Teachers say invest, don’t cut

by New Worker correspondent

TEACHERS, pupils and parents braved severe wet weather on Thursday night, the 17^th November,  to deliver a message to the Government with a rally in Whitehall opposite Downing Street followed by a meeting in the nearby Emanuel Centre.

The message they delivered to the Government in the week before the Autumn Budget Statement is that: “Every child deserves the best,” and to invest in education instead of bringing in a new round of cuts.

The National Union of Teachers (NUT) says that Schools and colleges are already under severe strain. Now the Institute for Fiscal Studies says that the biggest real terms cuts to per pupil funding in a generation are on the way.

The Government says it is protecting education funding. This isn’t true. In reality they are freezing the cash they give to our schools and colleges, so that inflation cuts its value, whilst increasing what they take from them in pensions and National Insurance contributions.

These increased costs are leading to big cuts affecting children. In a recent NUT survey, 70 per cent of heads said that lack of funding was affecting standards.

Any responsible government would be dealing with the real problems facing our education system – funding and the teacher recruitment crisis.

But instead of dealing with these, this Government is ploughing on with costly plans to make every school an academy, some schools grammars and the rest secondary moderns.