Forum 67.1 Spring 2025: In whose interest?

Posted on 20/03/2025

Forum’s newly-published Spring number addresses the way teachers engage responsibly with controversial issues. Introducing it, Patrick Yarker considers whether teachers’ unions really do put children last.

In a recent article attacking the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, former Ofsted Chief Inspector Amanda Spielman criticised the Education Secretary for promoting policies ‘influenced by education union leaders and activists.’[1] According to Ms Spielman, the Bill’s proposals ‘essentially put unions and union members ahead of children.’[2] She claimed unions would always defend the interests of adults in school over those of the young.

Some 800,000 people who work as teachers or school leaders in England are trade union members.[3] Are their interests really opposed to those of the pupils and students they teach? Do they always think of themselves first and of children last? The principal reason teachers enter the profession is to work with and for children and young people.[4] Teachers spend their working lives helping the rising generation. Ms Spielman forgets what everyone else knows very well, that the essence of a teacher’s work, day in and day out, is to enable pupils and students to flourish in school.

But Amanda Spielman has never been a teacher. Her career was made in accountancy, merchant banking and as a management consultant. In 2005 she joined the leadership of Ark academy chain, set up in 2002 by hedge fund financiers.[5] Lack of teaching experience was one factor cited by the Education Select Committee when, unusually, it rejected her candidature to be Head of Ofsted in 2016. The decision was over-ruled by an Education Secretary who didn’t think the Chief Inspector needed to have ‘prior understanding of all the sectors Ofsted inspects’.[6]

But in the eyes of the profession such understanding is necessary.  And in Ofsted’s eyes too. You must hold Qualified Teacher Status to be an Ofsted inspector.[7] You must demonstrate to those whose work you are inspecting and evaluating that you know on your pulses what it is they do. To have walked the walk strengthens the credibility of your judgement. However distinct from actual school inspection the work of running the inspectorate may be, the Education Secretary undermined the credibility of the office of Chief Inspector by indicating that it did not matter that Ms Spielman did not understand the school sector from the inside.

A better conception

Perhaps back then the minister thought Ms Spielman’s distance from state schooling was an asset. But the milieu in which someone has long worked, its values, perspectives and intentions, will reveal their commitments and infuse the way they think. A career in organisations where individual advancement is prized above that of the collective, and whose purposes include enhancing the power of management rather than of workers and sinking private finance deeper into the public sector, will signal powerfully which way someone is likely to lean amid the broader political struggle.

Simply by virtue of their position, teachers are most aware of the ways in which education policy can detrimentally affect children and young people. The employment and working conditions teachers enjoy or endure importantly shape and influence the learning conditions children enjoy or endure. Think of the ‘temporary’ classrooms permanently in place; the classes taught by a succession of supply-staff rather than by someone permanently-contracted; the demoralisation of another real terms pay-cut; decisions on what can be taught and how, or even what can be posted on classroom walls, routinely made without discussion with teachers or students. How else but through their unions—democratically-structured representative bodies with leaders elected, not appointed—may teachers defend and seek to improve their pay and working conditions, and speak with consequence in the policy debate? They are not putting children last when they do so, but defending a better conception of the whole service, one informed by the day-to-day understanding of what is happening now to children and young people within it.

While in my view, Ofsted is beyond reform, a schools’ inspectorate has a vital role to play in evaluating the performance of the sector, holding it accountable and fostering its improvement. Colin Richards was among many contributors who explored this in Forum 65.3. Instead of trying to split the interests of teachers from those of children, and to present Ofsted as the children’s champion against (unionised) teachers, Ms Spielman should acknowledge that teachers, young people and school inspectors are on the same side in wanting the education service to get better.

The argument is over the kinds of improvement to be made.

The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill will a little curtail the licence to shape education which academy chains have enjoyed. Ms Spielman wants academies let be, though they are inherently undemocratic in the way they are structured and too often dirigiste in the way they are run. She finds it objectionable that academies and maintained schools will be set on the same legal footing, and all children taught the national curriculum by properly qualified staff. Hard to see how her stance defends the interests of children ahead of the adults who run academy chains.

Education forms the minds of the next generation, and the debate about how minds are to be formed will be politically-charged. Forum’s Spring number looks at how teachers address controversial matters. Contributors write about the constraints under which they do so and the costs that can accrue. Practitioners at primary and secondary level consider the requirement to maintain impartiality, the pressures towards self-censorship, and the price of challenging the status quo. For challenge there must be: to the current diktat on the teaching of reading, for example. Articles illuminate ways of teaching sensitive histories, and of valuing more inclusively the language students speak. The number also presents evidence sent to the Curriculum and Assessment review by John White, and by the Forum Editorial Board, and carries the text of Sammy Wright’s memorable 2024 Caroline Benn Memorial Lecture: ‘The problem with fairness and choice’, as well as an introduction to Caroline Benn’s life and work. Now there was someone who knew what it took to remain a credible voice in the public debate about what matters in education.

Notes

[1] Ex-Ofsted boss says education secretary wants ‘to please unions’ – BBC News

[2] Ofsted ex-chief says schools bill ‘very likely’ to make education in England worse | Ofsted | The Guardian

[3] Teaching and leadership union membership drops to lowest level since 2010

[4] Full article: Who wants to be a teacher? Findings from a survey of undergraduates in England

[5] Full article: ARK and the revolution of state education in England

[6] House of Commons – Appointment of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Education, Children’s Services and Skills: Government Response to the Committee’s Second Report of Session 2016–17 – Education Committee

[7] Contracted Ofsted inspectors for schools and further education and skills – GOV.UK