SecEd: On Your Side: A teacher’s lament as the cuts hit hard - 08 Mar 2012

Joanna Davies
Since last February, when I was informed of the decision to close three of the courses offered for PGCE secondary including the art and design course that I have led for nearly 10 years, I have I felt like Malificent the bad fairy at Sleeping Beauty’s christening – uninvited and irate.

What has concerned me more even than my own predicament has been the future of those who were due to start their teacher training last September and those who planned to do so in the future.

If the course had failed the students or if I had been inept, I could perhaps understand, but that isn’t true – Ofsted rated the course outstanding and I am proud of the record of student retention and the success of their achievement and recruitment into the teaching profession.

The course I ran, like many other arts courses, was endangered as a result of short-sighted thinking that calculates that these subjects are non-essential luxuries outside of the core of sciences, mathematics and languages.

Our current government has established its position through the EBacc and by slashing funding for arts courses in higher education, despite the undisputed reality that the creative industries in this country are as valuable and much more highly regarded than the financial sector.

In education, the arts have been the key to success for many young people and the schools they attend. If you lose those teachers of music, dance, art and drama whose subjects are usually their passion and whose rooms are open every lunchtime and after school to facilitate moments of rare pleasure, excitement and courage in performance and display that punctuate the endless cycle of modules, levels, revision and testing, testing, testing, imagine what might be left?

In truth, I am angry and sad – and rather scared. With the reality that what I do is not valued, I need to look ahead. I find myself having to reconfigure not just my career, but many other aspects of my life. Since my teens, I have been altruistic enough to do something of use to society, with enough stamina to work in some pretty challenging environments, going part-time when my children were babies to keep something of a career for the future. I have paid into pension pots and topped them up so that I am not dependent when I am older.

I have no wardrobe full of shoes or photo album full of pictures of exotic holidays and here I am, adjusting to working until my late 60s or longer for a significantly smaller pension because not only is my fund (along with all other public sector workers) being raided to help repay what the bankers gambled away, but instead of being rewarded for being a responsible working mother I am to be punished by having my pension averaged out over all those impoverished years of part-time work and the fact that I have achieved a certain standing in working life ignored, making choices between paying off a mortgage or helping my children not to accrue enormous debt should they decide to educate themselves beyond school level.

And what do I tell my daughters? It’s always been tough to be a girl and although there is the tiniest spark of fight in this generation of school-leavers, marching against the government, marching for the right to safety and dignity for women in a society that has moved on only in millimetres since my own teenage years in the 1970s, they stand to lose the most from the decisions of this government that no-one voted for or endorsed.

Why would girls pay as much as boys for an education that may lead to a career that, unless they are prepared to sacrifice the right and need to bear children, will be interrupted and curtailed, meaning that the cost of their qualifications is automatically higher and will take significantly longer to pay off? Why would girls bother to maintain a career (if they are lucky enough to have one) once they have a family when their pension is averaged out over its length meaning it will include maternity leave, part-time work and pauses – despite equal commitment to their family, community and to our society?

• Joanna Davies is a senior lecturer in art and design at Roehampton University. The editor of SecEd is Pete Henshaw. Email editor@sec-ed.co.uk

Wednesday, 6 April 2011

Taxing times

New taxation laws were introduced today which will alter the thresholds that many families are taxed at but also at which they receive benefits. It's been on my mind a lot today for my own family situation having two young children but also my wider network, the people around me in my daughters class at school or nursery, the children and families I have contact with through my work in education and parents everywhere who are trying to make ends meet and raise their children in the best way possible.

There are three major areas of concern to me:

I believe that most cuts in benefits, e.g. child benefit and tax credits affect predominately women and children and will affect the standard and quality of life for these groups most.
The changes will potentially stigmatise any kind of benefit/credit making hard working families feeling the pinch less likely to claim even when they are eligible
Policy wise: the target to eradicate child poverty by 2020 seems to be sidelined by successive governments when dealing with fiscal matters affecting families

How many women and children proportionately are making the decisions? Many women I know are battling hard to have choices about their lives even in the post-feminist world we live. On my own part, although I believe that the rights of women are central to a democratic soceity, in some ways we continue to enslave women by the opposites, that is, equality is not about being exactly the same, it is about having the same potential and the right to make a choice. In my opinion women (and men) should have the right to work, equal rights to career progression, equal rights to pay and benefits for the equivalent job but they should also have the option to raise their children if they choose to, take some time out of work without financial penalty, be encouraged and supported in the first place when they choose to have a family and live in a society that values and respects the biological differences between male and female human beings.

Child Benefit is one area that I have never felt was a bad 'benefit' to be claiming, not that other benefits are bad but when through working hard, many families sit on the threshold or cut off points of other taxation and benefits policy, the view that every 'child' was entitled to that benefit was positive, the child focused element of the benefit not tax or earnings related made it palatable across the board, it's not emotive, person specific rather than subjective judgment on circumstance (and yes, I do accept the cost of that) children from every walk of life, every background, every parental circumstance got one thing that was exactly the same, one moment where government policy was largely irrelevant and for a brief moment they were seen as and treated as the same, neither rich or poor, black or white, religious or not, academic or not from the North or the South, no none of these, just children. Personally I am desperately sad this model has gone and now parental income, class, education, opportunity even equality can evade our children at the most basic level. I wrote to my MP on this very matter a few months ago and was disappointed by the response that I felt only understood a spreadsheet showing a negative when I long for a way of thinking that centres on real people, real lives.

The unfairness of applying one level to benefit classification nationally is obvious £42-43k in London compared with £42-43k in parts of the North of England is almost like dealing with a different currency, but how do we make it fair? I don't know the answer and remember children are central here, what are the life chances of children groing up in each of the English regions and in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, they have to be considered alongside financial changes .

Finally what are the implications of todays changes on the commitments to eradicate child poverty by 2020? Some children are going to be worse off, whether this puts them into a technically 'impoverished category' remains to be seen but a taxation system which is purley based on parental income takes no account of background, family levels of debt, compassion, priorities, self esteem. It cannot be the only way, the terms are too limited We must learn to think more widely, more collaboratively, we must put children at the heart of policy not pound signs we must learn that parental income is not the only measure of wealth and indeed can completely obscure the picture and take the long term view.

After pondering all this I am still left confused and grateful to not be a politicial in the troubling times we live in, it is hard to make decisions. I am also left worried though, worried for the fututre of my own children and worried for all those families who will suffer, who may have to make sacrifices, who are but a statistic, a saving and yet they are not only this, families grow children and children are our future.