Addressing his union’s annual conference in Birmingham at the weekend, Russell Hobby, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT), said schools were no longer prepared to live with the “chaos” of government education reforms.
He focused his speech on the “constant upheaval” around assessment and government plans to turn all schools into academies.
He said that ministers were too pre-occupied with reforms to notice that schools needed the basics, such as school places for every child, enough teachers and sufficient money for building repairs and maintenance.
He told delegates: “Instead of focusing on these basic supply issues, we face the constant upheaval of assessment and top-down reorganisation. Changes are made at such a break-neck speed and at such volume that mistakes are inevitable.
“A department that cannot publish the right test paper on a website is not a department we can rely on to successfully convert 15,000 schools to academies in the next few years. These mistakes are not ‘human errors’ but strategic errors of pace and engagement.”
In secondary schools, he said, teachers were faced with delayed specifications on the key exam subjects they are expected to teach from September.
“The (ministers) will expect every school to improve its results each year while implementing a system of comparative judgement designed to erase all trace of those improvements at the national level,” Mr Hobby said.
“It is the ultimate zero sum game that pits school against school. We face further reform on appeals and reviews of marking that concede the principle that there is no objective way to say that some answers are better than other answers. That wouldn’t be so bad if we didn’t hang so much weight on the differences between those scores.
“We have the problem of the year 7 re-sits. Pity the secondary teachers who must solve in a term what a primary school was unable to achieve in seven years. Pity the 11-year-old who arrives labelled a failure. We also have the universal EBacc measure that will begin to overshadow the Progress8 measure before it has even been fully implemented. We still await full clarity on the assessment of students with special needs.”
Mr Hobby said that far from seeking to avoid accountability through the testing and assessment regime, heads realised there was a role for this. But he added: “Our patience has been taken for granted. There is an anger and despair in schools beyond any I have seen before. So I think I need to say clearly that we cannot and will not endure another year of this chaos. School leaders cannot do their duty to children under these circumstances.”
On forced academisation, Mr Hobby said ministers had “not won the argument”.
“Parents, MPs, councillors, governors – the people who matter – are just not convinced,” he said.
“The government risks damage if it attempts to rush through top-down structural change.
“The government needs to press the pause button. I can understand the desire for a single coherent system but let’s step back and consider a better way.”
Mr Hobby urged ministers: “Do not bring forward legislation now. Spend more time consulting the profession, parents and local government. Do not compel schools against their best judgement.”
He added that further discussion was needed, preceded by a “decent pause and careful listening”.
“The NAHT stands ready to develop these constructive alternatives. That is our way. We have shown our commitment to school improvement and readiness to change when necessary,” he said.
“When we criticise, it is because something is genuinely wrong. The sooner politicians learn to listen, the fewer mistakes they will make.”