Education

Workers' Liberty bulletins from NUT conference 2013

Bulletins produced by Workers' Liberty education workers for the National Union of Teachers conference 2013. Click here to download the main conference bulletin. Click here to download the bulletin for Sunday 31 March. Click here to download the bulletin for Monday 1 April.

Tower Hamlets Class Struggle #10 - February 2013

A Workers' Liberty industrial bulletin for education workers in Tower Hamlets, discussing the fight against victimisation of an NUT rep at Bishop Challoner school and attacks on teachers' pay. Click here to download the PDF.

Lecturers strike against sackings

Lecturers at Halesowen College will strike on Thursday 14 February to demand reinstatement for four colleagues sacked for trade union activity. The University and College Union (UCU) strike ballot returned a 75% majority in favour of striking. Strikers will also deliver a giant “Valentine’s Day card” petition to college bosses, containing more than 12,000 signatures in support of reinstatement. The lecturers were formally sacked because their students failed to attainment levels, but the union blames college management. It says there are routine problems with “groups being pushed together...

Gove tries to claim Gramsci

Speaking on 5 February, Tory education minister Michael Gove claimed to have been inspired by Antonio Gramsci, who was a leader of the Italian Communist Party in its early years. Either Gove has never read Gramsci, or he is lying about him. Especially since Harold Entwistle wrote his book Gramsci: Conservative Schooling for Radical Politics , it has become quite widely accepted on the left that Gramsci had what would now be called 'reactionary' views about schooling, or even about education in general. Both of these things are untrue. He did not hold the kind of views about schooling that Gove...

Venezuela: Lies, damned lies, and statistics

“Anybody familiar with Stalinism will know the technique; figures record yet another triumphant over-fulfilment of the five-year plan while the peasants drop dead of starvation in the fields.” NCAFC held its AGM last weekend in Birmingham where Student Broad Left – the student front of Socialist Action – proposed a motion so absurd that only the four members of Student Broad Left present at the NCAFC conference voted in favour of it. In their motion “Venezuela shows there is an alternative: free education as a right", Student Broad Left claim that: “One amazing achievement has been the...

Teachers' rank-and-file conference

This Saturday December 8th the network of NUT branches (known as divisions or associations) which was established in response to the retreat in the pensions struggle earlier in the year will hold its second national conference in Leicester. Local Associations for National Action (LANAC) emerged in March last year after the NUT National Executive voted to call off a planned national strike due to take place on March 28th despite 73% of members voting for the strike in a union survey. As feared by the activists and branches that launched the network, that was the end of pensions action for the...

CBI calls for end to “exam factories”

The CBI has attacked the current regime of testing children, calling some secondary schools “exam factories”. This, coming from the high table of the British bourgeoisie, highlights the absurdity of over-examining school pupils. Naturally, the reasons given by the CBI were terrible: “Qualifications are important, but we also need people who have self-discipline and serve customers well”, said the CBI director general, adding that measuring attainment by criteria beyond test scores might boost economic growth! As socialists we measure the quality of education not by its effect on profits or by...

News in brief

The announcement that subjects such as drama and art will not be included in the new “English Baccalaureate” (EBacc) and that it will only focus on “core” subjects (English, maths, science, history and languages) has provoked criticism from people in the arts that the country’s “creative edge” is at threat. But this misses the point. The narrowing of the curriculum will badly affect working-class students who have fewer opportunities for self-expression. Sell out Lambeth council, which bills itself as the “Co-operative Council”, is on the verge of selling its last stock of “short life” social...

Bring back the pamphlet!

Material conditions for socialist education and self-education are better than they’ve ever been. Much socialist literature which previously you could read only if you could get into a good library is now freely available on the web. Vastly more has been translated. Thanks to second-hand book sales moving onto the web, printed books which you’d previously find only by searching second-hand shops are now also easily available. Thirty years ago, if a newcomer started reading the Communist Manifesto, and wondered who Metternich and Guizot were, they were on their own. These days the Workers’...

Tower Hamlets Class Struggle #8 - October-November 2012

An industrial bulletin for education workers in the London borough of Tower Hamlets, including a report on a recent victory against inspections and observations at Bishop Challoner school. Click here to download PDF.

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