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

Tuesday, 28 June 2011

Strike Action

I'm not striking myself on Thursday but I fully support all those who are.

This is the first time in my life I can make such a statement as I am fundamentally opposed to strike action in the public sector.

My opposition of strike action started when I was a small child. My Grandmother had been a nurse in her professional life, she was also a Welsh Conservative from a mining community and had strong views on strike action and the personal and professional compromise she had to equate. Being in a vocational profession, which many in the public sector are, she recognised the impact on her patients that she had faced during times of industrial action and could not justify in any terms patients who lost dignity due to lack of nursing care. This had a huge impact on me and I was fully signed up to the notion that private sector industrial action was wrong from an early age.

My own parents followed labour when I was younger but could rarely explain to me the whys and wherefores of politics and I became frustrated by the negative undertone and lack of personal and financial accountability I saw in the party and policies.

In the late 1990's I worked for a short time for a company in the private sector where I saw industrial action costing hundreds of thousands, even millions of pounds. At this time I saw shop stewards who at times seemed ill informed and ill-educated militantly leading people into strike action which cost money and cost jobs. My mind was made up, there must be a better way?

2011 here and now and the biggest teachers union and other public sector workers are about to go on strike. I'm not striking myself, I don't belong to those groups but I do have a huge amount of sympathy for the majority of those who will be out on strike and these are the reasons why.

Many public sector workers are equally or better qualified than many of their contempories in the private sector yet are paid less in salaries during their working years and receive typically less in reciprocal benefits such as private health insurance, car schemes etc
The changes are too widespread, too big and too quick to be implemented
The summer strike will not majorly affect the education of children preparing for life changing examinations or transitional moves
There has been little or no compromise from the government alongside a host of other educational changes that are ill thought out, rushed and having an impact across the board such as the removing the BSF capital investment programme, academy policy, teacher training changes and changes to the inspection framework
Attacking public sector pensions on the basis that they are better than the private sector does not mean that pension provision across the board becomes acceptable but rather the public and government are making a statement that dignity, care and well being in old age is not important. This is also shown in the shambolic care and state benefits system for older people in society that the government is yet to address.
The government know this for them is a battle for the taxpayers support and not about the moral high ground or the financial deficit. The PR/spam machine is in full swing!
The young in the profession will soon be saddled with huge tuition fee loans, with the cost of pensions set to rise by so much and diminished benefits, how many NQT's will be able to make increased pension contributions or see it as important. In the long tern this leaves the tax payer with a much higher bill as it will need to provide state care and provision.
I am a parent and value how hard teachers work with my own child, pension contributions rising by up to 50%, the retirement age jumping, (let's face it how many private sector workers will be faced with 30 4 yr olds in a reception class unable to read and write or 30 15 yr old teenagers who can't be bothered to learn when they themselves are 68?) Is this what is best for our children whether or not demographics tell us we are living longer?

I urge everyone to think long and hard about strike action, what it means for our public services, what it means for our children and what it means that it is necessary in the first place and as for the Conservative party elements of the government, you are losing people who have supported you all their voting lives, get back to the sounding board and make some better decisions.