Support the BEST education - not the most STRESSED!

May 3rd Children's Strike: Open Letter to Nicky Morgan from Let Our Kids Be Kids

Reprinted from Let Our Kids Be Kids website LINK

Open Letter from Let Our Kids Be Kids – the voice of tens of thousands of parents who want an end to SAT testing NOW.

Dear Nicky Morgan,

We are aware that you’ve been flooded with open letters recently but this one is a bit different. We’re writing from everybody. We represent the voice of parents across the country. Parents are everybody. They are teachers, they are junior doctors, they are steel workers, they are speech therapists, neuro scientists, academics, small business owners, stay at home mums. Parents aren’t people you can dismiss into a single box; parents are everybody that you were voted in to serve.

• Children as young as 6 are labelling themselves failures and crying about going to school. We know this because we are parents.

• The capacity for children of this age to actually learn the concepts you have asked them to learn is questionable. We know this because parents are also neuro scientists.

• Children’s mental health is at risk because of the increased pressure they face through primary school testing. We know this because parents are also mental health nurses.

• By the time these children reach secondary school they are turned off education. We know this because parents are also secondary teachers

• Children who have been taught in a system obsessed with passing tests rather than learning for learning’s sake enter the world of work unprepared. We know this because parents are also business owners.

• By the time children who have been through this exam factory end up at university they have to be re taught how to learn in a curious way. We know this because parents are also academics.

The other interesting thing about parents is that they aren’t employed or paid by you. You can’t dismiss our concerns as being about pay or holidays or pension plans… our priority is the happiness and wellbeing of our children.

You’ve said some interesting things about parents but rest assured that we are parents who would most definitely discuss the issue of education with you if you were to turn up on our doorsteps. We are parents who do feel that elections can be won or lost on educational matters. There are tens of thousands of us and we have reached the point when it is time for us to speak. We need you to listen.
We’re not convinced, based on your track record, that you’ll listen to just words so, to make it very clear how strongly we feel, we are also planning a day of action with a Kids’ Strike on 3rd May  (#KidsStrike3rdMay) which will see thousands of primary school children staying off school IN SUPPORT of teachers and schools and in protest at the DfE’s testing policies. We want an end to SATs NOW. Not in 2017, not in the future. NOW.

Perhaps the government hoped that this mass parental revolt would be extinguished following the shambolic cancellation of KS1 SPaG test? This has simply added fuel to the fire. It merely demonstrates how little thought goes into your decisions and shows that you do think teacher assessment is a good enough tool to use.

You have dismissed the concerns of pupil stress and anxiety caused by the SATs by blaming our wonderful teachers for not administering tests in an appropriate manner. We say to you that this is utter nonsense. Teachers would be insane to allow our children to face these tests unprepared. The new curriculum related to these tests demands that teachers teach a dulled down, test driven curriculum to our children for months in advance. Since you and your inspectors put so much emphasis on test scores for your league tables can you blame schools for trying to get the best out of our children? We don’t blame them. We blame you and your government’s ridiculous testing regime.

A marvellous quote was posted to our campaign page:

“Learning can only happen when a child is interested. If he is not interested, it is like throwing marshmallows at his head and calling it eating.”

Your government has effectively spent millions of pounds of tax payers’ money chucking marshmallows at our children’s heads. You’ve had some wonderful teachers trying their hardest to chuck these marshmallows about but no matter how hard they try they are still missing… because these children are in the vast majority of cases simply not mentally ready to learn the material you have placed in front of them. It’s a bit like teaching an 8 year old to drive a sports car or a 6 month old to walk… it’s not going to happen.

You have got it wrong. We give you a score of zero for this. You have failed. Please resit your submission for devising an appropriate testing system. Or you could just leave it to the experts in the field, the trained teachers, next time.

Conspiracies abound that this is all part of the enforced academies plan. Making SATs so hard that schools inevitably fail means that your academy business leaders can come in and rescue ‘failing’ schools… leaving them completely unaccountable to parents. You will never have to listen to us again! It’s good to have a plan… just not a plan which leaves millions of children as assets and the education of our children as a commodity… that would in fact be a truly awful plan.

Please take a long, hard look at this. Do you want your legacy to be the confident cancellation of unneeded and unnecessary SATS, showing you are listening to your electorate and the teachers you claim to support… or the overseeing of a shambolic testing regime desperately unwanted by millions of people to the point that this country saw it’s first open parent revolt?

You have the power to stop these tests. NOW. Our children, our teachers and our schools deserve better than this.

With sincere hope that you are listening, on behalf of the tens of thousands of supporters of ‘Let Our Kids Be Kids’.

Caroline Lucas ensures powerful teacher voices are heard in Parliament

It is unusual these days to have speeches in Parliament fully reported. Today I am making an exception because I feel the issues raised by Caroline Lucas in her adjournment debate on education on Tuesday were so important. Please do read on after the text break.


This evening I want to pay tribute to the incredible work being done in schools in Brighton and Hove. Last year the city’s young people got their best ever GSCE results. This year the key stage 2 results were in the top quarter in the country and 54% of A-level students got A* to B grades, an improvement in results for the third year running. Brighton and Hove was also named top local authority in the country for tackling homophobia in schools. That really is a track record to be proud of, so I want to applaud the many teachers and other staff who make such achievements possible.

However, those achievements have been reached in spite of Government policy, not because of it. Research from the National Union of Teachers reveals the extent to which Ministers have been taking teachers for granted. The NUT found that 87% of teachers said that they know one or more teachers who have left the profession because of work load; that 90% of teachers have themselves considered leaving the profession because of work load; and that 96% said their work load has had negative consequences for their family or personal life.

Tonight I want to do two things: first, to share some of what I have been told by local teachers about the daily reality behind those statistics, and to ask the Department of Education and the Secretary of State to start listening to teachers and to review their current policies; and secondly, to make the case for statutory PSHE—personal, social, health and economic education—teaching in all state-funded schools. I have a private Member’s Bill before the House designed to achieve exactly that. I very much welcome the Minister’s views on that proposal.

What Michael Gove's outrageous academisation programme is doing to my mother

The daughter of a teacher has asked that her Facebook posting on her mother's plight as a teacher be shared widely LINK I publish it here for you to share with others. 

I'm feeling low and a little bit helpless at the really horrible struggle my mum is currently going through. Hopefully she won't mind me posting about this - but I want to put it out there as it's something I really think people should know about.

My mum is a primary school teacher in a state school in Yorkshire, and has been for 20 years. She is a wonderful teacher: caring, committed, enthusiastic, her pupils love her, she has produced countless concerts, plays and choirs that have won national competitions, and has never received anything but very good / outstanding reports from Ofsted inspectors.

Her school is now, it would appear, in the midst of being systematically forced to become an 'academy school'. Academies have been around for a while - originally the stillborn brainchild of the Blair government, they are now being ruthlessly implemented by the self-important imbecile - sorry, 'moderniser' - Michael Gove; a representative of an even more clueless government obsessed with results tables and change for its own sake. But what is most disturbing about the whole pointless affair is not so much the staggering waste of time and resources, as the shockingly corrupt way it is being implemented.

For the first time in the entire history that my mum has worked at her school (which is 10+ years), the school was judged in an Ofsted report as having 'serious weaknesses' (having only ever been judged as good / outstanding prior to this). The headteacher was let go, and an 'executive head' was drafted in by the local authority, a woman who apparently has a reputation for supposedly 'turning around' failing schools (and by this I mean that she clearly deliberately fails them so that she can be seen to have 'turned them around' six months later).

The teachers were all subject to impromptu lesson inspections, and almost EVERY SINGLE teacher in the school, individuals my mum described as 'some of the best teachers I have ever known' were failed. My mum was failed for the first time in her career (Although on receiving this news she rather wonderfully told the inspectors "I don't give a monkey's"). The school has now been given six weeks to 'improve', before the government will come in to inspect them again. The teachers are doing 16 hour days in an attempt to do an impossible amount of work so that they don't fail this second inspection. My mum hasn't had an evening or a weekend off for weeks. She worked all through her supposed holiday last week. She is getting chest pains. One teacher collapsed from stress.

My mum had been planning to retire at the end of this year - this will be her final year as a teacher - what a way to thank her for 20 years of hard work and dedication to the state school system. She has always been an incredibly strong, cheerful, optimistic person, and whenever I speak to her now she talks of her life being a 'living hell' and 'just making it through the next five months'. I have never in my life heard her talk like this.

And all this in spite of the fact that the teachers at her school have been made perfectly aware that when the government come in to 'inspect' the school, they will be doing so with an agenda. That agenda being to turn the school into an academy - as they have done with several other schools in the area.

Essentially, all the work the teachers are putting in will most likely be for nothing, because the government have every intention to fail the school so that they can be seen to 'turn it around' and make it into an academy. It seems to me to be the most ridiculous scam - a con on a national scale which must be happening in countless more schools and which is abusing the time and resources of already desperately over-stretched, underpaid and under-appreciated teachers.

I feel very frustrated at not being able to make more people aware of what seems to me to be a total outrage. I am going to make this post public - please share, and if anyone I know is interested in the story or has any suggestions about how to increase awareness of this please get in touch. Thanks.