Young people 'diverted onto low-pay jobs' because of 'elitist' education reforms, teachers' leader warns
Graham Dawson, the new president of the NASUWT, said the reforms were 'narrow, academic and elitist'
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Your support makes all the difference.Young people are being “diverted onto the dirt track of low-pay, zero-hours and dead-end jobs” because of the Coalition Government’s “narrow academic and elitist” education reforms, a teachers’ leader warned yesterday.
Graham Dawson, the new president of the NASUWT, told the union’s annual conference in Cardiff that children and young people are being denied access to a wide range of educational opportunities as schools come under pressure to “abandon the arts, PE, music and other non-core subjects to concentrate on those subjects deemed acceptable by this Government of Gradgrinds”.
Mr Dawson, a special needs teacher from Tyneside, told the conference that “education is more than five A to Cs”.
He went on: “Education leads to worlds of wonder and opportunity. Not a narrow corridor, confining and restricting children. It is imperative to educate the whole child. It is time that those in charge of Government policy, and some of our school leaders, also realised this as well.”
He accused the Government of restricting the life chances of many young people by trebling university tuition fees, undermining vocational learning and presiding over the growth of unpaid internships and rising youth unemployment.
“No country can afford the waste and human cost of casting many of its young people aside with such casual abandon,” Mr Dawson told conference delegates. “As guardians of the profession, we must speak up for all those children in our country with no voice, no hope and no future.”
Mr Dawson condemned rising levels of child poverty, highlighting that the number of families living in B&Bs has doubled in three years.
Despite the toll this was taking on wellbeing, Government spending on children’s mental health services has fallen by 6 per cent under the Coalition, meaning teachers were left trying to repair the damage caused by family breakdown, poverty and deprivation, he said.
School reform Minister Nick Gibb said: “It’s extraordinary that the teaching unions haven’t said a single positive thing about England’s schools over the past week. All they’ve done is undermine the hard work of their members which has seen a million more pupils in good or outstanding schools since 2010, a 71 per cent increase in students taking rigorous academic subjects and 100,000 six year olds reading more confidently.
“It’s abundantly clear that the gulf between the leadership of the unions and their members has never been greater”.
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