morelearning

Dear Mr Gove,

Thank you for your concern about education.  I appreciate the kind gesture of giving every school a copy of the King James Bible, and I will certainly use ours if I ever get my hands on it.  Ideally, I'd like a box full so I don't have to run up the photocopying bill, but I suppose that might have cost the DfE a bit too much.   I have to admit that I was a little puzzled about why you think you need to write an introduction to it, but if that makes you happy, knock yourself out.  I'll just ignore that page.

It's a shame that your concern for education doesn't actually extend to being a concern for educators or the educated. 

You talk about reducing first class travel to 'just £265,000 in 2010/11'.  You talk about spending 'only £25,000 in the last 12 months on new furnishings in the DfE'.  You talk about '£600 million for new free schools, with areas of poverty and population growth prioritised.'

In my school, staff don't claim their legitimate travel expenses for meetings, because we know there is no money.  Our departmental office furniture came out of a skip twenty years ago.  Our school serves some of the poorest wards in the country, and yet we're seeing our funding slashed year on year.

I understand that the country's in a mess, and I understand that we all have a part in fixing it.  But I don't understand why you would demonise the people who work directly for the country's long term well-being and development.  I don't understand why you think that talking about no more fruit baskets for ministers equates to a real terms pay decrease for public sector workers.  I don't understand how you think that this will encourage good graduates into the profession.

I'm not a militant, itching for a fight.  I'm a classroom teacher, working hard to ensure that the students in my care get the best deal I can give them.  But I'm not just in this for them.  No-one goes to work out of the kindness of their heart.   My pay was frozen and I didn't strike.  My school's funding dropped, so class sizes went up and I didn't strike.  Contact time increased and I didn't strike.  Now you want me to pay more, work longer and get less… and you think I'm militant for striking.

I've spent days explaining to the young people that I teach that, despite the impression that you and your media friends are giving, I do care about them.

I do care about their education. 

I do care about the school. 

But when I am old, and I can't take the 70+ hour weeks, and the constant pressure and the sheer physical exhaustion any more, then they won't be there for me, will they?  I'll be on my own with my reduced pension – if I don't keel over and die in the classroom, in my saved-from-the-skip in 1980-something chair.

I didn't want to strike today, and I don't really think it'll make a difference, because no-one's listening.  But I have two jobs to do.  The first is to protect and stand up for myself, because no-one else will. And the second is to educate children – and like it or not, that includes teaching them that you can't always believe what you hear, and that you have to look after yourself before anyone else.

Cinders