During Covid, the country found out what it was to disrupt schooling — three years of missed lessons, home learning and mask-wearing have meant a generation has lost out on its formative education. Many parents were forced out of the workplace to look after their children — with a long-term impact on their own careers. Now teachers are causing further disruption by walking out of the classroom in protest over their pay. How can they do this to their pupils?
Or so runs much outraged comment about industrial action in the teaching sector that is to continue for seven days in February and March. But this is of course mostly posturing — I note there was no such anger when the extra Coronation bank holiday was announced. A few days off school — no pupil will face more than four days of strikes — is nothing to the rolling disaster going on in classrooms throughout Britain.
The strikes reveal something that has been rather ignored. Despite big promises during Covid that pupils will be given help to catch up, they simply haven’t. Just 59 per cent of 11-year-olds met threshold standards last year in reading, writing and maths, compared to 65 per cent in 2019. The attainment gap between rich and poor is at its highest in a decade. Meanwhile, children are suffering more complicated psychological problems than before the pandemic, and they are not getting much support either. Teachers complain that referring students for specialist help takes months.
The problem all comes down to spending, which is troubling the Government because, relative to last year, it feels it is pouring money into schools. Why aren’t teachers feeling flush? Funding in 2022 was 6.8 per cent higher than it was the previous year, and staff have had a pay rise of around five per cent. Yet schools complain they are stretched, and teachers that they can’t afford to stay in the profession.
This spending comes against a background of long decline. Since 2010, investment in schools has been falling — real-terms funding fell by nine per cent in the decade to 2019, and despite recent efforts won’t return to 2010 levels until next year. The UK was already spending less than its peers on education before Covid struck.
Meanwhile, other costs are mounting. Energy bills are taking larger and larger bites into budgets — although schools differ dramatically in financial positions depending on when they locked in better contracts. Food costs more, as do supplies, as do pensions.
And despite a rise in pay, soaring inflation has meant teachers have had a real-terms pay cut of five per cent between this year and last, against a 13 per cent cut in the last decade.
The most consequential effect of all this has been to deter people from going into teaching in the first place, as pay falls relative to other graduate jobs. Current numbers are at about half of the Government target, and dropping — particularly in secondary schools. Subjects like physics and maths have been understaffed for so long that there is no room for a further squeeze. Soon some schools will simply not have a physics teacher.
And that is what makes these strikes more than a battle of wills between current teachers and Rishi Sunak. Thatcherites in his government are urging him to hold firm — on this wave of industrial action, as on others — and trust that teachers will back down against public pressure.
But should the Government win the battle it may lose the war. The real industrial action in the teaching profession has been going on for years — at graduate level and in the early stages of teachers’ careers (one in three quit after five years in the job). If people are simply selecting other careers, we have a bigger problem than a few days of pupils out of school. In fact, this isn’t a political fight so much as a policy problem. How do we tackle falling numbers in the teaching sector?
A big recruitment drive will only go so far. There is already talk of recruiting non-degree teachers into the profession — but how much can we afford to skim on qualifications in a teaching job? The key to stellar grades is the quality of teachers. One US study found that in just one year’s teaching the pupils of the top 10 per cent of teachers learn three times as much as those taught by the worst 10 per cent.
Education in this country has a history of trying out ‘miracle’ solutions — but this is a basic that we can’t afford to get wrong.
