Unlike other professions such as lawyers, most people can name a teacher who helped them a lot. I can think of three or four who changed my life for the better.
During lockdown, lots of parents gained a newfound respect for the profession.
Yet we don’t treat teachers like other professionals. We don’t expect doctors or lawyers to put up with abuse of the kind that’s sadly too common for school teachers.
Behaviour in schools
The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill does many things, but it is bizarrely silent on discipline and the right for teachers and pupils to have a safe place to work.
To fix this, we’ve tabled amendments to the bill. It’s time to make sure all acts and threats of violence against teachers are reported to the police. We should not expect teachers to suck up abuse that we’d never expect other professionals to have to suck up.
What gets measured gets managed, but we have far too little data on the state of discipline in schools or alternative provision settings. We need to change that.
I went to a comprehensive in Huddersfield, which was pretty typical of most schools in this country. But even in that average school, the level of disorder and violence was simply unacceptable. It made teachers’ jobs impossible. And that makes it harder to retain good people in one of the most important jobs in our society.
Why we need a phone ban
We also have to make things easier for teachers. For example, we’ve tabled amendments to the schools bill to bring about a full ban on phones in our schools. Though some schools have good policies, many still don’t.
The pressures from parents to allow phones can be severe. But having phones in school is bad for attainment - and bad for children. Teachers waste time asking for them to be put away, pupils are distracted, and children don’t get to enjoy even a couple of hours of freedom from the pressures of the online world.
Decisive action in schools would help reset social norms. The shift to a screen-based childhood is having bad effects on young people, from mental health and school readiness to simply turning up knackered. These effects are set to widen gaps in achievement unless something decisive is done.
Education was one of the issues that brought me into politics. I got to see how good state education can be at an amazing sixth-form college. But I also saw how sometimes the system let down teachers and pupils and squandered people’s potential.
Education culture wars
As an MP on the edge of Leicester, I see how powerful a culture of aspiration can be. But I also see how powerful the anti-education culture still is in so many places. I remember at school asking why, if things get smaller when they cool down, ice gets bigger. I also remember how ashamed I felt to have asked.
I once borrowed a book from Huddersfield library and hid it, because I was ashamed to be caught reading (it was, ironically, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four). My parents were not anti-education - quite the opposite. But the culture was, and we still need to change it.
We are pressing the government to respond to the many criticisms school leaders have made of the schools bill; we have already got the government to U-turn on measures that would have threatened teacher pay.
We think taking away school freedoms is the wrong direction, and it’s difficult to find anyone who knows what the fiddly, micromanaging changes in the bill are supposed to solve.
Successes in England
But the much bigger issue is the lack of a clear vision. In opposition, we’re starting afresh, and renewing and reviewing everything about our education policy.
Recent Conservative governments got some things right: it’s striking that England’s schools rose up the international league tables as Scotland and Wales went down. This isn’t the fault of teachers in Scotland and Wales, but the system.
As the Institute for Fiscal Studies has pointed out, with the same funding levels, deprived pupils in England are now outperforming the average pupil in Wales.
What was done in England worked better than what was done in Scotland and Wales. But does that mean we were content? Of course not. There are massive questions to answer.
How do we bring the same big improvements we saw in numeracy and literacy in primaries to secondary schools, and ensure no child is left without the basics? How do we fix the attendance crisis?
How do we get all parts of a community to contribute to improving schools where pupils have struggled for decades? How do we grow and empower trusts that really do add value to schools?
There are massive questions to resolve. We want to work with all of those who have the passion and experience to help us answer them.
Neil O’Brien MP is shadow minister for education
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