I love my mum,” said last Saturday’s headliner on Glastonbury’s West Holts stage. But then, as the London-born hip-hop artist Loyle Carner prepared for his next song, he got on to the really crucial part. “My mum’s a teacher; my girlfriend’s a teacher,” he said. “The only thing I feel like right now is, teachers are striking and I stand with them.” A cheer began to go up, which then swelled as he reeled off a list of the educators who had helped him on his way, starting with his mother: “All my fucking teachers that lifted me up and saved me.”
The following day, Glastonbury’s Left Field – the big top that has a bill split between evenings of music and daytime debates and discussions – hosted an hour-long event centred on the current wave of strikes. I was in the chair, and the panel included Nusrat Sultana, a teacher and trade unionist from Birmingham who works at an autism-specialist school. She talked movingly about slashed budgets, disappearing staff, the end of school trips, and many of her colleagues’ dire financial situations.
When I asked if there were any teachers in the crowd, around a dozen hands went up: whatever the festival’s escapist attractions, people obviously wanted to come and tell people about the scale of a meltdown in state education that goes back to 2010 – if not even further – and is still not getting nearly enough attention.
This coming Wednesday and Friday, teachers in the National Education Union will once again be walking out of schools in England. They now look likely, when the new school year starts in the autumn, to be joined by headteachers. In real terms, insists the union, experienced teachers have endured a 20% pay cut since 2010. More than one in 10 new teachers now quit after just a year in the classroom, and one in three within six. Last week brought news that 700,000 children in England are being educated in buildings that need “major repairs”, a story that was followed by specific details of what that now entails: as school premises are forced to shut because of safety concerns, kids are being taught in churches and village halls, or being sent home to take lessons remotely.
Here it all is: as that unrepentant austerity zealot George Osborne promotes his new podcast, with the promise of banter and laughs, and the former education secretary Michael Gove still sits in the cabinet, the schools system is in a state of collapse.
Special-needs provision is underfunded and dysfunctional. Thanks to a mixture of cuts and Conservative dogma, art, music and drama have been pushed to the margins. Teachers stop teaching not only thanks to their often impossible financial position, but also because of the cold system of “accountability” that involves endless data collection and testing, and constant anxiety about a visit from England’s infamous schools inspectors. And who actually cares? The current education secretary is the sixth holder of the post since the autumn of 2021.
When I got back from Glastonbury, I spoke to a handful of schools insiders who fleshed all this out. Sarah, an art teacher from the north-east who left full-time teaching last year, told me about what has happened to the secondary school where she worked for 16 years. She left, she said, “because it was no longer the school I loved, and it was damaging my health”.
From 2010 onwards, there had been a steady shedding of staff amid reduced budgets, until the school was transferred from her local council to an academy trust, and things became impossible. Sixty members of staff left in just 18 months, pushed out via a mixture of voluntary and compulsory redundancies and “settlement agreements” whereby other people were quietly sent on their way. The sixth form was closed, for reasons of “financial viability”. Funding for music tuition from visiting specialists was ended, meaning that children could no longer learn to play an instrument. Art and technology teaching were also cut, and the modern languages on offer came down from four to two.
She was a union rep. “People would come and cry in my classroom,” she said. “And you always felt at risk: am I next?” One of the most notable effects of all the cuts and turbulence, she said, was what happened to some of her students: “A lot of the behaviour became really, really shocking, and that was a direct result of removing the consistency of staff being there and all those personal relationships.”
Rosie teaches in the nursery class of a council-run primary school in the London borough of Tower Hamlets, having also taught children in year 1 and reception. Over the past three years, financial pressures have led to the school’s staffing being restructured twice: in the first set of changes, 14 teaching assistants were lost, “which had a huge effect, particularly on our most vulnerable and needy children”. The nursery, where 54 children are taught, used to have 10 members of staff; now it has five. “But the needs of the children haven’t gone down; if anything, they’ve increased.” Nurture groups for children who need early intervention have been scaled back, and the same applies to speech and language therapy. As a result, teachers and support staff are “worked to the bone”.
Her school now makes a point of recruiting early-career teachers – or ECTs – because “we can’t afford to pay people who are experienced.” Money for things beyond English, maths and science has shrunk, which means “no new paintbrushes if they’re tired and raggedy, and not enough paint … we used to get in special paper for watercolours, but that’s not there any more. The cupboards are bare.”
She will be striking this week. “The main thing is, this is not just about our individual pay,” Rosie told me. “It’s about funding for schools.” This issue was vividly highlighted by the government’s recent offer to teaching unions of a largely unfunded 4.5% pay rise, which would only pile on more financial problems: “We won’t accept a pay increase at a cost that falls on the children in our schools,” she said.
For some people, all this may bring on a heartbreaking sense of deja vu. In the 1980s, the secondary school I went to – which sat next to a railway line – was full of mundane evidence of a school system that was buckling. As well as the teachers’ strikes, I vividly remember their context. Endless lessons in portable buildings that shook when the trains went past; the ancient desks, with empty holes where inkwells had been; the textbooks from 20 years before, and the all-pervading feeling that, whatever the valiant efforts of our teachers, no one in any position of power and influence really cared.
Things are superficially different now, but the sense of rot and shrinking horizons feels exactly the same. This week, in fact, feels like yet another grinding instalment of a story that seems to always involve the same basic elements: squeezed budgets, misplaced policy and what happens when state schools are too often commanded by privately educated politicians. To cap it all, England now feels to me like a country run by people who do not want to think about the future: the state of our schools, and what teachers are desperately fighting to overturn, could not provide a more vivid example of what that fear and neglect actually means in practice.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
