3rd January 2013 9:00
By Blue Tutors
There was a news story recently about Ofsted inspectors having a vested interest in pushing schools towards becoming academies, or, more accurately, the story was about the NUT’s criticism of the potential conflict of interests. Now, in this case the criticism seems reasonable, but what is of no surprise is that the NUT again used the story to attack the government’s education policy. Whenever the NUT, and their spokesperson Christine Blower, are mentioned in connection with policy, it’s usually to criticise, rather than to support.
To an extent, it makes sense that officials in the NUT would not be in favour of any changes to education policy. They hold prestigious positions within the NUT, and changes to the industry in which teachers work could encourage those teachers to seek a change within their own union. One could argue that it is simply the current government’s politics to which the NUT object so strongly, but they reacted in the same way to the departing Labour government.
At Blue Tutors we try to avoid being too political when deciding how best to operate. Ultimately we represent our tutors and our students, and want what is best for them, but generally we tend to fall slightly on the side of being liberal. It is a fallacy to say that private tuition is reserved mainly for the wealthy, we actually find that the majority of our students are from non-selective, non-fee paying schools. Our concern, when deciding whether we support a piece of policy or not, is simply whether we believe the policy to be a positive thing, and not whether we support the incumbent government’s politics in general.
The irony is that it is, in fact, teaching unions who are sometimes conflicted, and the danger is that we don’t give a fair chance to what could be very positive improvements to our education system, because we concerned about how those changes will affect individuals in the short-term, and not what the landscape of our education system will look like in the future.
In our experience the most exceptional teachers and tutors that we have come across support a lot of the policies that have been put forward by Michael Gove, the education secretary. They also tend to maintain that they don’t support the Coalition government on lots of other matters, but without fear of their own position in the education system, they can happily support a policy based on nothing more than what good it will do.