Teachers on tenterhooks - how do the main parties plan to screw up or fix education?

[noblegiraffe]

Given that teaching is political and every time there’s a general election our jobs can be thrown into chaos by a new broom (Mr Gove, I’m looking at you in particular) I thought it would be a good time to look at the education policies of the main parties.

I’ve attached Labour and Conservative plans. The Lib Dem manifesto was in such a shitty format that I’ve attached a précis instead.

Main points are:

Tories:
More money for everything, but not as much money as other parties. The money will probably be eaten up by the promised £30,000 salary for NQTs (what about the rest of us?) so there’ll still be very little for the other stuff like support staff.
More SEN school places
Discipline good, poor behaviour bad, Ofsted good.
More money for the arts (because they’ve been fucked over by the EBacc)

That was pretty much it. The Tory manifesto is very light on anything because they know that support for May plummeted when the manifesto of grammar schools, dementia tax and fox hunting was released. Don’t do anything controversial, it was said, so they didn’t.
Until.....
No-notice longer Ofsted inspections with an extra day focusing on stuff like extra curricular activities.

Defeat from the jaws of victory.

Labour:
More money for everything
Every class to have a qualified teacher (how?) and schools to be open 5 days a week (dig at the Tories who haven’t managed this basic requirement, but how does it fit into their plans for a 4 day week for everyone else?)
More non-contact time for teachers (woohoo! This would be a genuinely good policy, but needs more teachers to cover it)
Bring back academies under local control (bit tricky to turn around that behemoth)
SCRAP EVERYTHING. Ofsted, KS1 SATs, KS2 SATs, Reception baseline tests. (What then, for accountability? It was bad enough when Gove scrapped KS3 curriculum levels which ended up with the whole flight paths nonsense. I can see a lot of unintended consequences and increased workload here)
Tax private schools and attempt to bring them under state control (because we totally have the capacity to cope with this).
Bring up FE per pupil funding to match that of secondary (this is a brilliant policy)

So much change, when what we really need is stability. An extra PPA per week won’t make up for it, and no concrete plans for recruitment. I hate to say it, but I’m not impressed.

Lib Dems:
They won’t get in, but they might prop someone up:

More money (obvs)
20,000 more teachers (figure plucked from their arse? How will they do this?)
Scrap SATs and league tables (see above for Labour, what then for accountability)
Scrap Ofsted and replace with something that sounds just like Ofsted.
NQTs to get £30,000 (did they copy the Conservatives’ homework here?)

[noblegiraffe]

More Labour manifesto attached here.

Links to the manifestos:

vote.conservatives.com/our-plan
labour.org.uk/manifesto/
www.libdems.org.uk/plan

[noblegiraffe]

Should say this is all England (self-centred of me) as education is devolved. Even if the SNP prop up a Labour government, can they vote on English education?

[Rosie2000]

Thank you for this- I have no idea who to vote for. We have no independent candidate so it’s red, blue, yellow or green. I cannot not vote

[noblegiraffe]

Even though on paper the Tory education policies look like the least disruptive (Labour is a frustrating mix of very good and complete stinkers), I’m not sure many teachers will be voting Conservative because of
a) their record on education since 2010 - schools disastrously underfunded, a critical shortage of teachers, the terrible changes to the exam system
b) their policies on other stuff like social care, welfare, the NHS and other public services that have a massive impact on schools.

Teachers also tend to have a social conscience.