From school places to behaviour to teacher training, the teaching unions have excelled themselves with their doom and gloom pronouncements at their conferences this weekend about the state of our schools.
We shouldn’t be surprised, there is, afterall, an election coming up and we all know where the union leaderships’ loyalty lies. But these conferences have simply served to highlight one thing – that the gulf between the leadership of the classroom unions and their members is wider than ever before.
Because the unions’ depressing portrait isn’t what I see when I look at England’s schools today. The first commitment I made as Education Secretary was to get out of Westminster and into classrooms. Since then I’ve spent a day a week visiting schools and spoken directly to over 900 teachers – from St Ives, to Morley, to Newcastle. What those teachers have told me is very different to what you hear from their unions.
Rather than banging a rhetorical drum, or setting themselves against change, most teachers have got on and set about making our plan for education a reality.
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