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UK university strikes called off after UCU members accept pension proposals

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UK/April 17, 2018/By: Colin Drury/ Source: https://www.independent.co.uk

Students welcome decision to avoid walkout.

Further strikes at UK universities are to be called off after members of the University and College Union (UCU) voted to accept proposals aimed at resolving a dispute over pensions.

Thousands of staff – including lecturers, academics and researchers – were were due to walk out next week in protest at plans which they said would reduce their retirement pots by £10,000 a year. Fourteen days of strikes have already hit 65 universities since 22 February.

But members of the UCU voted to call off more action after bosses at Universities UK agreed a joint panel would be set up to reassess the pension issue.

The news was welcomed by the National Union of Students (NUS), with estimates suggesting up to 1 million students were affected by previous walkouts.

Shakira Martin, NUS president, said: “We are pleased to see a deal has been reached. Students have wholeheartedly chosen to support their staff during this dispute, and we have seen inspiring displays of solidarity on campuses across the UK since day one.”

The strikes were called after Universities UK revealed plans to change the Universities Superannuation Scheme from a defined benefit scheme – which gives a guaranteed retirement income – to a defined contribution scheme, which would make pensions vulnerable to changes in the stock market. Universities UK had said the alterations would help make up a £6bn deficit.

But, with the proposals now dropped, members of the UCU voted almost two to one to stop more walkouts and instead reopen negotiations. There was a record 63.5 per cent turn out, the union said.

Sally Hunt, UCU general secretary, said: “The union has come a very long way since January when it seemed that the employers’ proposals for a defined contribution pension were to be imposed.

“Now we have agreement to move forward jointly, looking again at the USS valuation alongside a commitment from the employers to a guaranteed, defined benefit scheme.”

And she added: “We hope this important agreement will hearten workers across the UK fighting to defend their pension rights and was won through the amazing strike action of UCU members.

“UCU has more work to do to ensure that the agreement delivers the security in retirement that university staff deserve.”

Universities UK said the decision to appoint an expert panel and suspend industrial action would reassure students that summer exams and graduations would not be affected by industrial action.

But a spokesperson warned: “It is important that interested parties engage with the panel and remain open-minded about its possible findings.

“Working in partnership with UCU, we will now appoint a jointly agreed chair for the panel as soon as possible before developing its terms of reference, order of work and timescales.”

Source:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/uk-university-strikes-called-off-uss-ucu-accept-pension-proposals-a8303086.html

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England: Music education should be inclusive. So where are the disabled teachers?

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England/ 16.04.2018/ From: www.theguardian.com.

For Kris Halpin, a disabled musician who delivers music lessons in schools, the thought of being in front of a room full of students used to be terrifying. But he knew what it would have meant to him at 14 to see a disabled person teaching his class.

“My experience in education [in the 1980s] was not immensely positive,” Halpin says. “I was bullied a lot at school because of my disability. Not by my peers but by the staff … When I had to flag an access [problem], I was told I was only disabled when it suited me. It was not a supportive place to be. Music education was my one salvation.”

Representation in the arts

At charity Drake Music, we wanted to look at the representation of disabled people in music education. But finding the data was problematic. Figures from Arts Council England [pdf] show that only 4% of the wider arts workforce identify as disabled. UK Music’s diversity research did not include disability in its survey.

In an attempt to improve knowledge in this area, we spoke to 36 music education hubs [pdf] about their workforce. Music hubs are groups of organisations – such as local authorities, schools, art organisations and voluntary organisations – working together to provide music education. They are so varied that making direct comparisons between them is difficult, but it gave us some idea about disability representation.

A third of the hubs said they had at least one paid member of staff who self reported as disabled. One in five (22%) were paid music leaders. There was a wide range of understanding and experience of disability, and each hub was at a different stage in providing truly inclusive music education services. But we were heartened to see that many recognised the importance of the topic. One respondent told us: “You are opening up a discussion we need to have.”

Diverse populations need teachers from a range of ages, backgrounds, experiences and communities. A more balanced and representative workforce creates relatable role models and opens the door to new possibilities for young people. It makes space for positive, constructive debate about the best teaching methods and approaches for working with young disabled people, and it combats negative perceptions and misunderstandings.

We know that music is a powerful force for many of the disabled people we work with. If made accessible, it can be a space for self-expression and offer a way in to a world of creative opportunities. That doesn’t happen enough.

Change cannot be affected by one organisation, or by a single policy, but will take many small movements across music education. There is increasing recognition that making music education more inclusive is important. This month, Youth Music launched the Alliance for a Musically Inclusive England, promoting diversity and cultural democracy in music education. Accessible practice is taking centre stage at conferences such as Music Mark. And there is recognition of the problem of declining music provision in schools more broadly.

From: https://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/2018/apr/13/music-education-should-be-inclusive-so-where-are-the-disabled-teacher

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England: Many parents face disappointment over primary school places

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England/ 16.04.2018/ From: www.theguardian.com.

Parents in England will find out on Monday whether their child got into their top choice of primary school to begin reception class in September, with many likely to face disappointment owing to the pressure on places in some areas of the country.

On what has become known as national offer day for primary schools, about half a million families will receive emails during the course of the day and letters later in the week confirming whether they have been offered a place at their first-choice school.

Despite fewer applications this year as a population bulge moves into secondary schools, thousands of families are still likely to miss out on their top choice, particularly in London, where just 86% got into their first preference last year, with that figure dropping to 68% in Kensington and Chelsea.

Early data suggested a slight improvement on last year’s figures in some areas. In York, for example, 94.2% of children were awarded places in their first-preference school this year – up from 92.9% last year – and just 11 children failed to secure a place at one of their preferred schools, down from 25 last year.

Last year, 97.2% of four-year-olds in England were offered a place at one of their top three primary schools. Many parents go on to lodge appeals in a last-ditch attempt to secure a place at their first choice of school.

According to the Good Schools Guide, the success rate of primary school appeals varies widely. In 2016-17, a third of appeals in the north-east went in the child’s favour, while the success rate was just 7% in London.

Elizabeth Coatman, the guide’s state education consultant, said: “Children are still being offered places which their parents consider to be inappropriate. Appealing is an option, but with huge regional disparities in the success rates, you shouldn’t count on it going your way.

“However unfair it may feel, the length of your school run, having siblings at other schools, super-sized classes and poor Ofsted reports are unlikely to be successful grounds for appeal.”

Paul Whiteman, the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said “In an increasingly fragmented school system, we lack a coordinated approach to place planning. The government’s own figures show that an extra 654,000 school places will be needed in England by 2026 to meet the 9% rise in pupil population.

“Until the government creates a national strategy to guarantee there are enough school places for every child in England, the annual anxious wait for families will continue.”

From: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/apr/16/many-parents-face-disappointment-over-primary-school-places

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United Kingdom: Measures to deliver quality education across all settings

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United Kingdom / April 15, 2018 / Author: Editorial Staff / Source: Government of the United Kingdom

A package of measures to help make sure children receive the best possible education either at home or outside of school have been announced today (10 April).

A package of measures to help make sure children receive the best possible education either at home or outside of school have been announced by School Systems Minister Lord Agnew today.

The announcement will support the families of the estimated 45,500 children that are educated at home, providing parents and local councils with strengthened guidance so both understand their rights and responsibilities.

A Call for Evidence has been launched to ask for the views of parents and local authorities on how to ensure children receive the expected standard of education at home, including:

  • How local authorities can monitor the quality of home education to make sure children are taught the knowledge and skills they need;
  • How effective registration schemes are for children who are educated at home; and
  • How government can better support those families who choose to educate their children at home.

The Education Minister also announced £3 million to support the joint working of local authorities, the police, Ofsted, the government and other agencies in tackling the minority of out of school settings that seek to undermine British values or expose children to other harmful practices. This work will help to share best practice across the country.

Today’s announcement builds on the recently launched Integrated Communities Strategy, which had education at its core. It is part of the drive to ensure all children receive the best possible education, with 1.9 million more pupils in good or outstanding schools than in 2010 thanks to the government’s reforms and the hard work of teachers.

Minister for School Systems Lord Agnew said:

Across the country there are thousands of dedicated parents who are doing an excellent job of educating their children at home, and many selfless volunteers working for clubs and organisations that help to enrich children’s education outside of school.

It is right that we should build on the high standards we’ve set in our schools so that every child receives a suitable and safe education – no matter where they are being taught – and that we can act quickly in the rare instances when this is not the case. This support for families and local communities will help ensure all children get the education they deserve.

The Call for Evidence will run for 12 weeks and will ask for views from families that choose to educate their children at home, local authorities and home education support groups. The issues raised include the registration of children who are home educated and the monitoring of home education provision by local authorities. It will build on the existing requirements for local authorities to identify children they believe are not receiving a suitable education and their powers, which can ultimately include serving a School Attendance Order.

The government is also consulting on revised guidance for parents and local authorities to support them in making sure home education provision is of the highest possible standard. This guidance will set out the processes by which local authorities should identify children who are being educated at home and how best to intervene if they are not receiving a suitable education. For parents, it will offer support and advice on whether or not home education is the right decision for them and their child, while also making clear the powers that local authorities have and the steps parents should take if concerns arise.

The Department for Education has also published its response to the consultation on regulation for out of school settings – environments that enrich children’s education. The department has carefully considered over 18,000 responses and has already taken action by establishing a £3 million targeted fund which will go to selected areas to support work between local authorities and relevant agencies. It will be used to show how existing legal powers can be most effective in addressing safeguarding and welfare concerns, alongside community engagement and outreach. This work will inform the need for any future regulation.

A consultation on a voluntary code of practice for out of school settings will be published later this year to set out what is expected of providers, and the Department will work with local authorities to provide guidance to parents on out of school settings.

Source of the News:

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/measures-to-deliver-quality-education-across-all-settings

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Denuncian afectaciones a sector educativo por recortes en Reino Unido

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Reino Unido/10 de abril de 2018/Fuente: http://prensa-latina.cu

Los recortes realizados por el gobierno británico afectaron a alrededor de cuatro mil 50 niños con discapacidades o necesidades educativas especiales en 2017, denunció hoy el Sindicato Nacional de Profesores del Reino Unido.
Mediante un comunicado, dicha organización señaló que, debido a las medidas de austeridad implementadas por la administración conservadora, esos pequeños no pudieron acceder a centros escolares especializados o al tipo de enseñanza que requieren.

Además, alertó que la cifra de menores perjudicados durante el año pasado es casi el triple de la registrada en 2016 (mil 73) y es la mayor reportada desde 2010.

También indicó que dichas afectaciones forman parte de una crisis en el sistema educativo, provocada por la mala gestión del gobierno.

Es una vergüenza que la dirección del país prive a las autoridades locales de los recursos necesarios para atender a los niños con necesidades especiales, aseveró Kevin Courtney, secretario general adjunto de la Unión Nacional de Educadores.

Los menores están en sus casas porque no hay suficiente dinero para proporcionarles una educación adecuada. Los padres y maestros están desesperados. El Gobierno le está fallando a miles de pequeños y sus familias, por lo que debe actuar de inmediato para resolver esta crítica situación, añadió.

Fuente de la Noticia:
http://prensa-latina.cu/index.php?o=rn&id=164680&SEO=denuncian-afectaciones-a-sector-educativo-por-recortes-en-reino-unido
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Children stuff food into their pockets and turn up to school in dirty uniforms as poverty worsens, headteachers warn in United Kingdom

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United Kingdom/ 09.04.2018/ From: www.independent.co.uk.

Los niños que viven en la pobreza llegan a las puertas de la escuela con «piel gris, dientes pobres, cabello y uñas». Los niños desnutridos están llenando sus bolsillos con comida y yendo a la escuela con uniformes sucios a medida que crece el número de personas que viven en la pobreza , han advertido los directores.

Malnourished children are stuffing their pockets with food and turning up to school in dirty uniforms as the numbers living in poverty grows, headteachers have warned.

Pupils are arriving to school on Monday wearing uniforms they have been in all weekend, while others do not turn up to school because they have no shoes, staff have said.

And schools are going out of their way to give parents debt advice – and one primary school headteacher recently opened his school during the severe snow to ensure his pupils got a hot meal that day.

Number of children in poverty surges by 100,000 in a year

Speaking at the National Education Union (NEU) conference, NUT section, conference in Brighton, school leaders described how pupils arrived at the school gates with grey skin, poor teeth, hair and nails.

A survey, by the NEU and the Child Poverty Action Group, found that three in five (60 per cent) school staff believe child poverty has worsened since 2015.

And the vast majority (87 per cent) say it is having a significant impact on the learning of their pupils.

A head from a school in Cumbria, who would only give her name as “Lynn”, said her pupils put “food in their pockets to take home because they’re not sure if they’re going to get another meal that day”.

“In some establishments I would imagine that would be called stealing, but in ours it’s called survival,” she said.

Lynn added that her members of staff have washed dirty uniform for pupils and they have used their own money to buy families beds.

She added: “You can go into the town where we are and the children are wearing uniform, often something that we’ve given them, and they are wearing that at weekends.”

And Lynn described seeing children from a nearby affluent secondary school and comparing them to youngsters who had been to her school.

“My children who have gone from me up to the local secondary school have grey skin, poor teeth, poor hair, poor nails, they are smaller, they are thinner,” she said.

Louise Regan, from a Nottinghamshire primary school, said she noticed a difference when taking pupils to sporting events with other schools.

“You think ‘our kids are really small’, you don’t notice it because you’re with them all the time. When you then see them with children of the same age that are in an affluent area, they just look tiny.”

Ms Regan added that her school gives out food and clothing, such as winter coats and shoes, to those families in need.

She said: “We’ve had children who haven’t come to school because they didn’t have shoes, we’ve gone and bought shoes, taken them to the house and brought the child into school,” she said.

In 2015/16, there were four million children in the UK living in poverty, according to the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) – equivalent to nine in every classroom of 30 pupils.

A Department for Education spokesman said they have launched a social mobility action plan – which sets out measures to close the attainment gap between disadvantaged students and their classmates.

He added: “Alongside this we continue to support the country’s most disadvantaged children through free school meals, the £2.5bn funding given to schools through the Pupil Premium to support their education and the recently announced a £26m investment to kickstart or improve breakfast clubs in at least 1,700 schools.”

 Many of the union members described the situation facing their poorest pupils and families as “heartbreaking”, the study said.

One headteacher told the press at the NEU conference in Brighton said that league table positions were becoming secondary to dealing with the impact of financial hardship among pupils.

Jane Jenkins, from a Cardiff primary school, said that children have turned up with just a slice of bread and margarine in their lunchbox. “It is really tough,” she said.

“When people are asking you about standards and you know, “why is your school not higher in the league tables”, often that is very much a secondary consideration for us these days,” Ms Jenkins added.

From: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/child-poverty-headteachers-schools-teachers-national-education-union-neu-austerity-a8283956.htm

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England: Cambridge ranked last in university fair access table

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England/ 09.04.2018/ From: www.theguardian.com.

A new measure looking at how successful individual universities have been in trying to widen participation to students from all backgrounds has ranked University of Hull as the best-performing institution and Cambridge the worst.

The experimental fair access rankings, drawn up in a research paper by the Higher Education Policy Institute (Hepi), rate the University of Derby, Edge Hill, Chester and Plymouth School of Art as among the top performers.

Close to the bottom are some of the country’s oldest and most prestigious universities, including St Andrew’s, Bristol, Oxford and Aberdeen, which perform only marginally better than Cambridge on this measure.

While overall university participation rates among young people have gone up from 10-15% of the population in the 1980s to more than 45% today, there are still wide discrepancies in intake, with fewer students from disadvantaged backgrounds attending the most elite institutions, the Hepi paper points out.

Written by Iain Martin, the vice-chancellor of Anglia Ruskin University, which comes ninth in the rankings, the report advocates the use of the Gini index – a statistical measure of distribution developed by the Italian statistician Corrado Gini in 1912 – in conjunction with so-called Polar measures of university participation in different local areas.

“Widening participation and ensuring that students from all backgrounds are provided opportunities to study at a university that matches their talents and aspirations has been a pivotal part of English higher education policy and strategy for many years,” said Martin. “While much has been achieved, it remains that we do not have an educational level playing field.

“Benchmarking fair and equitable participation using the Gini index – a well-understood and recognised measure of the equitable distribution of resource – provides a single way to measure our transition to a higher education system where all students attend a university that matches their talents and aspiration.”

Cambridge University said its admission rate for state school students had gone up to more than 63% and the proportion of successful applicants from postcodes with the lowest rates of participation in higher education had also increased, from 3.3 % in 2016 to 4.5 % last year.

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From: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/apr/05/cambridge-ranked-last-in-university-fair-access-table

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