Two of my friends are currently being coerced into joining a teaching union. Whilst one is receiving multiple phone calls from union representatives having left contact details at a recent university fair, the other is being told that by not signing up he is undermining the position of everyone else who has joined the union. These tactics are not only manipulative and alarming, they undermine the credibility of union membership. As a new member of the teaching profession, BOGOF and similar style incentives to join a union allied to a rather masonic secrecy in staff rooms further persuade me that these are not professional bodies and I would prefer not to sign up.
However, my real issue would be joining in. Now I should state here that I share significant concerns with unions about various changes to the profession: performance related pay, tests for 4 year olds, untrained teachers in classrooms, and chronological rigidity in the primary history curriculum amongst other changes are all misguided and sorely lacking in corroborative research. That said, striking is absolutely not the solution and does more harm than good to the profession: not only are children and parents the biggest losers every time a strike takes place, the already maligned professionals look like Kevin the teenager standing in the playground complaining ‘it’s so unfair’.
As a serving policeman where striking is illegal for public safety, so striking should be illegal for anyone who believes in a child’s right to an education. Kahneman’s loss aversion theory explains the asymmetry of feelings about concessions in negotiations between teachers and the government, but if teachers feel strongly enough about change then we have ample time to protest during school holidays. This would generate significant credibility for the cause by demonstrating the strength of feeling to protest in our own time, avoiding disruption for parents, and ensuring that education of the children remains sacrosanct.
Sympathy and credibility would be further generated by scrapping Baker days which once more inconvenience parents and harm the education of the very people we are here to support: having just had a two week break, many schools will be child-free today to give teachers time to plan or professionally develop. I was also staggered to find out recently that parents’ evenings are now often parents’ mornings or afternoons, once again disrupting the lives of parents and the education of children. Nobody with any credibility seriously believes that teachers work a 7 hour day from 0830 to 1530 but just as performance related pay is misguided because we don’t do this for the money so seeking sympathy and compensation for the hours worked is misguided if we militantly disrupt those we serve.
All of which leads me to believe that a better and more credible association of teachers than a union would be professional bodies similar to medical colleges. Just as these colleges are divided into specialisms such as surgery and anesthesia, so teaching colleges could divide into early years, primary, secondary humanities, secondary sciences, etc, reflecting the level of training and specialism required for these branches of education. Similar to other professional institutions, these colleges would be responsible for stipulating and recognising professional development. Whilst aspiring to the level of professional credibility that doctors have might be currently fanciful (although Finnish teachers would dispute this), professional colleges would disarm those pathologically opposed to unions who find it so easy to malign the profession when we are busy shooting ourselves in the foot. In that way, we would avoid the risk of striking out and instead be on our way to the major leagues.
Cambridge, 22nd April 2014
Scholey.com 