I couldn’t have been more dismayed by the decision of my children’s schools and other schools across the town to close their doors to pupils on Thursday.
How can it be right to use children as leverage in an argument over pay?
But I’m on the side of teachers – those 82.7 per cent of teachers who did not vote to strike. Unions claim to represent the interests of the profession and yet by this action they do not win public support, they lose it.
There are good things happening in Education. The editor of the Times Education Supplement comments that the professional status of teachers is rising under this government, that schools have never been better equipped and that teachers' pensions remain generous compared with most. It has never been such an attractive graduate destination.
But there is also serious work to do to raise standards. Commentary around the recent OECD report on Education standards talks of falling standards, of England as ‘bottom of the class’, of the threat of our shrinking talent pool.. And, even as we are trying to absorb this – the very same month - the Unions call teachers to strike?
One friend in the playground said to me that, ‘I bet private schools won’t be closed because parents pay; true, but so do we, taxpayers all. Worse still, on Thursday, it cost the children.
Cllr. Caroline Ansell
Prospective Conservative MP
Teacher and former Member NASUWT