Ei-iE

I am not someone who always wanted to be a teacher. I had no idea what I wanted to do when I finished my A-levels but generally felt that I’d be OK as long as I didn’t end up back in a school. But in my mid-20s, having worked in, and been pretty disillusioned by the music industry, I had a change of heart and applied to do a Postgraduate Certificate in Education in music. I was sent for a day to experience a secondary school music department and it’s no exaggeration to say that what I saw there that day changed my life. Music was everywhere. And it was participatory, it was valued deeply by the children, it was of an amazing standard, it was creative, there was no gatekeeping, and it was fun. It was a living, breathing thing and it was beautiful. I ended up doing my placement in that school and then got a job in the department as a newly qualified teacher. Later, when the head of department left mid-year, I took on that role.

It was a different time, before the financial crisis. There was freedom in the curriculum for huge amounts of practical work. Arts subjects weren’t limited to an hour a week or placed on a carousel. Nearly all music lessons had a practical, creative aspect. Outside lessons there were orchestras, jazz bands, choirs, string, wind, and brass ensembles, African drum groups, with extra curricula clubs running every day of the week. On Thursday evenings we ran a community music hub with a parent choir and instrumental lessons for adults. Over 450 children had one-to-one music lessons in the school each week, delivered by an enormous team of peripatetic teachers. Many of these were subsidised, some fully paid for by the department when circumstances at home were too difficult. Every year we would take the whole of year 7 to a concert at the Barbican, all 240 children with a huge team of staff coming out of school for what was, for most kids, their first experience of live orchestral music. But the main thing was the student-led music. We viewed ourselves not just as music teachers but as facilitators, opening up the department practice rooms well before school in the morning, during break and lunch, and well after the end of the day for kids to practice and engage in collective music making. Each summer year 10 would run a music festival in the playground where all the bands could play.

Exam results were excellent, but we never really worried about them. We measured the success of the department on engagement. How many children were actively engaged in music making? How many were taking an active part in the myriad school groups, clubs or concerts? What was the quality of the music-making? How many were enjoying themselves?

Then in 2010, after the financial crisis, the coalition government was elected, Michael Gove and Nick Gibb entered the Department for Education, and we entered an era of austerity. Austerity not just of spending, but austerity of imagination, austerity of creativity, of pedagogy, of ambition, of joy.

Gove’s English Baccalaureate and Progress 8, alongside austerity, ushered in an era of savage cuts to arts subjects. Students were actively discouraged from pursuing the arts. General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) and A level entries fell. The syllabus was narrowed and opportunities for genuine creativity were limited. Lesson time was taken from the arts to increase time in core subjects and students were limited in their options at GCSE. Vocational qualifications were discouraged and were restricted in content.

We are now nearly two years into a Labour administration. We have had the curriculum and assessment review, and the publication of the recent education white paper, Every Child Achieving and Thriving. The aims of the white paper are noble, many of the ideas within it are welcome and things we have been campaigning for. We want more inclusive schools with more children accessing the support they need in mainstream settings. We want a broader curriculum, we want easier systems for accessing support for students with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), we want enrichment entitlements for all children. But we also know that the funding assigned for the reforms to SEND equate to half a teaching assistant on average for each primary school. 13,000 pounds per primary school will not deliver the seismic shift we need in order to get to grips with a SEND crisis that has rumbled on for years. 13,000 pounds will be swallowed by yet another unfunded pay award with the government once again expecting schools to find ‘efficiency savings’. The Department for Education has suggested savings could be made by cutting assistant head and teaching assistant roles. How on earth can schools deliver increased inclusion and a radically different vision for SEND education if they are also expected to cut the leaders who will be leading on this work, and the vital support staff who will be delivering the specialised support on the ground?

We have the highest class-sizes in Europe. More than a million children are now taught in classes of 31 or more, the highest figure this century. And that’s against falling rolls nationally. Pay for teachers and support staff has fallen in real terms. We know that schools are once again approaching a new financial year unable to budget with confidence. A partially-funded 6.5% raise for teachers over three years, as suggested by government, does nothing to deal with the recruitment and retention issues in teaching. And with inflation likely to rise again the pay award risks being woefully inadequate and out of date before it is even implemented.

To educate fully cannot simply be a didactic pursuit. It must be an act of love. But that love has been weaponised against us. Nobody goes into education for the money. But working dignity is the least we deserve. For too long educators have had to make do and mend in a broken system. For too long we have propped up a failing sector starved of proper investment. We know the stories of educators buying the pens and paper that schools can no longer afford. I have spent weekends trawling charity shops and jumble sales for knackered old guitars I may be able to fix up and re-string for classroom use.

We have also seen the devastating impact of child poverty in our classrooms. We know that there are now one in five schools running food banks. How can it be, that in the sixth largest economy on earth, in 2026, child poverty is rising? 4.5 million children now live in poverty, an average of 9 in every class of 30. Yet governments repeatedly espouse education as the means of social mobility whilst slashing funding. The white paper talks at length about the responsibilities of schools in low-income communities, the need to raise standards and improve attendance. But why do ‘low-income’ communities exist? We need wider societal, economic and political solutions alongside educational reform. In a G20 report last year, Nobel laureate economist Josef Stiglitz warned of an ‘inequality emergency’. The report points out that inequality of this magnitude is not inevitable, it is the direct result of political choices. Financial deregulation, weakening labour protections and privatisation all aid rising inequality, as does cutting corporate and top income tax rates. We live with a sense of near economic perma-crisis and rampant inequality, yet the answers from the political establishment always seem to be the same. We cannot expect educators to stem the tide of rising inequality and child poverty whilst governments relentlessly and blindly pursue the very economic policies that create these conditions.

Without funding, we know that no matter how noble the aims of the white paper might be, they will not materialise on the ground. Schools are running on empty. So our message to government must be clear…Fund our schools, invest in educators, invest in our children, invest in our communities. Funding education is not a bureaucratic issue; it is a moral one. If we are to Save Education, austerity must end. Not in words, but in deeds.

We must be the driving force in the fight to save education. We must unite and galvanise our members to demand an education system that works for the young people we educate. I know we can do it. We are experts in challenging apathy, in changing minds, experts in encouragement and in showing what is possible if you just keep trying. We are experts because we do these things every day as educators. So we must build the ballot. We must build belief and resolve in our members. We must set out a vision for education worth fighting for. And we must keep going.

Despite the many challenges we face, I have hope. A better education system is possible, and that means a better world is possible. I believe this because I believe in the transformative power of education, I believe in the power of organised workers, I believe in the young people we work with every day. And I believe in us. I have hope in us.

So, in the words of the song, sung by our movement, from the Charleston cigar strikers of South Carolina in 1945, through the civil rights movement in the US, to those brave women in Parliament square waiting peacefully to be arrested… “Deep in my heart, I do believe, We shall overcome, someday.”

Watch the full speech below!