), replacing governing bodies or making an academy order.

In the case of community schools rated by Ofsted as ‘inadequate’, the Secretary of State will have a new statutory duty to order them to become academies. This will make it effectively impossible to argue that the use of an academy order is a disproportionate response to inadequacy. Instead, academy status will become a necessary legal consequence of Ofsted’s rating. (*The legal implications of the Bill are usefully summarised here.). It also rests on the assumption that making them an academy is in itself a solution to this problem. Inadequate academies (surely a logical impossibility in this world view?) will simply be transferred to another academy sponsor.

The Bill seeks to close other so-called loopholes in existing legislation. By ‘loopholes’, Morgan means the statutory duty to consult on any academy order. This was already a weak bit of legislation that gave communities little real say, but nonetheless the Conservatives seem to have found it embarrassing that communities have used the rhetoric of parental choice and the mechanism of consultation to launch some remarkably effective challenges to the academy-producing machinery set up in Whitehall. So that has to go too.

Finally, the bill places a legal duty on governors to promote and facilitate the transition to academy status. So once the machinery swings into action, a school’s governors will have a statutory duty to help the process along the way. Again, it seems that situations like that at Thomas Gamuel in our own borough, where a governing body had to be replaced to remove democratic, community opposition, were proving embarrassing and irksome.

Running throughout the Education Bill is a barely concealed contempt for democracy and community voice. The law that allows the government to create academies was already undemocratic as it removed schools from democratic oversight with minimal process. Now the last democratic spaces are to be shut down and parental choice is revealed as a useful fiction. Nothing is to be allowed to get in the way of the academisation steamroller.

Faith-based policy:

The government will argue that choice and democracy are ultimately trumped by the interests of your child. All this is being done for the children, right? But of course we know that’s not true. As Henry Stewart from the Local Schools Network and others have argued, there is no evidence to support the idea that academy status is automatically beneficial for schools and there is some evidence that academy chains are doing worse than their community school equivalents.

This is remarkable because it shows that what’s happening here is faith-based politics. The government knows that academy status is not a magic bullet but it doesn’t care. It believes, on a fundamental level that community comprehensive school status is inherently wrong and appeals to evidence merely cloud the clarity of that insight. Its faith is based on the idea that the comprehensive experiment, like the welfare state and the NHS, are historic errors that need to be reversed and represent impurities in its emerging education market. And it is reinforced in this faith by the CEO’s of the academy chains who are queuing up to praise this bill the rafters. Just have a read of the quotes on the government’s press release, including from Waltham Forest’s own home-grown Reach2.

What can we do?

In the immediate term, the bill will face opposition, although with the government commanding a working majority and a woefully weak education opposition from Tristram Hunt, it’s difficult to see it being substantially amended. Nonetheless OCOS will be looking to support any attempts to weaken the bill, so watch this space.

However, with such a profound attack on democracy and our community schools, we have to do more. One answer to attempts to close down democracy and exclude people from the school system is to create more democratic pressure. That means that locally, we need to use every opportunity to demonstrate that even where formal mechanisms don’t exist, the voices of parents, teachers and communities can find expression through mass meetings, polls, surveys, protests.

Similarly, if the government and academy chains don’t want us to be involved in our local schools, then we should be getting even more stuck in, using every opportunity to make it clear that we don’t accept their vision and we don’t accept a passive role in our school system.

Finally, we need to continue to build organisations, policies and a vision for an alternative school system. Locally, we have tried to contribute toward this a borough-wide campaign oriented around a positive vision for our local schools, in the form of our Charter for Education and we’ll continue to develop this initiative. But there’s much more to do. Watch this space for more soon.

Baseline testing - what it is and why you should be worried

We're pleased to host a guest blog from Katie Lindenburg, Primary school teacher, NUT member and mother, about the new Baseline tests for 4 year olds...
What are the Baseline Tests for 4 year olds?

From September 2016, all schools in England will be required to use standardised baseline tests to assess children in their first few weeks of Reception.  (Many schools will be piloting the tests from September 2015.) This is despite considerable expert opposition and the recommendations of the Government’s own consultation process.  Baseline Testing was introduced in 1997 and withdrawn in 2002 as it proved unworkable and a similar scheme was found to be ineffective and scrapped in Wales in 2012.

Schools have been given six different options for the test, all provided by private companies.  The assessments are carried out 1:1 between teacher and child with most options requiring children to answer questions on a computer screen.  Most tests have right and wrong answers, with no room for teacher intervention.  If a child gets a question wrong, the teacher must move on.  Each child’s attainment will be measured against a ‘pre-determined content domain’, resulting in them getting a raw score which will be used the ‘baseline’ against which all future attainment will be measured.  So, the score a child a child receives in his or her first weeks of Reception are supposed to indicate their attainment in end of Key Stage 2 SATs tests 7 years later!

Why should we oppose the baseline tests?

-          The tests are going to be extremely disruptive.  Entering Reception is a huge transition for children.   In order for this transition to be as smooth as possible, teachers should be building supportive relationships with their pupils, not focussing on tests. 

-          The tests will be statistically misleading.  The assessments are based on a very narrow checklist of basic skills and knowledge and take absolutely no account of the different ways and rates at which children develop.  No account will be taken of a child’s age.  As every parent and teacher knows, there can be a huge difference between a child who has just turned four and one who is about to turn 5. 

-          The tests will place pressure on schools to ‘teach to the test’.  The curriculum will inevitably be squeezed and distorted as result of this pressure, detracting from the rich, playful, exploratory and creative environment we should be fostering in the Early Years.  It will add to the current downgrading of play and is likely to prioritise measurable academic achievement in literacy and numeracy over physical, social and emotional, and intellectual development

-          The tests will be harmful to parent – school partnerships.  If schools decide to share the results of the assessments with parents, then they could potentially be told that their child is a ‘failure’ in their first weeks of school.  It also opens up limitless opportunities for private companies to cash in on parental worries with preparatory materials, practice tests and tutoring.

-          The tests are not based on the needs of children.  The results of the tests are not going to provide meaningful or useful information to teachers of parents and carers in terms of progress or attainment.  They are driven by accountability measures and will be another stick to beat schools with.  Undoubtedly, the baseline results will also be used to determine teachers’ pay.

What can you do?

Members of the local NUT will be out campaigning regularly and asking parents, teachers and those who care about children to join us.

·         Sign our petition opposing the baseline test

·         Join our Facebook page – Scrap Baseline Test for 4 Year Olds (Waltham Forest)

·         Sign a postcard and send it in to your school to let them know you are unhappy with the tests (these will be available at our events)

·         Join us at events in the local area to let parents know why we are opposed to these tests.  We will be in Lloyd Park on Sunday 17^th May for a picnic, play and information session, with very special guest Michael Rosen.

If you want to get involved please contact us via Facebook or email tooyoungtotestwf@yahoo.com
 

Waltham Forest needs a new secondary school… but not this one.

Readers of the Waltham Forest Guardian will have seen the news that the borough is to have a new secondary school. Thanks to the Tory led Coalition’s legislation, it has to be a Free School. And thanks to the Department for Education it will be sponsored by the Lion Academy Trust, which already runs three primary academies in the borough.

Wrong school, wrong time, wrong place

There is no doubt that Waltham Forest needs a new secondary school. Figures produced by the local authority indicate that the bulge in primary places will work its way through to create a need for one new secondary school by September 2017 and another by 2019. But with funding following pupils, timing and positioning are important. It matters a lot to other schools in the borough where the new school is built and when it opens. If it opens too early and in the wrong place it will harm other schools. Yet the government’s insane legislation and its ideological fixation with Free Schools means that the Lion Academy Trust have been given preapproval to open a new school in September 2016. If it ever opens, it is likely to be built at taxpayer expense, wherever the Education Funding Agency can find some land it can buy.

And then there’s the question of the approved sponsor. The Lion Academy Trust currently run three primary schools in the borough, including Thomas Gamuel, which they took over in the face of massive local opposition. But they don’t run any secondary schools. We’ll be looking at the Lion Academy Trust in more detail in later posts, but for now, the summary is that this school is likely to be built at the wrong time, in the wrong place by the wrong people. Perhaps that’s why the indications are that this proposal is not being welcomed by the local authority, other headteachers or teaching unions.

Alternative plan?

But what’s the alternative? With an objective need for a new secondary school by September 2017 something needs to be done now. Interestingly, even the executive head of the Lion Academy Trust recognises that the election may upset his plans. It’s possible that a Labour led government will simply stop proposals that don’t fulfil its criteria of need and may start to relax the constraints on local authorities. But the Local Authority can’t sit back and hope. We hear talk of a possible alternative plan being worked out that combines further expansion of existing secondaries with a new school involving the Co-operative as a sponsor. This would be a Free School, because current legislation means it has to be, but as a Co-Op school it would at least have a democratic governance structure that could involve the community, the local authority and other schools. It would also have a better relationship with teaching unions. It would also enjoy the active support of Walthamstow’s MP who is already on record as actively supporting any proposals from the Co-Op.

It’s not an ideal solution and we believe that it would suffer from weaknesses relative to local authority community schools. Neither should anyone underestimate the difficulties that would be faced in bringing this plan to fruition. However, given the current range of options faced by the local authority and by the local community, we think that any such alternative plan would merit support over the DfE’s choice, the Lion Academy Trust.

More details as soon as we have them…  

 

Guest Blog: Laura Bates writes for OCOS on the importance of Sex and Relationship Education

The OCOS Charter for Education calls for a rounded education for all children as well as for schools to be safe places where our children are free from bullying and sexual harassment. We at OCOS believe that unbiased, fact based, SRE (sex and relationship education) is crucial if we are to achieve that aim. We believe that SRE shouldn't just be about the mechanics of where babies come from. We believe it should also address issues such as the importance of consent in sexual relationships, what abusive relationships are, and it should challenge sexist and homophobic stereotypes and bullying.

Our Community Our Schools welcomes the Our Bodies, Our Future conference at Frederick Bremer school on 24th January and we would encourage the many local parents who support our campaign to attend. In advance of the conference, we are delighted to welcome the keynote speaker, Laura Bates, as a guest blogger for OCOS on the campaign for compulsory SRE. 

Laura is founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, a collection of over 80,000 women and girls' daily experiences of gender inequality. She writes regularly for the Guardian, Independent, Red magazine, Grazia etc. She is Patron of SARSAS (Somerset and Avon Rape and Sexual Abuse Support, formerly Bristol Rape Crisis). She works regularly with schools, universities and businesses and collaborated closely with the British Transport Police on Project Guardian, which has increased the reporting of sexual offences on public transport in London by 25% and the detection of offenders by 32%.

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When the UK Youth Parliament surveyed almost 22,000 young people about SRE, 40% said theirs was either poor or very poor, and 43% said they hadn’t received any at all. When Brook surveyed over 2,000 14-18-year-olds throughout the UK, nearly half said that SRE “doesn’t really cover what they need to know about sex”. An ICM poll for the End Violence Against Women Coalition (EVAW) found that 77% of young people feel they do not have enough information or support to deal with physical or sexual violence. And a recent Ofsted report found that schools were failing young people on SRE.

Wherever you look there are ample indications that our current system is not fit for purpose. In a world in which they are bombarded with sexist media, gender stereotypes and online porn (which frequently gives a biased and misogynistic portrayal of sex), young people desperately need support and information about issues such as consent and healthy relationships. And in a world in which 85,000 women are raped annually in England and Wales and 400,000 sexually assaulted, how can we fail to tackle vital issues such as consent and healthy relationships in the classroom? 

Meanwhile, the NSPCC warns that “thousands of teenage girls who are sexually assaulted by boys suffer in silence because they often accept the abuse as part of a relationship or don’t know how to stop it”. Given that many young people also experience or witness abuse at home, (750,000 children witness domestic violence each year), the government has an urgent responsibility to provide information in schools about what constitutes abuse, and to let young people know that help and support is available. 

Perhaps most pertinently of all, we know that these problems are also happening in schools (where 300 rapes have been reported to police in the past three years and almost one in three girls experiences unwanted sexual touching). So education needs to start early and must cover issues surrounding rape and consent, where there is currently a huge amount of myth and misinformation, particularly among young people.
The idea that children should be given guidance and information on these issues seems so sensible that many people are shocked to hear it isn’t already on the curriculum. But it’s currently not compulsory for schools to teach young people about sexual consent, healthy relationships, or issues such as online pornography or abuse.

Nearly 40,000 people have signed a petition from Everyday Sexism and the End Violence Against Women Coalition, calling on party leaders to make sex and relationships compulsory in all schools if they are elected at the General Election, including issues such as consent, healthy relationships and online porn. With the responses in from all the major political parties, all but the Conservatives say they would support such a move.
It’s great that some parents discuss these issues with their children, but we can’t guarantee they all will. Some parents describe feeling unable to discuss them, or find it difficult to know where to start. Schools provide young people with guidance about plenty of other important life lessons, such as healthy eating, so why not give them similar support on the universal topic of human relationships? Giving young people the tools they need to safely and happily navigate relationships is simply essential. It’s too important to leave to chance.

Our Schools: Kelmscott School in focus

The  national press and political parties are fond of caricaturing and criticising our community schools and they have few chances to answer back.

In the first of what we hope will be a series of pieces on our local community schools, we feature a short interview with Lynette Parvez, headteacher at Kelmscott School in Waltham Forest.

How would you describe your school, briefly, to a stranger?

Warm welcoming – a really good place for children to learn.

Tell us one little known fact about your school.

I will make this a serious answer. One little known fact about Kelmscott is how many A and A* grades we get. Parents get so fixated on C grades they forget that it is the performance of the individual child that counts and there isn’t anything to celebrate if a child gets a C when they should be getting an A (or A*). In Kelmscott we have had a focus on this aspect of our teaching and this year we had 8 subjects achieve more A and A* grades than the National Average. Those subjects were, French, Biology, Chemistry, Maths, Geography, Physics, French and RE. 

What is the funniest thing a pupil has ever said to you? Or, what is the funniest/most memorable thing that has happened to you as a head teacher?

Funny things happen every day. I like to see pupils’ happy and enjoying school. We have had lots of events over the years which are memorable but one of the best evenings was our Bollywood evening. Everyone got dressed up in Bollywood style outfits. We had a fashion show, dances, poems and of course lovely food to round off the evening. That was definitely one of the highlights of my time here.

What do you consider your greatest achievement as head of Kelmscott

You could say the obvious things like when we have had some really good examination results or when we have had good Ofsted inspections but to be honest one of the things I am really pleased about is my campaigning for a Zebra crossing outside of the school gates. In the first few years I was here I was petrified when I saw the pupils crossing Markhouse road with all that busy traffic. I kept asking the council to do something about it but I kept being told there was no money.

Eventually a child got hit by a car. Thank goodness the child suffered very little injuries but that was enough for me to go into overdrive. Luckily Councillor Saima Mahmood who held the portfolio for education at the time helped and hey presto the crossing was put in place. Even now I do not feel it is completely safe but I think it is better than before.

What would you say to a Y6 pupil trying to decide which secondary to apply to?

My message to a year 6 pupil would probably be chose the school that you feel you would be happy to attend. I strongly believe that if children are happy to come to school, they stand far more chance of doing well. Poor attendance is one of the main factors limiting a child’s achievement. I would explain to them that they should consider that they will be spending the next 5 years minimum of their lifes at the school so it has to be somewhere they (within reason!) want to be. Having said that I do feel strongly they should think about their local school because if they wish to take advantage of all the extra-curricular opportunities the school has they don’t want to be wasting time travelling a long distance when they could be enjoying a sports club or perhaps getting ready for a school play.

How does your school compare to the school you went to as a child?

Interestingly I moved to Walthamstow when I was 12 years old and we lived near Willowfield which is where I spent my year 9. In those days Willowfield was a Junior High which meant it only had pupils from what would now be called KS3. After year 9 all pupils moved on – most to the Senior High which was called McEntee. Today it is the Walthamstow Academy. Willowfield was a really lovely school and I can remember getting involved in lots of projects because they had something called the Spring Festival.

When I moved to McEntee it was very different. It was a much bigger school with older pupils. If I were to compare that school then with Kelmscott now, it is worlds apart. In those days you were left to sink or swim. No one tracked your progress or made you feel capable of succeeding. I wanted to choose Science for options but was told I wasn’t very good at Science. Eventually they allowed me to do Biology. Interestingly I went on to do a degree in Geography with Geology as my subsidiary so I have a Science degree.  Kelmscott genuinely cares about each pupil and wants them to succeed. We do everything to keep pupils on track and prepared for their exams. For me this is the biggest difference.

Find out more about Kelmscott School here.

Another packed public meeting as parents and teachers unite for our community schools

Well over 100 people crowded into the excellent venue at Harmony Hall off the High Street on 21st October for another packed OCOS public meeting. Kiri Tunks from Our Community Our Schools introduced the meeting as a contribution to public discussion about OCOS’s proposed Charter in the borough, explaining that it was intended to be something that could be amended, developed and used by parents, teachers and everyone who cares about progressive education. She then introduced the first speaker Melissa Benn who spoke about the original vision of comprehensive education and why it matters who owns our schools.

Melissa pointed to the widespread, political and media representation of comprehensive schools as associated with ‘failure’ and argued that this orchestrated campaign masked their huge successes. Prior to comprehensive movement, children had been socially divided and told they were failures by 11, supported by disgraced eugenic theories of educational ability. From mid 1960s the tripartite system that segregated people into secondary modern, grammar and public schools was challenged by the comprehensive movement and by new academic theories of educational psychology. This movement, she argued, was a tremendous success of our society and we should celebrate it.

‘All our children should go to schools together’ she urged, arguing that all the ways of dividing our children fundamentally arise on the basis of class division. Private schools, Melissa argued  ‘have everything they want, except they turn out some very strange citizens.’ She called for a government that was strong enough to challenge increasingly entrenched social privilege and would fight for all schools to have fair admissions. Melissa argued that it was government policy and not failures of the comprehensive model that created divisions and fuelled parental anxiety. The best school systems in the world, she argued, send all their children to school together and even the  OECD says it’s good for society and for children too. She finished by reiterating that it really matters who runs schools. We are being pushed back to a 19^th century patchwork of provision – we need to restore local schools to local communities.

The next speaker was Kevin Courtney, Deputy General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers who said he was delighted to be at a meeting organised by parents and hoped there would be hundreds more like it across the country. Kevin focused on the problems created in the school system by teachers’ heavy workloads. ‘We are losing thousands of good teachers. It will become a problem in schools and lead to staff shortages and fatigue’. But the fundamental problem, he urged was less the volume of work than the composition of the workload. Teachers, he said, have to be increasingly focused on data, tests, league tables and evidence: ‘measurement is driving the whole child out of the picture. We need children to be happy, rounded human beings – creativity and enjoyment are lost. This is accountability gone mad. There is a lack of trust in the system for teachers’.

Kevin pointed to the US, where children are tested all the time and teachers pay is tied to children’s  performance. “It’s like doing a full day’s work and then going home and spending hours explaining that you’ve done it”.

Kevin finished by pointing to NUT’s manifesto for the elections and in particular the demand to tackle child poverty. ‘Politicians attack schools for not being ambitious enough for working class children. Every teacher knows this is their job but we also know that child poverty makes a big difference. We’re in one of the richest and most unequal societies in the world. We need politicians to focus on making society more equal and freeing teachers to teach.’

The meeting was then addressed by Jenny Smith, headteacher at Frederick Bremer school, featured on ‘Educating the East End’. Jenny opened by saying it was fantastic for a head to be invited to speak in a meeting where we’re not having to defend our schools from attacks and academisation. Jenny echoed Melissa Benn in condemning the attacks on community schools and pointed to her own family which had been divided by the pre-comprehensive education system. Being able to go to a comprehensive school, she said, made a huge difference. Jenny talked about what London schools can achieve, pointing to the investment that came through London Challenge and which led to such coordinated improvement in standards. But she condemned the Coalition’s attack since 2010 and its ‘chaotic’ policies: ‘We’re now being judged by our GCSEs alone, while the Free School initiative destabilises school system locally and creates a perception that there is something wrong with our existing schools’.

Jenny argued that ‘we have to retain the principles and models of community education. Waltham Forest is unusual in its diversity and our community schools represent our local community and still dominate the educational offer’.

She also recounted how when applying for a headteachership, she deliberately chose a community school and argued that at her school ‘tolerance respect and compassion are integral to our school. There is no labelling, bullying is rare, every child is known, nourished and nurtured in our school. Our community schools sustain community cohesion.’ ‘It’s difficult to hate’ she said ‘when the label is a friend at school’.

She finished by calling on the media to stop attacking community schools and promote their achievements. She argued that we need to improve pay for teachers in Waltham Forest, noting that we are only paid outer London weighting, and she called on teaching unions to ‘work with us to build a new relationship’. Jenny finished with a simple call for politicians to ‘make the madness stop’ and for parents to continue to support their community schools.

The last speaker was the local MP for Leyton and Wanstead John Cryer, who opened by reiterating the points made by earlier speakers about the iniquities of the pre-comprehensive era and told the meeting about how his mother had been written off by the school system and left a year below the national minimum. John also repeated his now notorious description of Free Schools as a ‘barking mad’ experiment which put people like ‘that screaming egotist Toby Young’ and ‘the Chuckle Brothers in Rotherham’ in charge of schools. He also warned that the recent scandals were, in his view, ‘just the thin end of the wedge’. John pointed to the scandalous waste involved in the Free Schools experiment, citing the example of the Suffolk Free School which had £2 million spent on it and has 36 pupils. ‘Imagine what Jenny Smith’s school could do with £2 million?’, he said.

Academisation and Free Schools he said were fragmenting the school system and reinforcing class divisions and finished, like Kevin, with an impassioned plea to tackle poverty: children from poor, working class families, living in cramped conditions, with parents who work every hour that God sends to make ends meet, they’re struggling from day one at school. Address that and you will change society for the better.’

Discussion opened with an inspiring contribution from pupils from Frederick Bremer school: ‘We want to learn in a dynamic place, we want to learn more life skills that prepare us for the modern era, especially the technology; and we’re not robots, we want to be creative and dynamic. We need more funding and more resources.’

Other speakers urged parents to become governors to ensure that their schools were community places, while many speakers made clear that they wanted all children educated together and not segregated on sex, faith or class lines. There were calls to include more on sex education in the Charter and for initiatives which made it clear that Waltham Forest is a great place to go to school precisely because of its diversity.

It was another inspiring meeting which affirmed the value of the Charter, added some valuable new elements and came up with some excellent concrete ideas for the future. Thanks to everyone who came and watch this space for more soon.

What sort of person do you want teaching your child?

Why I’m supporting the OCOS charter, by Michelle Hendry 

What sort of person do you want teaching your child? I want my child’s teacher to be happy, motivated and feel valued. That’s because I want my child to be happy, motivated and feel valued.  All the teachers and support staff I’ve come across went into the profession with commitment, passion and enthusiasm.  I know this to be true because I have 10 years of experience of working in inner city London secondary schools.  As a parent, I feel so grateful for this insight because of the faith it has given me that my fellow professionals fully intend to do the absolute best for my child; to instil her with a thirst for learning and support her both emotionally and socially, during the sometimes difficult school years.  

The flip-side of this is that I know many - too many - wonderful teachers who are battered and demoralised by a system that is failing to support them in achieving this. 

Our children learn the importance of ‘group work’ from an early age; that through co-operation and having positive discussions from lots of different viewpoints, all members of the group feel valued and able to share their ideas.  By creating a collaborative environment, all members of the group feel supported and empowered, and so able to bring their own strengths, cultural experiences and differences to the table; and to do this without fear of judgment, criticism and being put down.  Should the same model not apply to teachers then?  Should they not be working together to share good practice and make learning exciting and invigorating for our children? This seemingly simple task is becoming increasingly impossible against an overwhelming backdrop of constant monitoring, assessment and testing.  The balance is all wrong. Teachers now spend so much time documenting evidence for the work done in lessons, and inputting countless data into spreadsheets, that they have precious little time to prioritise the most important part of their job: giving worthwhile feedback and planning high quality lessons.  Yes, I want my child to get good qualifications, but I also want her to have the space to be creative, the ability to socialise and above all else, to have an enjoyment of learning. 

40% of teachers leave within the first five years.  The chief inspector of schools, Sir Michael Wilshaw has famously said, ‘if anyone says to you that staff morale is at an all-time low you know you are doing something right’.  An ethos that condones low staff morale is not a supportive one. If a member of staff challenges a procedure in their workplace, they should feel free to do so not only without fear of recrimination, but because their voice is valued and will be listened to. After all, we know that students learn the most when asking questions, when curiosity is encouraged, and where they are challenged to look at different perspectives. How can we expect teachers to make that vital connection with our children, to encourage higher levels of thinking when their own levels of stress, tension and exhaustion are so overwhelming? 

For many teaching is a vocation; for all it is a profession.  By definition, professionals should be accountable. Of course I want to know that all teachers follow a professional code and I certainly want to know that my child’s teacher is fully qualified.  But the problem comes when professionals are accountable to a system that undermines and contradicts the very values we want instilled in our children.  I don’t want the people who spend more time with my child than I do, spending more time proving they’re doing the job than doing the job itself. 
I support the OCOS charter because like our children, teachers and support staff need space for reflection; to try out new ideas that will make the next lesson better than the last; to be nurtured and supported so that they can grow and perform to the best of their ability. Like our children, teachers and support staff need to be respected, valued and listened to and have working conditions that are conducive to a positive learning environment. Like our children, teachers and support staff need to be treated equally regardless of gender, age, race or religion.  Because like our children, we want our teachers and support staff to represent our vibrant and diverse community where everyone has a voice that is equally valued.