TEACHERS CONSIDER THEIR NEXT MOVE

BBC 24 April

The National Union of Teachers is taking stock after staging its first national strike in a generation. One third of schools in England and Wales were hit by the walk-out, staged over pay. A survey by the National Association of Parent Teacher Associations suggests most parents think teachers should accept the offer on the table.

An independent pay review body suggested an increase of 2.45%, plus a further rise of 2.3% in 2009 and 2010. The NUT could choose to ballot for a rolling series of strikes this summer. It received a mandate at its national conference at Easter. Other teachers' unions have agreed to the offer and do support the strike. Head teachers have spoken out against it.

The survey by the National Association of Parent Teacher Associations and the Times Educational Supplement suggests 60% of parents think the NUT should accept the pay offer.

BBC

Lead Story | General

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COUNCILS UNDERESTIMATE SCALE OF SCHOOL STRIKE CLOSURES

The Guardian 24 April

The number of schools affected by today's teacher strike action could be many more than the 8,000 predicted, after key local authorities reported double the number turning pupils away, the Guardian can reveal.

In Liverpool, Birmingham, Bristol and Camden yesterday's predictions for school closures were vastly underestimated, meaning the true extent of the strike could far outweigh the 1 million children who were thought to be off school.

In Liverpool alone the number of schools closed or partially closed went up from a predicted 67 yesterday to 135 confirmed today. In Birmingham the number more than tripled, from 75 reported to a Guardian/Local Government Association survey yesterday. Some 248 schools in the city are closed or turning some pupils away today. Seven more authorities reported a higher number of schools were affected than they predicted.

"It does seem higher than what we were thinking," a spokesman for the LGA said. He put the changes down to underreporting by schools and local authorities.

The impact will embolden the National Union of Teachers, which will meet within weeks to decide on whether to follow its one-day strike with further action.

Guardian

General

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'NEW TEACHERS ARE BEING DRIVEN OUT'

The Guardian 25 April

It was cold and raining, but the car horns kept the Lawnswood teachers' picket going: driver after driver honking, more support than most of the strikers had expected. "Schools are everybody's business, not just ours," said Richard Raferty, who normally teaches humanities at the Leeds comprehensive, but was on the picket line with a "Where's the money, Darling?" placard.

"We've been criticised in some of the media for walking out, but newly qualified teachers especially are being driven to walk away from the profession altogether. Most of them have got student loans whose interest payments have just been doubled. They can't make ends meet."

His young colleague Lola Okoloasi, who teaches English at Lawnswood, agreed under her umbrella that she was a case in point. With a salary around £20,000 and a £16,000 loan debt accruing £500 a year, she said: "I've no way of paying off a sum like that at this rate - at least not for about 25 years."

Okoloasi and the other dozen teachers on the picket line, out of 23 who went on strike at Lawnswood, don't want to leave a job which they see as a vocation, but temptation hits them virtually every day. "Everyone I graduated with is earning £2,000 a year more than me, at least," she said. "And I've had to do an extra year of training compared with most of them too."

Guardian

General

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NUT SHOULD OFFER A LESSON IN DEMOCRACY

Alice Thomson; Daily Telegraph 25 April

Here's a really good lesson, one I am sure you will all want your children to learn. If you don't like having to eat salad or you don't feel like discussing frogspawn in biology, if you hate swimming or think it is unfair to have Double Maths on a Monday morning, then go on strike.

It's easy: just sit on your desk and refuse to move, or don't come in at all - go shopping or play football instead. If the teachers complain, you can explain that it is the only way you can get your point across, that nothing ever happens through negotiation, and confrontation is the best way forward.If the head teacher tells you that these are the rules and that the majority of pupils abide by them, stick two fingers up.

Why shouldn't you disrupt everyone else's lives? If you don't look after yourself, no one else will. The more attention you draw to yourself, the better. Get the camera crews in, parade up and down the high street. It doesn't matter if most of the other pupils want to negotiate a deal to have chips instead of salad one day a week, or change Double Maths to a Tuesday. That would be a pathetic compromise.

Daily Telegraph

General

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ONLY TEACHERS TO CO-ORDINATE SPECIAL NEEDS

Irena Barker 25 April 2008

The idea is to stop teaching assistants or other support staff gaining crucial Senco role All special educational needs co-ordinators (Sencos) will have to be fully qualified teachers under new government proposals. The move will affect the growing number of schools that have given the post to unqualified staff, such as teaching assistants.

Under the proposals, by September 2009 all new Sencos will have to be qualified teachers. Those already in the job for at least six months will have until September 2011 to qualify. Nasen, the professional association for people working in special needs, and the National Union of Teachers, have welcomed the move. But both are unhappy that the Government has backed down over plans to make it compulsory for Sencos to be members of the senior leadership team. It will be enough for a “champion” of special needs to be part of management, with the work delegated to another staff member.

New research by Leeds University has found that only a third of secondary Sencos are on the leadership team, compared to 71 per cent in primaries, where the head often takes the role. Nasen said it was essential for Sencos to be at the heart of school management in order to be able to liaise with governors, and to ensure money allocated to special needs was spent on it. The association said that because special needs funding is not ring-fenced, it can be taken for other areas of the school, such as ICT or buildings.

TES

General

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STRIKERS LOSE PARENTS’ SYMPATHY

TES 25 April

Only one in three supports teachers’ demands over pay as more industrial action is threatened

Parents have expressed little sympathy for the national teachers’ strike, affecting activists’ plans for further industrial action. The TES and the National Confederation of Parent Teacher Associations (NCPTA) polled 750 parents about the strike, which was due to close thousands of schools in England and Wales yesterday. Nearly a third said the action, by the National Union of Teachers (NUT), had lowered their view of teachers.

However, most parents who responded said their opinion remained unchanged. The lukewarm response of parents will be a factor for the NUT leadership in deciding whether to proceed with a ballot for rolling strike action, as the union’s Easter conference demanded. The online TES/NCPTA survey showed that 63 per cent of parents believed the Government’s 2.45 per cent pay offer was sufficient, or more than teachers deserved. Christine Blower, the union’s acting general secretary, said she believed teachers still enjoyed the goodwill of parents. “I can’t deny there are some parents who are opposed to strike action,” she said. “But we haven’t felt great waves of opprobrium coming in our direction.

“We haven’t done this for 21 years. The post-strike period will tell us whether we can continue the public-sector campaign, which primarily for us is about teachers’ pay. “This campaign is about ensuring teachers have decent pay levels and that they can continue to work in a decent education service – teachers need to be respected and valued.”

TES

General

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SCHOOLS BRACED FOR JOB LOSSES

TES 25 April

As rising costs in food and fuel and pay anomalies hit budgets, some heads say they will be forced to lay off staffMany schools are expected to cut staff numbers as the tight funding round, rising costs and slowing global economy bite. Heads are demanding that the Government reviews its three-year funding settlement, to factor in wage rises and higher costs. Ministers require schools to reduce spending by 1 per cent per year, while costs such as heating and transport are rising.

School leaders say the only way they can save that money is by reducing staffing costs, which comprise four-fifths of a typical school budget. At its conference in Liverpool next week, members of the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) will ask the union’s leadership to negotiate more flexible funding in response to the state of the global and national economy. Mick Brookes, its general secretary, said schools were being asked to implement a huge agenda of policy reform – not least the new diplomas – and needed more funding to do so. Funding for the diplomas is expected to leave some schools with shortfalls ranging from £20,000 to £200,000.

Teachers’ pay will rise by 2.45 per cent in the autumn – already more than heads had anticipated. In yesterday’s planned strike, the National Union of Teachers was demanding 4.1 per cent.

TES

General

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TEACHERS' STRIKE

Letters; Daily Telegraph 25 April

Sir - The National Union of Teachers, civil servants and college lecturers are very lucky they have been offered a pay rise at all, let alone given the chance to strike about it (report, April 24).The company my daughter works for has informed its staff that there will not be a pay rise this year and many of the staff, including my daughter, will be hit by the abolition of the 10p tax rate. She and many others cannot claim tax credits, so how are these people meant to cope without going into debt?Surely the easiest way to help would be through raising the allowances, thus benefiting everyone.

Sally Giles, Farnham, Surrey

Sir - On your front page (April 24) there was a large photograph of a notice advising parents that a particular school would be closed that day.

I hope the teachers who were not at work spent the day attending English lessons to learn the correct use of "owing to" and "due to".

Pete Griffiths, Grays, Essex

Sir - If I were a teacher, I would be disappointed that my union had decided to use a Thursday as the day to show dissatisfaction with the latest pay offer. Had they chosen a Friday, the teachers could have had a long weekend break somewhere.

Frederick Reuben Parr, Tyldesley, Lancashire

General

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GIVE A LEG UP

Biddy Passmore TES 25 April

Want to know the best way to make pupils recall information? Repeated testing could be more effective than revision, says Biddy PassmoreSo you thought testing was just assessment and either neutral or actively harmful to learning? Well, think again. New research from the US suggests that, far from being a recipe for a blighted childhood, repeated testing is one of the best ways to learn. The active retrieval of facts from the memory that occurs during testing is far more helpful for consolidating knowledge than passive studying.

The study indicates that pupils who stop revising a topic after they have correctly recalled it once are doing themselves no favours. They need to keep testing themselves and each other on the same material to make it stick. The researchers, Jeffrey D. Karpicke of Purdue University, Indiana, and Henry L. Roediger III of Washington University in St Louis, decided to test some central assumptions about learning and memory. These are that “learning occurs while people study and encode material”, that additional study should therefore increase learning, and that testing represents a neutral event that merely measures it.

They gave 40 college students a list of 40 Swahili-English word pairs, asked them to study it for a set time, and then tested them on the list. The 40 students were divided into four groups. One group repeatedly studied and were tested on the whole list (group 1). In the other three, once a student had correctly recognised a Swahili word and recalled its English translation, it was either: repeatedly studied but dropped from further testing (group 2), repeatedly tested but dropped from further study (group 3), or dropped from both study and test (group 4). All of these study and test periods were back-to-back, on one day.

The results? Repeated studying had no effect on the student’s ability to recall the information a week later. Those who were just tested once but carried on studying did much worse than those who stopped studying but were repeatedly tested. In fact, the “one test, repeated study” students did almost as badly as those who stopped both studying and testing.

TES

Curriculum / Quality Assurance

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GIRLS EDGED OFF THE PAGE BY CAMPAIGNS TO BOOST LITERACY

The TES: 25 April

Curriculum / Quality Assurance

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